Pinnacle Systems Studio DV V8 Video Editing

It's been about two weeks since I first received my Studio DV V8. Installation was fairly straight forward. I notice the quality of the IEEE-1394 PCI card was more on the low cost side and the IEEE-1394 6-pin/4-pin cable fit very loosely into my Sony DV. When I start the capture, computer lock-up and I have to cycle the power to get out of it.- There are no 800 numbers for phone tech support and tech support hours are 10-7 EST M-F; which can't be utilized by me.- I had logged this problem with them twice via web support in the last two weeks and had not heard anything from them.(I will update the review if I ever get an answer back from them.)

I bought this software over a year ago to edit video from my Sony Digital 8 camera.Installation:It took me close to 3 months to setup because of issues between Windows ME and the included FireWire card. I actually had to hack the Microsoft drivers .INF file to get the card to work properly on my system.User InterfaceThe software is amazing easy to use. The user interface is very intuitive.To capture, hookup your Digital camcorder to the Firewire card with the included cable. You just say you want to record and up to 15 minutes of video is transfered at a time. This is due to a limit in the size of AVI files.The system is capable of automatically sensing scene breaks, so when it captures, it automatically organizes scenes.For editing, it just have to arrange the scenes. You can also shorten the scenes through again a very good UI.The software has 3 voice tracks. You can easily add music from MP3s or CDs to your video. You can also do voiceovers ( I haven't tried this yet ).If you are making DVDs, you can add chapters and menus. The UI for doing this is pretty good as well.You can also add stills. I've made many videos which are combination of video and stills pictues from a digital cameraThe software comes with many transitions. You can do fads and other cool effects.You can output your movie to DVD, S-VCD, VCD, RealNetworks, Microsoft Media Player Format, or MPEG ( No Quicktime support ).Now the bad: The software has been very unreliable, at times, I lost hours of work. Anyone who looks at the message boards will see that the user base of this software is generally unhappy. I seem to finally have a patch that has made the software reasonable reliable. I can honestly say that I love the software but have never been so frustrated with the qauality of a piece of software before. When it works its really good, but it doesn't always work.Because of the unreliability of the software, I would not recommend it to a computer novice.

Its easy and simple to use, dont have to especifie many entries like in adobe premiere, you only have to be a little clever and that's that, incredible easy

I had already ordered Pinnacle Studio DV from Dell when I started reading all of the horrible reviews. I bought the program after seeing some DVDs that my boss made of his son's football games & he said he had no problems. When it arrived I decided to try it and hope for the best & I'm glad I did. I captured about 90 minutes of video that I had shot using a Sony TRV-350. The capture process when very smoothly. Editing confused me at first (I didn't want to read the manual) but I caught on quickly and edited the video down to about 30 minutes of scenes that I wanted to burn to DVD. The rendering process did take a while: 30 to 45 minutes but when it was done my dvd drive spit out a completed dvd with the titles and transitions that I added and it looked great when I played it in by DVD player. I had no problems at all during the entire process including installation. I did follow Pinnacle's recommendations and bought a separate hard drive for capturing and I made sure no other applications were running in XP. I am very pleased with the product. I do have a new system: Dell 4600, 2.6ghz P4, 512 RAM, 40 GB internal, 80GB Western Digital firewire external hardrive (I used the card that came with Pinnacle for the firewire connection as the Dell 4600 didn' have one - the Pinnacle card comes with two connections one of which you must use for your digital camcorder). I am very pleased with this product.