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| Ease of Set Up | 6.5/10   |
|---|---|
| Ease of Use | 2.5/10 |
| Value for Money | 1.6/10 |
| Reviewer Rating | 1.4/10 |
| Overall Rating | 1.2/10 |
By Reaction
on 7th Dec 2005
| Value for money | 2/10 |
|---|---|
| Overall value | 1/10 |
 Reaction's recommendation | |
Simple, friendly interface.
Lots of features.
Unstable.
Unreliable.
Annoying.
Firstly, I am using Pinnacle on a 3.0GHz Pentium 4, 1GB RAM, Radeon 9700 graphics card, 200GB HD, WinXP, with no virus checker or any other applications running (apart from WinXP's standard background tasks).
On first running the program after installation, Pinnacle crashed immediately - not a good start. On the second and subsequent attempts, it opened correctly.
During normal operation, Pinnacle is prone to either lock-up or crash and disappear from the screen, for no apparent reason. This can be when using the title editor, applying an effect, or simply scrolling through your video.
When it comes to writing your SVCD or DVD, the problems really start. On approximately 1 in 3 occasions everything will work perfectly, resulting in a properly finished and playable disc.
On the other 2 in 3 occasions, rendering will hang with no indication of the error. Turning off the hardware rendering option (which uses the graphics card) makes no difference. After the lengthy rendering process has finished, Pinnacle will wrongly state that there is an error with the disc media and that the disc cannot be written. Successfully using the same disc on another occasion proves that the program was in error.
Another very annoying aspect is Pinnacle's greedy attempts to make you spend more on additional effects. In the effects lists and transitions pages, the majority of items are marked with a padlock, to tell you can't use them unless you pay up! I simply cannot understand what sort of idiotic marketing department thought that this would be a nice feature! Considering the overall unreliability, this makes you feel even more ripped-off every time you see the padlock.
If this review seems overly negative, than that is because the program's regular crashes, the constant worries of wasting hours of effort, and the permanently annoying "locked content" overshadow any satisfaction that might be gained from using it. This program is dreadfully unreliable, and a look at Pinnacle's own user forums proves this to be the point. This amateurish software should never have been released in this state. Even fully patched with the latest updates, it remains the only program that ever crashes on my PC - and does so regularly.
Important, please be aware that:
| Helpful | Unhelpful | Agree | Disagree |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Total Respect: +2
Would you like to see a review that's not being listed?
mesh1071
on 24th Dec 2005
northam1991 on 7th May 2006