Pinnacle Studio Plus 700-PCI Review

Overall Rating

PCI card has firewire connections, and the breakout box has S-video and composites for Audio and Video. The software has a lot to help a beginner/novice create a very nice DVD production. Will record to NTSC, PAL and SECAM, though I have only tried NTSC.

Software installation was a bear.

The Pinnacle Studio Plus 700-PCI video capture software box comes with 3 discs. I couldn't get it to install for the life of me. So after some Googling I found out that to overcome that problem you need to create a folder on your desktop called Studio, then copy the contents of Disc one into that folder. Then reboot and go into safe mode with networking. You do this by continually pressing the F8 (key) until you get to the safe mode menu. Once you are in Windows (safe mode) then open up the Studio folder and locate the setup.exe file and double click. You should be good to go. You might have problems installing the bonus DVD (Disc 3) due to some conflicts with InCD from Nero. There is a program that will delete just that program, and then you should be good to go.

What I've just told you is the worst case scenario. But I did all this and everything after that was smooth sailing. I'm quite happy with the card and software.

I think most people that complain about Pinnacle are those that just can't get around software conflicts. So if you don't mind the possibility of fiddling with that a bit, you should be fine. If you are not into troubleshooting at all, then I would make sure that prior to purchase you are assured that you can return the product. Again, I think this is a great product, but some initial tinkering might be needed. It all depends on your system and your software. I tried a USB capture Device from ADS and I returned it after a few days, and after comparing the two I would take the Pinnacle hands down. Although it does cost more.

Getting a PCI card for video capture is always better and faster than using a USB video capturing device. Definitely having the Firewire capability is great, as this allows you to use Pinnacle's editing software to make a great production from your DV camcorder recordings.

Members' Comments onbjoord's Review

• oldspammer on 2nd Dec 2006

  Pinnacle Studio 700 PCI version 10.x
  
  Does this thing have hardware compression at all?
  
  Does this thing have a hardware decoder at all?
  
  If yes to either of the above, what % CPU time in "Task Manager" is used for (a) playback, (b) capturing, and for what CPU horsepower & operating system & RAM size?
  
  If not, what kind of CPU horsepower is typically needed to do real-time NTSC capture and compression at full 720 x 480 @29.97 fps, 4 MHz VBR bandwidth, and 48 kHz sampling audio @384 kbits/second data rate for (a) MPEG-2 program stream, (b) direct to DVD, (c) 640 x 480 pixel & 44.1 kHz sampling 128 kbits/second MP3 audio DivX, (d) 720 x 480 w/AAC audio MPEG-4?
  
  It is my understanding that proper NTSC DVD video bandwidth is between 6 and 12 MHz, and audio is Dolby Digital AC3 at 48 kHz sampling @ 384 kbits/second data rate--if not, some older set-top boxes will not be able to play the DVD. Digital Theater Sound (DTS) / 7.1 surround encoding is also permissible for the audio compression.
  
  Bad DVD creation software does not use Dolby Digital AC3 encoding; instead it might use uncompressed PCM or mpeg-1 layer 2. What audio compression / encoding is used for DVD creation here for Pinnacle Studio 10.x?
  
  The Pinnacle Systems web site hints that CPU speed is key for proper real-time capturing, but the site does not provide any hard numbers for these things.
  
  Is it possible to transcode (re-encoding) an existing MPEG-2 video file to DivX or MPEG-4 in real-time via hardware codecs?
  
  If not, what kind of speeds are we talking about to re-encode a typical one hour MPEG-2 4 MHz 720 x 480 w/48 kHz @ 384 kHz data rate audio to DivX, and with what kind of CPU horsepower?