Pinnacle Studio 9.0 Upgrade

I have had Pinnacle Studio in various guises for a long time - here I am looking at v9.4 (the last before the latest version which is based on the 'Avid' technology). From the very start there have been bugs and given the number of patches and version upgrades it is surprising still to find so many bugs. These waste a lot of time - less so now as I no longer assume it to be me that's got it wrong! The package itself is fine and can, in theory, be made to do most things that an amateur movie maker is going to need. The great pity is that much of it is thwarted by bugs.

I have considered moving to the latest version but for the same money I can buy an alternative package and frankly I've had enough hassle from Studio to last me for a lifetime. Nice package, shame it doesn't work.

Pinnacle Studio 9.0 video creation and editing software is very buggy and support is poor. This is the third version of Pinnacle I have used, and all of them have been appalling. After 40 - 80 hours of editing you find nothing renders successfully. I am going to abandon my back catalogue and start with something else.

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.

I have a 3.0 ghz, p4, w/ hyper-threading, 1 gig ram, 9800 Pro video card, 7200 rpm HD 160 gig, and the Pinnacle Studio 9.0 upgrade software hangs-up during rendering. After I bought it and started using it, I ran into this issue over and over again, so I started researching it. You will find 1000's of references to this rendering hang-up using Pinnacle studio 9 plus. I recommend you put your money into something a little more stable.

I was looking at Pinnacle Studio 7 video creation and editing software some time ago but decided to hold off due to some issues with that particular version. When Pinnacle Studio 9.0 Upgrade came out, I decided it was time. Was I wrong! I am running Windows XP with an up-to-date, fast processor so I thought I was ready for anything. I tried 4 times to load this software and my system crashes every time. I closed all unnecessary programs before attempting the install with no luck. I tried both "Typical" and "Custom" installation methods with no luck. Pinnacle needs to address these installation problems right away. Go ahead and take a chance but I would recommend staying away from this mediocure software until Pinnacle's software engineers get a clue.