Pinnacle Studio 9

I have been using Pinnacle Studio for a few years now and have advanced quite a bit since I first started. I found it easy to use compared to say, Movie Magix (which had some real bells and whistles but was much harder), so for the most part I stayed with Pinnacle. About the hangups..... yes, the hangups!!!! After changing my registry to disable Dr. Watson which caused severe problems with Pinnacle (because Pinnacle totally hates some types of AVI files), I was finally able to get it to render but it hangs during the 2nd part of the rendering just before it burns. Is this a memory problem? Pinnacle is a great educational program for beginners who want to make tiny movies with maybe 50 pictures or so, but after undergoing my toughest project of all with about 300 pictures, 20 AVI files plus sound clips and music, only to learn it seemed too complex for Pinnacle to handle, I wouldn't recommend it for more advanced users. There's no point where a program could hang up that co... Read more

I would not recommend this to anyone, anybody thinking about buying this needs to stop NOW. Don't waste your money. All this software is good for is headaches and frustration. Pinnacle Blows!!!!!!

Guess what. The story hasn't changed for Studio 10 or Studio 11. Be very careful about buying this product. Investigate all the complaints on various reviews including Pinnacle's own forum site before making a decision, where you may not get your money back. http://forums.pinnaclesys.com/forums/thread/158746. aspx

The first time I tested the program it worked great. I wasn't making a grand project, just "learning" how to capture and burn to DVD. With about a minute long clip captured, the auto burning process worked fine. I then tried again trying to capture off of an HD DVR Direct TV receiver that I had kids programs on. Well after the program loaded and I checked the settings I clicked on the Capture button. BAM A error report comes up and asks for a bug submission. After that a memory error popped up behind the first error report. I closed down, checked the settings again, and tried again. I did this a grand total of 10 times including a reboot. I defraged the harddrive and found a setting in the capture set up to enable hardware acceleration. I clicked this on. Bam, it is now capturing as I write this. However, I will be doing no editing or story board work, just DVD burns for a vacation trip. After reading the above comments, I can agree with them in my simple experience with this program... Read more

Worst software and WORST software company I have ever dealt with. I never got the program running right because their support is non-existant. If they spent 1/2 as much money on support as they do advertising they probably would be OK. I will never - and I mean NEVER - buy a pinnacle product again. There should be laws that force companies to at least support the garbage that they put out!

most terrible video editing software. rendering is a pain. Buyers beware, it's a waste of money.

Extremely frustrating program. Crashes and freezes all the time. Have been trying to edit the same video for the last 4 weeks and have gotten no where! It also does not seem to work with other movie editing programs. Studio support tried to help, but after many many hours on the phone with them I am no farther along! Stay Away!!

I have Dazzle 120, which was expensive and does not work. I have tried to instal it on three computers running Xp Pro and XP home. Once it worked, 500 times it crashed. The patch does nothing, there is no support and the hardware will not allow other better programs to use it. Avoid it at all costs. I shall also forever avoid Studio 9, Pinnacle and the whole shebang.

Version 9.4.3 of this software always locks up when trying to render a DVD or other video files. I'd highly advise anyone thinking of buying it to look elsewhere.

what a load of crap, had this program for 12 months and only managed to complete 1 project.And that was only 22 mins long.

Worst, most frustrating experience I've ever had with a program: Studio9-where's my refund?

I want to bump this up a little. It's not all that bad. The only true professional software in this class is Adobe Premiere Pro, which seems unusually missing in this review. It's for true professionals and at every TV Network and local stations. It's a $700 product and was $1,000 when it first came out. I can't say that I was at a "proficient" level with it, but I was getting there. It was and is a very difficult product to learn... especially if you want to use all or most features. The reason I'm touting Premiere is that this Pinnacle Studio 9 is the only one that I see in this group that comes close to the "way it is done" in Premiere. Nope, it doesn't even come close but it is highly productive and uses similar timelines and transition behaviors. There are, what I call, two modes of this software. One is the very simple mode that makes it behave like the quick capture-and-make software and the other mode is very similar to Premiere. It seems that the designers at Pinnacle wasn't ... Read more

Add me to the list... started using version 8 and have patched and upgraded through 9.4.3. Finally threw it out. Between the software crashing while creating simple photo albums, and crashing during rendering, and now, it gives capturing errors, claiming "aspect ratio changes" (even though three other software capture programs have no trouble). In the years I have worked with Pinnacle, I have only completed a couple of the projects I have started. The software looks great and is easy to use... but if you actually want to finish a project, be prepared for rendering problems and DVD burning problems like you cannot imagine.

I also bought the Dazzle 150 package with the Pinnacle 9 software. The hardware portion worked fairly well, but the colors did not come in well from my digital camcorder (Sony). The same tape burned good DVD's on my Phillips DVD player/burner. Many of the same problems listed in other reviews. I liked the editing software, but could NOT burn a DVD. Most of the time it would fail to render a complete video. Finally took the entire package back for a refund.

I must agree I have used pinnacle studio 7/8 and now have 9 pro, this also hangs up after a rendering a movie which I have used in previous versions, a 30 min video renders for abour an hour then hangs up, this is using 9.4.3 IT IS USELESS

I bought a Dazzle 150 analog video capture device and it came with Pinnacle Studio 9.3 SE. Capturing from the device was a breeze. I didn't encounter any problems and the quality was quite good. Things started to look pretty bad when I started editing, however. At first, by adding a few existing MPEG-1 files to my storyboard, I was able to produce somewhat of a movie and with transitions in between. However, once I got to about 20 clips, my system started getting bogged down performance wise. Anything I did in Studio 9 took about 5 minutes to accomplish - and I mean anything! From a keystroke to a mouse click, every single input action I gave Studio 9 took forever to complete. What was Studio 9 doing? Who knows! I did some research on the Internet and found a suggestion someone made regarding turning off background rendering, so I did. I still had the same problem. Everything I did took forever for Studio 9 to process. It's not like I told it to make the movie, I was simply doing thing... Read more

I never got past the opening splash screen. Computer hangs up!!!!