Mildly OT - comparisons with Pinnacle Studio ?

PeterWright wrote on 10/29/2007, 12:07 AM
Some physio clients have asked me to help them with their editing program, which they use for routine physio treatment footage, and it's Pinnacle Studio 10 (!!).

To educate myself, I downloaded the Trial version of Studio 9 and boy do I feel clumsy - it's so hard to do routine things like trimming clips, control transition properties etc, and as for audio editing ....!!!

Anyway, as I work my way through whatever their questions are, I shall take any opportunity to suggest they invest US$80 in Vegas Movie Studio, then I can really help them.

I know there are a few ex-Pinnacle people here, so I would welcome any info on the known shortcomings of that software.

Comments

Grazie wrote on 10/29/2007, 1:35 AM
Pete, I was stopped dead in my tracks back with Studio8.

Why?

VideoFactory!! Nudge, Nudge . . say no more!! And what has VF become? Exactly!

Tell you what - if you are THAT convinced of doing the work, why don't YOU buy it for them? It is s/w, it is a tool.

But you may have some wish to retain the work? By being paid to assist them with S10?

Grazie
PeterWright wrote on 10/29/2007, 2:01 AM
Grazie, I have NO wish to continue being Pinnacle's Little Helper!
It feels so clunky ...

I shall certainly sound them out on the possibilities of maybe a monthly session, but only if it's with VMS !

I shall be taking the trial version of VMS on a memory stick - just on the offchance ....

cheers
Peter
Grazie wrote on 10/29/2007, 2:49 AM
LOL!!! - G
Zulqar-Cheema wrote on 10/29/2007, 3:31 AM
I posted a link to a piece of software that allows you to run your favorite software from a HDD and then plug that in to any PC and it will work on that machine as it works on yours, making your software portable. The only thing it did not recognize was the FW, so you could run Scenalyzer from the HDD that should work. You can still use the HDD to transfer data as normal
Look up...
MOJOPAC
mr.beebo wrote on 10/29/2007, 4:07 AM
Regarding any version of Pinnacle-save save and save your work! They are all unstable.
blink3times wrote on 10/29/2007, 5:50 AM
Regarding any version of Pinnacle-save save and save your work! They are all unstable.

Actually that's not really true anymore. Not that it doesn't have bugs, but it autosaves pretty well.

Pinnacle studio has always been a bit of a double edge sword. Studio 9 has a pretty bloody good quality sd mpeg encoder (Pinnacle doesn't lease their mpeg encoder BTW... it's their own design). But there are always some bugs here and there that one has to be aware of.

Studio 9 however was not capable of HDV so that encoder got scrapped and starting with s10, the Avid liquid render engine was incorporated. S10 was a disaster upon release... some say it was the Avid take-over that got in the way, but regardless.. you could do NOTHING without crashing. A lot of patches and hardwork has solved that problem, and for the most part s10.7 is pretty stable. The quality of the output is pretty high as well. There is a guy on the Ulead forums that used to be a Ulead rep who has gone on record as stating that the quality of the studio output beats out any of the Ulead products.

There are some unique features in studio which you will not find else where.... little things like being able to split your capture by TIME instead of scenes.. For example, I can split my capture once every 60 seconds (or what ever time I set). I can use background rendering which renders the timeline in the background while I do other things so that preview plays smoothly when I am ready to view it. There is a true time line view or storyboard view (I find the storyboard view great for doing slide shows). And final rendering has been greatly simplified for the benefit of the beginners..... there are no "upper field" or "lower field" choices to be made.... these things are handled automatically.

One of the downsides to studio though has always been the little "extras" that you buy. Studio comes as a basic package and you can do basic things, but to do things like DD5.1 sound, you have to buy an addition package license. So the price tag that you pay at the store should be known as the "basic price" only.

Studio 11 ultimate however has taken some of that away and a lot of the little extras are now included. S11 also does things like HD DVD and AVCHD (bdmv) production and it's all pretty stable.

I don't know if people are aware but Avid bought Pinnacle a while back and is taking Pinnacle studio pretty seriously. Unofficial word has it that there are an estimated 10 million studio users world wide, so that this converts into a pretty big money maker for them. They have done surveys on the studio forums as to things like how many would take advantage of multiple track time lines and such. So it stands to reason that we will see studio do nothing but grow.
kentwolf wrote on 10/29/2007, 12:44 PM
>>...I was stopped dead in my tracks back with Studio8...

Me too. It has the distinction of being the worst peice of software I have ever used.

I will say that had Studio 8 not been so terrible, I would have never found Vegas 4.

So, I guess in the end, it was worth it. I think the info about Vegas was posted on the Pinnacle boards by a frustrated user. The way things worked (at Pinnacle), at least back then, no matter what the problem, it was the fault of "your system." Anything. Everything. Your system's fault.

I would think that the Avid purchase of Pinnacle must have been pretty embarassing for Avid users. Sort of like when NEC bought Packard Bell some years ago.

Thank you.
Former user wrote on 10/29/2007, 1:15 PM
"I would think that the Avid purchase of Pinnacle must have been pretty embarassing for Avid users. "

Maybe but Avid had been using Pinnacle hardware in their edit systems for a long time. Pinnacle made the video effects cards for the Avid Symphony system and I believe for the early Media Composers.

Dave T2
Maverick wrote on 10/29/2007, 1:20 PM
Me too. It has the distinction of being the worst peice of software I have ever used.

This is exactly how I found Vegas.

My first project was competed with Studio 6/7; it was tough going due to all the crashes and limitations but I had no idea that there was better until I searched and found Vegas 3.

To be honest, I am glad of my experience with Studio as it helped me to strive to use Vegas to a higher degree to prove I can do better with it.
mdopp wrote on 10/29/2007, 1:21 PM
Actually I came to Vegas 4 some years ago after being totally annoyed and frustrated about Pinnacle Studio 8. As others have already said: This software is buggy to the utmost extend and should have never been released (at least not to anybody giving their money for it).
I've also tested Pinnacle Studio 9 (just for "fun") and it was just as buggy as 8.
Never tried 10 but I've not heard much good of it either.

Regarding shortcomings: There are many. Very limited number of tracks, no dual screen support, no scalable window arrangements, no support for external controllers, very limited support of codecs, no proper color correction, no proper keying etc. etc. etc.
The whole studio series is directed to the low end amateur market and can't compare with reasonable video editing software.
Martin

blink3times wrote on 10/29/2007, 4:23 PM
"The whole studio series is directed to the low end amateur market and can't compare with reasonable video editing software."
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Agree completely. Pinnacle studio is no match at all for Vegas... different level altogether. On the other hand you can't do HD DVD or qood quality avchd with Vegas... which is why I have studio 11. I have never actually tried to do any serious editing on it though... no sense if you own Vegas.

I also have Avid liquid which is Pinnacle studio's big brother. And Liquid BTW is how I found Vegas. Liquid 7 was buggy as hell when it first came out and it was pretty much useless without a series of patches that took almost a year in the end to come through. I gave up waiting at about the 6 month mark and bought Vegas.... best move I ever made!!!

As it turns out Liquid is now being discontinued. They claim it will be replaced, but with what will be an interesting question.
PeterWright wrote on 10/31/2007, 9:39 PM
Well I've run my training session with my clients, and I must admit that even though some operations are harder to do in Studio, some were not and I could not really recommend that they change to VMS.

One particular feature where Studio 10 suited their purposes very well was the simple way you can drag a Menu to the beginning of the timeline, set Chapter points and automatically create thumbnails, then render and burn the DVD straight from the timeline.

Having a separate program such as DVDA, to create and burn is fine if you need control over the finer points and features, but for these clients that would have seemed very complicated compared with how Studio does it.