I second all of mmreed's remarks. I have had MF3 for now one month. I have successfully burned 3 VCD's and 3 DVD's without a hitch. I had(past tense) Studio for over a year and abandoned it Spring 2003 for Ulead products, which BTW are very good also, but not nearly as easy as MF3.

GO FOR IT!!!!!!!!!! YOU WILL NOT BE SORRY.

Thanks for the comments. I have been really frustrated with Studio 8, was considering upping to 9, but wasn't sure if I should take a chance again or get something that works.

Also, is Movie Studio the Same as Video Factory, and is the latest version 3? And is there a version 4 coming out soon? I don't want to buy 3 if 4 is coming soon.

That's what Pinnacle did to version 8 users and a lot of users are upset.

You will be amazed at how easy and reliable Screenblast is. Like you, I also was an original Studio 8 user, and had many headaches and problems with it. Since finding Screenblast, life has been a joy again (ask my wife)!!

Al

Yes, Movie Studio is VideoFactory under it's SONY Screenblast name. Version 3 has only been out for a short while. I wouldn't expect version 4 for at least another year or more.

dibbkd

I cannot answer your question about V4 of MF3. I also got caught up in the Pinnacle Studio 8 upgrade from 7, which NEVER worked. The only thing I know for sure is that MF3 works and if a version 4 were to come out, I could only imagine that it will work even better. I think Sony has a real winner here and with all of the Pinnacle users coming over here, I don't think that Sony would "screw" us.

I think Sony wants us to become used to the MF3 way of doing things so that someday we will up grade to its high end Vegas Video NLE product, which I hear is the best of the best!!!!!!!

I, too, am a Studio 8 refugee. I struggled with it for about 9 months before switching to MS3. I've used MS for 6 months, now, and have not had it crash once...literally! You will NOT regret the switch to MS.

Be aware, though, that MS does not have a self-contained DVD authoring capability, which is one of the nice things about Studio (assuming it worked.) Instead, you get MyDVD as an external application. Alas, this product sucks. However, there are many other authoring tools out there to choose from...heck, you could even use Studio if you can get it to work for DVD menus, etc.

I'm someone who had little or no troubles with Studio 8, but regardless Screenblast is just better, period. Better features and editing capabilities, 3 video tracks (Studio 8 only has 1, and though you could do A/B roll editing in S8 with a workaround, it was a big pain and you couldn't see both sets of video footage next to each other, which is how A/B rolling is supposed to be done), and as others have mentioned, Screenblast has some nice capabilities that Studio doesn't have, like chroma-keying and PIP. I just used the Screenblast demo for a project, and I will definitely be purchasing it and using it a lot more.

Hi all...

My name is Chuck, and I'm a Studio-haulic. You know how it is -- you're lured by the marketing, seduced by the sleek interface. You can't keep your hands off it. And it breaks promise after promise. You delude yourself -- "It's my fault, I can change. The next release will be better." You spend all of your idle time with it, wasting hours upon hours, hoping for the late-night payout that never comes. You go home frustrated...

I'm typical of many who post on the Pinnacle forums, and who have reviewed Studio 8 on amazon.com. You'll read post after post from people who say: "I'm a very experienced software/hardware guy, and this software is the buggiest, most unstable piece of junk I have ever tried to use." In my opinion, it is

I went through extraordinary efforts to get that godforsaken program running -- to the extent that I built a new machine, bought a new O/S, and even a digital camera to get around one Pinnacale FAILURE after another. I actually had it running fairly well on a mid-grade machine under Windows 98SE, but there were other niggling issues, and I just couldn't take it anymore, thus the purchase of new hardware.

To keep it short, along the way I had nearly every problem that you'll see written up in the forum. Studio wouldn't recognize my capture device; Studio would only see the tuner in my capture card -- not the composite or S-VHS inputs; Studio would lock up during rendering; the audio is out of sync in the video, et al.

Tech support on the forums is a joke. They use the Obi-wan Kenobi mind control technique, which has you repeating gibberish: "Studio 8 is not buggy." "Most users don't have problems." "It's my hardware, not Studio 8". If you can get them to respond to your problem, it's usually one of a handful of canned responses: "Make sure you're using the latest version of Studio." Or "Uninstall Studio, run regdelete, and reinstall Studio." Or "Try to make a test project with Photo Shoot, (a series of short clips, totalling about 3 minutes of video...) and see if the problem occurs with that." This response galls me the most. They supply 3 minutes of carefully-crafted video -- is this the same as capturing 45 minutes of video, editing it, adding menus & then burning a disc? I don't think so. Oh -- if you have a project that fails, you can send it to them for evaultion. Yeah, right. When was the last time you sent a 4 gigabyte email, or stored it on your "personal website" for them to download. What a joke.

I have never seen a sofware vendor make such ridiculous demands on your system: shut down all background processes you can using "Enditall", disable write-behind caching, uninstall other burner software which may conflict with Studio 8. They have even gone so far as suggesting that users format their hard drives and reinstall the O/S. (Yeah, I know -- good practice, but I don't think I'm about to lose 3 years worth of data and other apps to do that for one stinking, unstable piece of software that may never work right.)

I'm at a point right now where it works quite reliably. But only if I follow a specific sequence of time-consuming workarounds and extra steps, starting with capturing and editing only in DV avi format. The workarounds abound. "Break your movie into several short clips. Add transitions and then render them to an avi file. Load the avi into a new project and split the video at the points where you want DVD chapters. Then render the whole shootin' match again. But don't burn it to disc. Use NERO to burn the disc." Sheesh.

I like Studio, it's great fun to play with. But I also like my hair, preferably on my head, where it's not after 3 months of working with this thing. I was on vacation the last 3 weeks of December, and spent literally every spare waking minute wrestling with that infernal beast. I was taken in by the apparent elegant simplicity of the interface, and overlooked the fact that the way I was successfully using it was far from the intuitive process promised in the advertising hype. Basically, it amounts to using a subset of the software, because Studio "does better" with certain file types, etc. Yeah? Well, why in the hell does it say that it works with such-and-such, if it doesn't?

I've looked at a couple of other less-elegant editing solutions, and they, for the most part, did what Studio couldn't. Things like recognize & control my capture hardware. Actually capture files to disc, little things like that. And that brings me here, to Screenblast.

I downloaded the trial version night before last. It's not quite as intuitive as S8, but it does many of the same things, just in a slightly different way. But you know what? Everything I've tried works. It captures from my capture card -- I don't have to connect my camera and do a DV firewire transfer. It recognizes all the inputs of my capture card -- something that S8 doesn't do to this day.

Most pleasing are several features S8 doesn't have, and I've only tapped the surface of Screenblast. I've rotated video and I've sharpened it -- two things I've had a great need for. And I see a lot of other very handy-looking video manipulations. But, for all the good news, there's one big enthusiasm-killer: the demo version will not let me burn a DVD. The only major remaining issue for me with S8 is the ridiculous ease in getting an out-of-sync DVD. (sound trails video, making you think you're watching a dubbed Japanese movie, and Godzilla is about to step on your house...) Since I can't burn a DVD, I have no idea if this is going to be a problem with Screenblast, and I don't feel like wasting another $99 to find out. More forum reading is in order, I suppose -- I'll be looking for discussions on this topic.

Am I going to upgrade to Studio 9? I don't know. I have this love/hate relationship with Pinnacle. I enjoy using it, but feel like a war veteran with a metal plate in his head who relives the war everytime he hears a loud sound. When I read posts on their forum from users going through the same nightmares I did, and Pinnacle doesn't respond, it makes me crazy. If I do upgrade to 9, it will go like this: I will order directly from them. If the product doesn't work correctly, I'll try to resolve things for a resonable period of time. If it doesn't work, I will politely, but firmly, request a refund. If there is any hesitation on their part, I will contest the charge on my credit card, and I will not give up or accept no as an answer. I can accept that no software is entirely bug-free, but with Pinnacle, I feel like hanging a No Pest Strip above my computer work area.

Sorry to have written this much, but then, you're not reading now, anyway, are you?

being an ex-pinnacle user myself... all i can say is ....

buy screenblast ...youll love it. The demo will not burn dvds. The one thing that does stink about Screenblast is the dvd making app - it uses myDVD whihc stinks. so here is the answer:

Buy Screenblast Movie studio, use it to edit, then buy DVD-Lab and use that to make DVDs.

If you load your video toolkit with those two apps, you will never have the need for anything else...they will work flawlessly, and you will experience happiness in the video editing world never before known to man.

Hi Chuck:

Let me assure you that once you use Screenblast, you will never want to go back to Studio. Sure, Studio has some really cool concepts, but Pinnacle just never seemed to carry it through to completion.

Screenblast has many more features that far surpass Studio, such as actually working, chroma key (blue screen) and others. You can also capture a single frame at a time (if you are into animation). There are a lot of transistions and effects which I use quite a bit when correcting color or the quality of my captured video. And speaking of capture, I also use VirtualDub (which is a free download). It allows you to dynamically synchronize the video clock to match the audio clock which helps eliminate out of sync (OOS) problems. VirtualDub is available for download from:

http://www.virtualdub.org/index

Although authoring a DVD through Screenblast is pretty weak, there are several other packages that perform exceptionally well. My burner came with ULead Movie Factory and Video Factory which are much better than MyDVD that comes standard with Screenblast. Also, there is a great package called DVDLab for authoring DVDs which allows complete control over how you author your DVD (e.g. animated menus, intros, linking videos together, placement of buttons, etc.), and that is just the tip of the iceberg. A trial version is also available for download from:

http://dvdlab.net/dvdlab/

Since using Screenblast, I have never had a single coaster (although I am thinking of turning the ones I have from Studio into clocks and sell at the flea market). Any problems that I have encountered are due to the Pinnacle driver I need to use with their DC10plus capture card. Even though I am using the Pinnacle DC10plus for analog capture, I have never had an OOS problem.

Browse through this forum and compare it to Pinnacle. For the most part, the Pinnacle forum is full of irate and unhappy customers complaing about the software and threatening lawsuits. It seems like the only solutions involve jumping through hoops and hoping that it will be sunny on Tuesday at 2:45pm with a relative humidity of 80% to make things work (oops, sarcasm showing again). Their forum leaves me feeling very depressed whenever I go there. With the Screenblast forum, everyone here is extremely knowlegable and very helpful. It is always a positive experience when I come here. Sure you will find some who have encountered a problem, but the difference here is the problems are few and far between and that it usually gets resolved very quickly. Sony always has a presence on the forums here and are also willing to listen and help, not just give you canned responses.

Thanks...
Al

I'm another Studio 8 convert. Worked myself to death on a project that simply would not render in Studio without flaws. Suspecting I might have corrupted my project file somehow, I even started it over again from scratch (silly me). Still wouldn't render clean. Studio offers some cool stuff (loved the DVD authoring tools) but the problem is it just doesn't work like it's supposed to -- you definitely can't rely on it. And the support stinks. Half the time they seem less informed than you about how the product works. And the forum?! It's the biggest collection of flaming posts on the Internet. How Pinnacle stays in business is beyond me.

I finally gave up and bought Screenblast and have been very happy. It crashed only once and I think it was operator error in that case. All the features actually WORK. Because MyDVD stinks, I have edited in Screenblast, rendered to an AVI file, then pulled those few finished AVI files into Studio, added a menu and burned there. For that, Studio has been working so far. (I do have another post somewhere here about a DVD problem I thought was due to burning in Studio, but now I'm suspecting it may be a problem with the label I applied to the finished DVD and not Studio.) Based on my research, if I didn't have Studio for the disc authoring I would probably buy DVD Lab. And I may still do that.

Anyway... I wholeheartedly recommend Screenblast. As far as Studio goes, I'm only using it for disc authoring because I happen to already own it and it seems to be working for that. But I will never shell out a single dollar for a Pinnacle product again.

I am pretty new at this but confirm everything said above. I have had no problems with MS3. My only problems have been with MyDVD so I am shopping for a different DVD authoring S/W that creates chapters and menus.

I had Studio 8 on my computer (it came as a (bonus?) with my Canon camera). My computer kept locking up and slowing to a crawl to the point that I though I had some defective RAM on the computer. The problems stopped after I uninstalled Studio 8 (hope I got ride of all the exteranious dll files)

well, I started this post last week because I am an unhappy Studio 8 customer. The program makes me so mad, and I have honestly never hated a piece of software before. I guess there's always a first time.

I'll be purchasing Screenblast as soon as I can scrape up another $100 after blowing it on a new high-speed PC thinking it would solve my Studio 8 problems. What a fool I was.

To Al, who replied directly, and to the others also who commented:

Thanks for all your suggestions. Screenblast seems to, indeed, be feature-rich, in addition to -- um -- actually working. For what it's worth, Studio works very well for me now, albeit with the annoying, time-consuming workarounds. It doesn't crash, it burns everytime and to every format. When something goes wrong, it turns out to be something I did. It is easier to use than Screenblast, but I was never one to shy away from a little extra effort when the results justified it.

The one thing I don't have any confidence in is Studio's damned OOS issue. It's their software, even though they won't admit it. It's ironic that one of you mentioned editing with Screenblast, then authoring and burning in Studio. I'd love to do that, too, but I'm convinced that my OOS problems are created during rendering after the menus go in, so there goes any advantage I had by switiching to Sony.

One of you mentioned the Ulead products as an authoring adjunct to Screenblast. That software also was bundled with my 2nd burner, but I haven't even installed it, having been so enthralled with Studio's promise. Ironically, I got my Studio 8 SE with the first burner --- an I/O Magic beast that I took back after it trashed several DVD-RWs... I paid for the Studio update to the full version after playing with it for one night -- that's how cool it appeared to be. Ironically, the burner that was such a nightmare also came with Pinnacle Instant CD/DVD. Now that Studio has revealed itself to have more bugs than a rotting corpse, it makes me wonder if it was more shoddy Pinnacle software that was at the root of that problem, too.

I'll be hanging out in both forums for awhile, as I get familiar with Screenblast. I do try to help in the Pinnacle forum -- having been through so much, I hate to see these people show up with the same problems every day and get no response from the Pinnacle guys. First time one of them said a word in response to me was to argue in defense of Pinnacle's "good" name. Gee, thanks for all the help...

Better go -- lots of reading to do...

I too, have been disillusioned with Studio. Too much time spent in troubleshooting and work-arounds. If it worked as advertised, they really have a winner, but....

I downloaded the ScreenBlast Trial version a few weeks ago, and have been very happy with it. It is more challenging to learn, but is definitely worth the effort. The many problems I had with Studio do not exist with ScreenBlast.

FYI: Amazon has ScreenBlast for $84.99 now. I just ordered my copy. Looking forward to spending my time in "creative editing", and not in "workarounds".

Sony might want to take notice of this thread, and offer a "Competitive Upgrade" for the disillusioned Studio users. Too late for me since I just bought my copy of ScreenBlast, but just a thought. - Dave

You can buy Screenblast for about half the price on the educational / student discount site such as academicsuperstore.com or journeyed.com .

Tom