| Product: |
Pinnacle Systems Studio DC10+ |
| Date: |
22/02/04 (219 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Ease of use
Disadvantages: Unpredictable results, Terrible Tech Support, Does not do what it has been sold to do.
Whilst the capture card seems to do it?s job, the Studio 8 editing software that comes with it is another matter.
Whilst this software is relatively easy to get to grips with, as long as you read the manual, it is totally unpredictable as to what it will actually do.
I can edit a project with little trouble, but it is a lottery as to whether it can generate a usable file for burning to disc. Common ailments are clicks on the sound track and blocky images. It claims to be able to fit two hours onto a DVD. It fails to tell you that the quality will be very poor. In practice it can only manage one hour onto a DVD. Though it can output back to tape without a problem.
Another random facility is the DVD chapter editor. When setting the point to return to the menu you are working on it will decide to shove the return point at the very end of the project and not where you told it. The ability to resort chapters has been removed ? but is still in the manual and they have no other way to do this.
You are supposed to get expert support help when the product is registered. This, I am afraid is little short of a joke. You will be told to reinstall everything (something you will probably have already tried). After that they blame the problems on your video camera and once you prove that no to be the case they will just close the case and offer no further help. The last email I received from them was ?contact your vendor?. I have brought this up with their management and await some feedback.
If you need an analogue capture card and posses your own software to edit said captured video then this will do the job (just look for one on ebay to save paying for the bundled software that does not work). If you are expecting the software package to do what it says it will then you will be sadly disappointed.
Summary:
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Last comment:
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- 23/02/04 This is a good opinion, as you explain the difficulties you have had clearly and concisely. It is a shame you have had these problems!
Howeve r, I didn't feel that this was quite worth VU, as you don't actually give us any real information about the board itself...
I assume that this is a hardware MPEG-2 encoder (DVD-video standard) for converting video from an analogue source into digital video that you can edit and burn to DVD (many users may not know this).
It would be nice to know what kind of inputs this unit accepts (composite, S-video etc), or whether it features an external breakout box.
In addition, you advise people who own alternative software to buy the board separately. However, have you tested the board with other software yourself? It could be a board problem, driver problems, or something else with your PC setup that has caused your difficulties.
As for quality, given that you are creating digital video from an analogue source, the quality is never going to be perfect DVD quality anyway. Even if you have a top-of-the-range analogue camcorder, and a professional hardware encoder, there is going to be some quality lost during analogue-to-digital conversion anyway.
This is a good review, but you have left so many unanswered questions and gaps in information that there is not enough to help people here.
This is not intended to be preachy! I am supposed to be becoming the computers guide shortly, so this is just a little advice for what to include next time... so you can provide more useful information, and get more VU ratings. Perhaps even a crown :)
Dave :)
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