Avoid Studio 9 at all Costs! (Pinnacle Studio 9)

Member Name: mtgcsharpguy

Product:	Pinnacle Studio 9
Date:	21/02/05 (5462 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Easy use, Nice Features

Disadvantages: Unstable, Frequent Crashes, Patches don't work

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 things like inserting transitions, moving a clip from one position in the storyboard to another, and simply clicking on

an existing storyboard clip. After about the 25th video clip, Studio 9 now took about 30 minutes to do any little thing. It's

not like I have an old, slow system either. I have a P4 3.0GHz hyperthreaded, 1GB DDR400 RAM, 120GB SATA HD, ATI Radeon 128MB

video card, Windows XP Professional system! Now that's pretty fast! There should be no reason for Studio 9 to have to take

30 minutes to do something in response to a simple mouse click on an existing storyboard video clip!

So, in an effort to resolve this issue, I decided to go to Pinnacle's website and see if there were any patches available for

download. There was: version 9.3.5. So, I downloaded it and installed it. Now, the program wouldn't start! It gave me a

'DLLMain entry point' error! Can you believe that? The patch made things worse! After reading some FAQs at Pinnacle's site

regarding this issue, I did what they told me to do: 1) uninstall Studio 9, 2) remove the entire application directory from

disk, 3) remove anything running from the background in memory (such as antivirus programs, anti-spyware, unnecessary

services, etc.), 4) re-install Studio 9, and then 5) re-apply the patch. After going through steps 1 through 4, I was able to

get the unpatched version of Studio 9 running. However, after installing the patch once again, I got the same 'DLLMain entry

point' error! I still could not start Studio 9.3.5! I should've left it unpatched. At least it would've worked period!

So, I decided to reformat my entire hard drive, re-install Windows XP and then re-install Studio 9. I planned on only have

Windows XP and Studio 9 on my system. After installing both Windows XP and Studio 9 on my system, I had a working version of

Studio 9 running. So, I decided to try out, once more, the patch. This time the patch worked! I had to completely re-install

my operating system in order to get this patch to work with my OS! What a nightmare! So, I created my project again from

scratch. I added some video clips and some transitions. After about the 20th video clip, which are each only about 5 minutes

in length, Studio 9 started to creep. It started getting slower and slower! After about the 25th video clip added to my

storyboard, I decided to give up! This is not worth the time and frustration! I took my Dazzle 150 and Studio 9 package back

to the store for a FULL refund (after carefully re-packaging the box like it was new)!

I will NEVER buy another Pinnacle product again! Their software is completely useless, poorly developed and obviously poorly

tested. Instead, I bought a firewire card and converter and Intervideo's WinDVD Creator and ULead's VideoStudio software.

Both ran just fine on my system. I didn't experience ANY slowness (unless of course it was time to make the movie) during my

editing phase of using both programs, adding video clips to the storyboard didn't take 30 minutes to complete and simply

clicking and keyboard actions didn't take 15 minutes to accomplish! These are really good programs that are fast, have great

quality and WORK! Pinnacle's Studio 9 is the worst software I've ever encountered!

You've been warned - DO NOT BUY THIS PRODUCT! Note: the Dazzle 150 device itself was great, it was Studio 9 that was the

problem. Oh yeah, another point, the Dazzle 150 can only be used with Pinnacle software - you can't use it with other video

editing software such as WinDVD and VideoStudio!

Summary: