#Pinnacle studio 9 media suite upgrade#
#Pinnacle studio 9 media suite software#
#Pinnacle studio 9 media suite series#
#Pinnacle studio 9 media suite windows#

In addition to giving you a choice of storyboard, timeline, and text-list video-editing modes, Studio 9.0's elegantly designed Edit screen now provides a much-needed full-screen video-preview window.

#Pinnacle studio 9 media suite software#

But the software does not support DivX, MPEG-4, OGG, or Microsoft Media Center Edition's DVR-MS video format. Studio 9.0 can output projects to videotape, digital video recorders, DVD and CD burners, MPEG and AVI files, streaming WMV9 and RealMedia movies, e-mail messages, and even video-sharing Web sites. The software's flexible I/O capabilities let you capture live analog or digital video in DV or MPEG formats and import MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and most types of AVI files. Pinnacle Studio 9.0 offers a mature, well-designed feature set that is as comprehensive and easy to use as any in its price range. Studio 9.0's Background Rendering function was the culprit behind the program's frequent crashes-a problem that vanished when the feature was disabled.

#Pinnacle studio 9 media suite upgrade#

In any event, Pinnacle is aware of the rendering problem, and plans to correct it with a 9.1 upgrade due in March. We can report only what we saw during our own testing, but our readers continue to report other various instabilities.

Turning off this handy feature restored the system to rock-solid stability but significantly reduced productivity by forcing the program to pause after many types of edits to render the changes. An afternoon of detective work narrowed the problem to the program's Background Rendering function, which evidently conflicts with resource-hungry tasks such as copying and pasting clips or applying certain combinations of transitions and audio effects. However, digging further into Studio's more advanced features produced a string of seemingly random crashes-even on our clean system. Reinstalling the entire set of software packages on a similarly equipped Athlon XP 3200+ system produced a similarly smooth experience. Even with these applications running simultaneously-something no software vendor would recommend-Studio 9.0 was able to perform a variety of video-editing tasks without locking up. Then we upped the ante by loading Roxio Easy Media Creator 7.0, Sonic Solutions' MyDVD Studio Deluxe 5.0, Norton SystemWorks 2003, and 321 Studios' DVD X Copy onto the same system.

#Pinnacle studio 9 media suite windows#

We used a FireWire-attached Pinnacle MovieBox DV module for video capture and burned on 8X Verbatim DVD+R media.Р”Р‡irst, we verified that Studio 9.0 could be installed without incident on a clean copy of Windows XP Professional.

Our testbed contained a 3.2GHz Hyper-Threaded Pentium 4 processor, an Intel 875 (Canterwood) chipset, a Plextor PX-708UF external FireWire DVD rewriter, and 1GB of Kingston Hyper-X DDR433 SDRAM.

#Pinnacle studio 9 media suite series#

We began our evaluation by subjecting Studio 9.0 to an elaborate series of stability tests. Studio 9.0's slick, mature interface makes it easy-even for newbies-to burn a disc or capture video from a VCR or camcorder, and it does so without limiting your ability to tailor each task to personal preferences. Pinnacle Studio 9.0's pioneering three-step approach to video production partitions projects into Capture, Edit, and Output phases, each of which you manage from a single screen. It's still not totally bug-free, but we can't think of a better sub-$100 tool for creating and distributing home movies or producing video content for a presentation, a DVD project, or a Web site. Better yet, it adds a raft of powerful new features that include audio- and video-cleanup tools, support for Hyper-Threaded Pentium 4 processors, and the ability to accept third-party plug-in tools. Pinnacle has obviously worked hard to address these problems, and our Pinnacle Studio 9.0 evaluation copy was the most stable version we've tested to date. Despite being one of the most versatile video-production packages in its class, its popularity has suffered from a reputation for maddening lockups and system conflicts. Pinnacle Studio is the kind of program that our readers love to hate.