Greetings,

I am into Pinnacle video capture units for VHS/DV to VCD conversion. Would be appreciate it if anyone could comment about Pinnacle products. I am considering their Studio Deluxe package. Any comments?

TIA.

Jeff

-- Jeff W. (jwoosh@yahoo.com), May 06, 2002

Answers

Hi Jeff, Suggest you hold off given the poor driver support from Pinnacle. Also the price of the Studio DeLuxe is outrageouly high, given the capture card included. In the same vein, the Dazzle-II is also priced at the same high level. Whatever happened to competition? Go to www.inquirer.net and the forum at the Pinnacle web site. V.J.

-- V.J. (vpn@mad.scientist.com), May 10, 2002.

I bought a firewire port for my computer that came with Sudio DV from pinnacle. I use it for transfering home videos to my computer for editing and saveing. It has loads of great editing tools and runs pretty fast in my 933mhz prossesor. After I create a movie from my video clips that it captures from the video camera itself, I can save it as a real video, avi, or mpeg file in customizable quality settings. I can all record the new movie to my video camera again. It just sends a record command to it and starts playing the movie through it. Then if I want it on VHS I can connect the video camera to my VCR through it's A/V hook ups. I don't know much about driver support. I have never had a problem with that but once I did lose the serial # for the software when I needed to install it again. All I had to do was e-mail them and with in 2 days they e-mailed back with a new serial # no ? asked. I don't know the prices for any of this deluxe packages, but I do know that most of them are real high, and I haven't seen any cheeper. I guess that's just what that type of stuff is going for these days. By the way, in my package, I got a fire wire card (IEEE 1394) with 2 external ports, and one internal port. the card can transfer upto 500 mb per second per port. Plus I got that nice studio DV software all for about $100.

-- Jonathan Jackson (Not_Givin@Don't_Want_Spam.com), May 30, 2002.

No please don't buy the pinnacle studio deluxe for analog capture, and don't buy any pinnacle product. I made the mistake to buy the deluxe and it absolutely don't work for analog capture. I tried it on 2 different PC, changed almost on every PCI port the card, reinstall a 1000 times every drivers and patch in different order, following pinnacle support recommendation and nothing improved. both the phone and internet support suck. As a conclusion I wasted 430€ and hours for a plastic stuff that can go direct to garbage now!!!

-- (vannier@noos.fr), July 19, 2002.

Hi Jeff, The complaints you received, should be taken with more than a few grains of salt. I bought the Studio Deluxe last week for 410 Euro which is a fair price considering that it allows me to use my brand-new 1500 Euro Sony camera to its full extent. The installation of the drivers and all software went without an hitch. I could start capturing video from DV camera, S-VHS and VHS VCRs immediately and in top quality. 2 firewire ports and a breakout box with VHS, S-VHS and audio make for easy working. The software may not be as powerful as Adobe Premiere but I made quality titles and transitions in a jiffy without even opening the manual ! Exporting to tape or file is painless too. The manual could be better, I admit, too much is taken for granted (no mention is made how to switch from composite to S-VHS in analog capture - I found it in a logical place but it is not readily visible to a neophyte user). I used an old MiroVideo DC20 card before, which performed so well (only VHS/S-VHS) that I decided to stick to Pinnacle. Regards, Marc

-- Marc Van Holder (mvanhold@csc.com), August 21, 2002.

The complaints about Pinnacle products should be taken very seriously. Do a web search on pinnacle and studio and bugs and complaints. Pinnacle has put out some seriously flawed products. Their poor practices are documented all over the net.

-- Mike Zimmre (gmzimmer@islandnet.com), December 23, 2002.

I bought the Studio 8 package with the card and never could get the card to initialize for capture. I sent emails to tech support which were never responded to and I did countless installs and uninstalls according to their instructions on a brand new 2.4 Ghz P4 Compaq loaded with XP Home Edition and still had no luck. You might be one of the lucky ones where it works with your camcorder/camera, but it didn't work with mine (Panasonic PV-DV900 palmcorder). I previously used Studio Dv on Win 98 SE and it worked great. If I were you I would research Pinnacal's user forums and try to find information on your camera/camcorder model before considering purchase because their software/hardware (1394 card they included) was nothing but a waste of money/

-- John (composer@sbcglobal.net), September 15, 2003.

I desperately try to transfer HI8 VIDEO with PINNACLE STUDIO 8 DC10plus. The video transfer works but not the audio.Is it somewhere somebody who can help.Locally the assistance is zero. Thanks.

-- dhallenne philippe (philippe.dhallenne@wanadoo.fr), November 08, 2003.