Pinnacle Studio Ultimate Version 12 [OLD VERSION]
by Pinnacle Systems
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Software Reviews of Pinnacle Studio Ultimate Version 12 [OLD VERSION]
Customer Review: creepy
Summary: 1 Stars
I was about to purchase Pinnacle 12 Studio Ultimate, but that disclosure of 2 years limit for installed software license has stopped me in my tracks. Thanks for that info.
ku
Customer Review: Very nice affordable home video editing
Summary: 4 Stars
I used this program for the first time this week and it's mostly simple to grasp if you have some computer / creative knowledge. I found it carried quiet a toolbox of nice effects and plugins that help take your videos that extra step. The included Green Screen was a nice touch although it's somewhat too small to pull off an action scene. It's definitely good enough for a close up video but a screen could be made or purchased separately anyway so it's considered an added bonus here. The program hasn't crashed on me yet even with me testing out several plugins and video overlays so I'd say it's pretty sturdy which also depends on your PC. The bottom line is, it's a good buy and much less expensive than competitive products. And example of my first video which is no high budget film by any means can be seen here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_Lqe8fB6Dg
Customer Review: Has some great features; A few problems though
Summary: 3 Stars
After using Ulead VideoStudio DVD 7 for video editing for 4 years, I decided I'd try making the switch over to something newer, possibly better. Pinnacle Studio Ultimate Version 12 turned out to be superior in many ways, inferior in others. I'm sorry I can't compare Pinnacle Version 12 to earlier Pinnacle versions, but I hope anyone who is looking for new editing software will find this review helpful.
Things I liked about Pinnacle Version 12:
*The ability to adjust the volume within a single video clip or audio clip; i.e. make the first part of the clip loud, then get quieter, then get louder, or whatever.
*The ability to "lock" the audio or the video in place. In my other program, if you had an audio clip matched to a video clip, but you later deleted some video clips earlier on in the video, those 2 video & audio clips would not be in sync anymore. With Pinnacle 12, you can lock them together so they'll remain in sync, or unlock them later if you choose.
*Lots of great transitions and audio effects! Big plus.
*The program lets me save my movie files in many different formats, including MPEG 1, 2, & 4, MOV, DivX, AVI, RealMedia, Windows Media, Sony PSP-compatible, and iPod compatible. I especially appreciated this last one, and have enjoyed watching my creations on my iPod Nano.
*Videos look great.
Things I didn't like about this product:
*My computer is running on the minimum system requirements for this software (plus a little extra RAM). However, many times, I'll go to preview a video and I'll hear all the audio, but it'll get stuck on one frame of video for several seconds or even minutes.
*I have a 13-inch monitor, and it feels like it is too small to accommodate this software. When I'm trying to click on a piece of the video to drag it, or when I'm trying to manipulate the audio within a scene, I have to be able to precisely click on a very specific area, and I find myself making 6-7 mis-clicks before, almost accidentally, getting it right. This is time-consuming and frustrating. I think if you have a big monitor you should be fine, but if yours is small like mine, you may also experience my problem.
*I have not been able to find a way to make a 10-minute video to under 100MB without it looking terrible and grainy. (Luckily, now that YouTube allows videos up to 1 Gig, this isn't a big deal for me anymore.)
Though it certainly has a lot of fun features, and I've successfully made several videos using Pinnacle, I've found it difficult to get truly comfortable with this program. I find myself going back to Ulead for most of my projects, because it feels more familiar. I know my way around it. Even after using Pinnacle for months, I don't feel very comfortable with it. However, I will continue to switch off between Ulead and Pinnacle and hope that Pinnacle grows on me.
Customer Review: Mostly works like it should; technical support is near worthless
Summary: 3 Stars
Up front, I'd rate the software at 4.0, the technical support at zero. But weighting the software as the primary importance, I give it an overall 3.
I purchased Pinnacle Studio 12 Ultimate to help me edit my AVCHD files created while using my Canon Vixia HG20 camera (records in high definition). I purchased it after trying the trial version of both Pinnacle Plus and Sony's Vegas Movie Studio. I chose Pinnacle primarily because of ease of use. Sony's Vegas Movie studio was quicker to edit, and seemed more powerful, but it was more difficult to learn, and I didn't intend to spend a lot of time editing movies. I also liked some of the extra features of Pinnacle (like the montages).
The software generally works as advertised, but I continue to have a problem importing files from my camera, using the file/import/source method (a problem I did not have with the trial studio plus version). Pinnacle technical support is woefully inadequate in trying to resolve this problem, but more on that later. The good news is that there are relatively simple workarounds to file/import problem that allows me to copy the files to my computer and then bring them into the Pinnacle workspace.
I learned in the process of working with technical support to resolve the above problem, that according to Pinnacle, I needed a core 2 quad CPU machine running at 2.66 to process AVCHD files. I had not seen that advertised anywhere. The good news is that my machine meets that requirement. But beware if your intent is to edit AVCHD files.
In general I'm happy with the software. It's pretty easy to use (I created a DVD without reading any instructions). Has lots of fun features. Runs relatively well on my Core 2 Quad computer with 6MB RAM. And it does more than what I want / need / will probably ever use.
I bought the training DVD and find that extremely useful. It was a bit expensive, but it exposed me to a variety of capabilities I doubt I would have figured out on my own.
As with many others though, I am very displeased with Pinnacle technical support. I won't bore you with all the details, but in summary, I went on chat twice, and both times were unsatisfactory. Sometimes, the answers the chat person wrote back to me were clearly intended for someone else (they were nonsense to my problem). More frustrating though, was that after long waits, they would ask questions I'd already answered, precipitating another long wait. And of course in the end, the chat persons said they could not help me and I needed to call technical support. Bottomline, all chat could do was refer me to FAQs I'd already explored.
So I went on the phone, and after about 45 minutes of more painful and basic questioning, They finally said they needed to refer me to level 2 support. But I have yet to be able to make contact with level 2 support. They would not connect me directly (nor give me a phone number). Instead, they insisted I would get called back within 24 hours. Of course, 5 days later, I haven't been called back.
So I tried the e-mail routine, and after 8 days, and five responses, it's clear those who answer the e-mail also don't read what the customer has submitted, and are not likely going to be able to address the issue. They seem to know less about the software than I do, so they either ask some very basic systems questions (which I had already answered in my initial question if they would have read it) or they search their own FAQs for keywords that might have meaning (and do not). Very frustrating to say the least.
And my specific issue (the file/import/source issue mentioned above) remains unresolved.
UPDATE: Pinnacle technical support could not resolve my "import" problem in Ultimate and recommended I use a series of work arounds.
New software issue ... I installed Pinnacle Premium Pack Volume 1, and all the audio files were trash (literally complete static). And again, technical support has been painful, slow and so far, of no help. This one should be easy to solve-I'm guessing it the DVD installation routine corrupted the .wav files (or they weren't packed correctly in the first place) -- but apparently it's not that simple.
Customer Review: Lousy Piece of Garbage
Summary: 1 Stars
Yes, that's what I think. I'm absolutely disgusted with this product. I have a rather fast machine, a Pentium D-class, dual core, 3GHz, 2G memory, which is about as much as Windows XP Pro (SP3) can address anyway, and 250GB dual RAID HD array. If Pinnacle requires more machine than this, then it has no market space. Why spend $5000 and up for a machine to run $125 software?
What I find in trying to do serious editing with Pinnacle Ultimate in HD is that it's a slipshod collection of poorly written underlying code and extremely inefficient algorithms. It's uselessly slow. I design hardware and embedded software for a living, and I've seen the kind of programming work that I believe Pinnacle to be. If I used their techniques, I'd be out of a job in less than a week!
It takes my machine about 3 hours to output a WMV HD video of about 3 minutes length. There are huge memory leaks and buffer faults, memory paging faults, and other sloppy programming errors. It crashes or locks up as often as it likes, and background processing has serious errors, and cannot be controlled manually. When trying to play a video in a full-screen display, it chokes, and I can't tell what I've got.
I did manage to get a short DVD production of 19 minutes that worked OK after a great deal of effort. During creation and editing, transition effects would often either disappear or go corrupt in video or audio, or both, and fine-tuning of the transition was simply a Monte-Carlo process. No telling what the end result might be, so often an inserted transition (fade or wipe) would have to be deleted and re-inserted. Then many times an adjacent transition would be corrupted and that, too, would have to be re-built. Audio track buffers were often corrupted by combining dirty fade-in/-out buffers, introducing bits of audio from some third clip, rather than from the two clips in process. Other times, the time line would break and have to be carefully reconstructed due to unexpected gaps, broken audio/video sync, etc., which cannot be re-aligned once it gets corrupted.
Once I finally got a working edit, the resulting DVD was not bad, but with a few small errors. When I tried to re-open the project to make some adjustments, the editor went of into the weeds and ultimately deleted the entire project! There is no apparent way to make small projects and combine them other than outputting a project as a WMV file (very time-consuming!) and including it in yet another project, but that method also has its problems. There is also no good way to back up a project and revert to an earlier version, as the working project files are locked against direct access, even when the program is not running.
My recommendation is: Avoid this software! There must be something out there that actually works, but probably at much higher price. I feel that Pinnacle is no solution at all, since it causes only frustration and no satisfaction when used for serious edits.