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: 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.
Customer Review: DO NOT BUY! BUGS CRASHES- your computer will hate you.
Summary: 1 Stars
Although this program is very easy to use it crashes WAY too much if you want to get anything done. Click too fast? crash! import file is too large? crash! add to this all the bugs and glitches when doing normal things like chromakey. I would Chromakey the second layer, do a time stretch on the first layer - and all of a sudden the chromakey and pan/zoom options wouldn't work. I had to restart the computer for it to work properly.
If you're happy with cutting clips and then go make a sandwich while this program processes the clip you just split - then this program is for you.
Customer Review: Too Many Negatives for an Amateur
Summary: 2 Stars
Pinnacle's software has, for a casual user like myself, too many negatives to be taken seriously as a tool. The licensing agreement is a joke (it is only valid for 2 years!!!), it loads mysterious software that is impossible to remove, and it is too unreliable.Customer Review: Great User Friendly Software
Summary: 5 Stars
I purchased this software for my husband - as he is the computer expert in the house. He loves it. He has used various other photo and movie editing software to create movies, but he by far gives this one praises. He has created a number of short movies/DVDs of our family and friends and has commented many times that this software is easy to navigate and use. I highly recommend this to anyone getting into photo and/or movie editing.Customer Review: Worst version yet - glad I switched to Corel VideoStudio ProX
Summary: 1 Stars
I have been suffering through this company's software for at least four years. I started with version 8, right up through version 12 Ultimate. This newest is an absolute nightmare! It wouldn't even recognize all of the available options I've purchased in the past (at 49 dollars or more for each plug-in) unless I still kept versions 10 and 11 installed at the same time. The moment I transferred all of the extra material into version 12 and uninstalled the older versions (as I was directed to), the transitions and effects all disappeared.
Besides that, projects nearly always fail before the rendering step is complete, and if you're looking to burn something to a dvd, you can forget that as well.
I purchased a brand-new quad-core HP computer with tons of memory and a high-end video card intended for this type of work, and it didn't matter. Buying this software is nothing but giving a donation to Pinnacle's profit line. You will be wasting your money.
I have given up and switched to Corel VideoStudio ProX. It is similar to use, is much less expensive, and has great features as well. And guess what? It actually completes your projects and burns them onto dvd's. Can you believe that? Something that actually does what it's supposed to do! Read my review on Corel VideoStudio here and make the switch yourself.