Pinnacle Studio 7 Professional

Well, I've decided that I'm now tired of playing guinea pig for Pinnacle, and hope you won't feel the urge to do the same. My advice would be: pay a little more to buy a stable, well-supported product. Or use something free like Windows Movie Maker so you don't feel too bitter if it doesn't work as advertised.

My current system (Win XP, P4 2.67 GHz, 256 RAM, 80Gb RAID HD) is fast and stable with everything I throw at it - except this.

Please don't waste weeks of your life on the Pinnacle Support Forum. I've done that and believe me it's very overrated.

I never told them how much I really spent! :)

The support from Pinnacle is very poor. They make it difficult to even send an email. Sometimes they respond to a different problem. Several times they simply did not respond. I have never had an appropriate response to the synch problem. Many other people have had similar problems and it just seems to be ignored.

Upon purchase I have been extremely happy with this product. When deciding to get into computer editing, however, you need to exercise some caution. The fact is, video editing really puts your computer to the test. These commercials that show people plugging their camera's into the computer and making a masterpiece video in 10 minutes is fairly commical. Think about it, television newsrooms spend thousands of dollars on editing rooms that are just very basic. To think you can buy a $50.00 program to do the same quality of work is just laughable.

That being said, however, you can turn out very nice projects with Pinnacle. You will need to upgrade your computer. The more memory the better. Secondly, you absolutely need a second dedicated hard drive for your video. Third, you need a firewire cable. Fourth, a stable Operating System.

With all this in place, I've now edited two 20 minute projects (sons's birth, family fishing trip) with tons of video, nice transitions, titles that scroll, music, etc. I showed off my first video to a room full of 20 people and everyone was amazed.

Studio 7 has a learning curve. You need to keep the instruction manual handy! I've had to play with things several times to get them just right, but with close attention you learn the quirks of the program.

To be fair to people's problems, yes the program has a few bugs and I've had my share of reboots...but I attribute this as much to Windows ME as anything. You are dealing with video files that are huge in size and projects that require massive processing power all while trying to please every single computer and camera configuration out there...so you can't expect perfection. Pinnacle's support pretty much stinks which is too bad. But, their online forums via their website are powered by real users and the help is top notch.

I edited for about 8 years in a newsroom, and I can honestly say that using Pinnacle was easier than most of the equipment I worked with. Sure some aspects aren't as professional, but then again I'm not spending thousands of dollars either.

My biggest problem is keeping my project below 20 minutes!! Ha.

Simply put, this product works well and the support provided by their online forum is top notch! Using Pinnacle takes some patience, but is worth the plunge. Thanks.