Pinnacle DV500 Plus - Capture cards

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Pinnacle DV500 Plus

DV/Firewire
Analog VideoIn

Win95 Win98 Win2K WinXP
Vista? NT4 ~~MAC~~ ~~Linux~~
*based on user reports.

PCI

$400

8.1 (8.3)
38 votes

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Description (from the manufacturer site)

DV500 PLUS combines exceptional analog and digital I/O with real-time features where they matter most. DV500 PLUS is the only real-time editing solution which takes full advantage of all of the new Adobe Premiere 6.0 features:
Real-time multi-track audio mixer with VU meters and volume adjustments
Real-time 16:9 wide screen video processing of effects, transitions and titles
Real-time image correction for saturation, contrast and brightness changes
DV² Speed Codec with dual processor support for ultra fast DV mastering
Export formats: MPEG-2 (DVD compliant),MPEG-1, MP3,Real Media, Windows Media

More information

Comments

39 comments, Showing 1 to 25 comments

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ABSOLUTE RUBBISH.

I had expected a lot as I spent $900 for it. ($600 of which effectively going for Adobe Premiere 6) Got very little.

On two computers, an Athlon 1GHz T-bird and 2GHz T-bred, with 7200RPM drives and following Pinnacle's own manual (busmaster slot, yadda yadda, my machines were WELL EQUIPED), I often had problems with sync during capture. EVen when doing 2 separated runs (one for audio, the next for video). One dcay the capture would work without fail, the next it'd be a nightmare. Even on the faster machine, the problems remained the same.

Worse, capture quality is not good as the picture in general, but especially reds have a vertical deformity in them.

When capturing, I'd often see rainbow artifacts, requiring separate filtration to remove. Yuck.

In VirtualDub, when using the Pinnacle CODEC (even the version they released where they claim they fixed the bug), the AVI export would fail. Even when using a frameserver, the problem still occurred.

I recently bought a WInTV PVR250 and it's eminently more effective. No rainbow artifacts, it syncs fine, it's great. I can even save in 15Mb CBR (they say 12Mb is max) without problems, allowing me to retain quality for when I do editing/cleaning.

And it works in Linux too!! Windows is such a joke...

Comments posted by D. P. Cole from United States, April 04, 2005:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98? Win2K WinXP Vista? NT4? MAC? ~~Linux~~ - Rated: 1 of 10.

Can not get this card to work. Have had professional computer techs, network techs, programmers, and a graphics person load and reload the machine. Two days is the longest the thing stayed working. Am planning on trading it in for a Matrox.

Comments posted by Bill from Other, October 22, 2003:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98? Win2K WinXP? Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 1 of 10.

This is for a Pinnacle DV500 DVD w/Adobe Premiere 6.5. Wow! What a step up from ATI AIW or Hauppauge hair loss formulas.

As a relative newbie to video capture and editing, I find the Pinnacle software to be slightly confusing because it is not very well explained as a package.

Otherwise, the capture is very impressive. 0 frame loss with AV capture, good quality, up and running within minutes of hardware and software installation. Feeding three nonDV sources into the BlueBOX using an AV switcher - DVD, VCR, and TiVo - and then out to a TV/stereo system for monitoring. Works with both Composite and S-Video without hassles. Haven't checked out the DV capture, but don't expect any issues.

I wish that Pinnacle would break up the 4.5 driver software. Although my system is on a 768Kbps T1, the connection is wireless through a WAP which has the tendency to 'konk-out' during large downloads. 374MB is just not happening. Break it up into 4 parts and it's guaranteed to finish downloading.

Specs:

Antec Workstation Tower - 400W PS
GigaByte GA-8IGX P4 Titan 533 Intel 845G motherboard - latest BIOS firmware
Intel P4 2.54GHz
1.0GB PC2100 DDR RAM
4 case fans
IDE 1 Master: Maxtor 30GB 7200RPM HDD (OS and Apps)
IDE 1 Slave: WD 80GB 7200RPM 8MB-Cache HDD (vidcap)
IDE 2 Master: Sony DRU500A DVD+R/W-R/W drive
IDE 2 Slave: Lite-On CD-R/W 52x24x52 drive
PCI IDE: WD 80GB 7200RPM 8MB-Cache HDD (data)
AGP: GeForce4 Ti 4600 128MB AGP video card (masquerading as a Quadro4 900XGL via SoftQuadro4)
PCI 1: Pinnacle DV500 DVD
PCI 2: Creative Sound Blaster PCI 512 audio card
PCI 3: LinkSys WMP11 Wireless Network PCI card
PCI 4: -
PCI 5: ATA100 IDE card
Onboard 100BaseT Ethernet

Windows XP PRO SP1
All drives formatted NTFS
Intel Accelerator drivers installed
All fancy-smancy Windows display candy disabled
Capturing via Primary Display within Premiere

Comments posted by Robert Templeton from Other, May 23, 2003:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98 Win2K WinXP Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 9 of 10.

I bought my DV500 Plus card off the internet on Ebay. Everything worked fine except for building. But when the new driver AP4.5 came out, it worked fine. It's great to use and work with.

Comments posted by Norman from Other, February 01, 2003:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98? Win2K? WinXP Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 9 of 10.

Nice Card!

Not so nice V4.5 Driver download size! (374Mb)

Seems that new always means bigger as well . . .

Comments posted by Rocco from Other, December 31, 2002:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98? Win2K? WinXP? Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 10 of 10.

Excellent card if you FOLLOW THE DIRECTIONS. Using their recommendations for hardware and not trying to use the machine for everything under the sun including video editing, I have seen excellent results. Using Premiere 6.x I can capture from VHS, SVHS, DV or anything else I can hook up to any of the DV/SVideo/RCA connections without a problem. The software that comes with this card is far and away the best I have seen.

Comments posted by Allan Hall from Other, December 28, 2002:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98? Win2K WinXP? Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 10 of 10.

I bought the card about 6 month ago. I like the performance and the softwares bundled in the package. After a few hickups I get the cards running great.

Problems encountered when I change my platform to WinXP. solve it by downloading the update. Capture window display does not work with ATI Radeon 8500 and I have to use the loopthrough connection to TV monitor to see the captured video on progress.

Problems with 15 minutes cature can be solve by formating your hard disk to NTFS. It capture my video to the end in one file.

Since the capture software not work perfectly with my ATI Radeon card I have to give 9 out of 10.

Comments posted by RobbyA from Other, December 04, 2002:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98 Win2K WinXP Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 9 of 10.

This is an awesome editing card. Reading some of the comments i personally have had no conflicts with the DV500plus package. One thing i disliked was the lack of low resolution capture for vcd creation but when updating to premiere 6.5 (and latest pinnacle drivers to suit) i was able to export avi or a project to the adobe mpeg encoder which caters for dvd ( direct import into dvd it! ) mpeg1 & mpeg2 conversion which i might add has some impressive features. I previously used the latest tmpgenc program but the adobe conversion tool is twice as fast with the same if not better quality. Timeline markers also created in premiere can directly be exported to impressions pro as chapter points....too easy for creating dvdz. Personally i use acid pro 4 for handling audio then import it back into premiere. Because i use impressions 2.2 pro i convert the project (export to movie option in premiere instead of adobe encoder) using pinnacles MP2 compressor which can be changed between 2 and 15 M/Bit/s depending on desired quality and between cbr and vbr. I have used this card for 1.5 years and have never had any frames dropped or noticeable irregularities on picture quality after creating about 20 music dvd compilations and 7 one hour movies and countless vcd music titles. I would give it a 10 if it had native mpeg1 and mpeg2 capture and on occasions more real time features but frankly its not really a big issue. I recommend DV500+ users get 6.5 and latest pinnacle 4 drivers. My current system is a p4 2.53-msi 845pe max2 m/board-
1.5 gig 333mhz kingston ram-Gforce 4 128 m/bit v/card-yamaha dsp s/card-pioneer 16xdvd-rom + A04 burner-21" sony crt-second 18" sony lcd but i believe problems could arise from irq settings and system setups.

LOYAL PINNACLE USER TIM

Comments posted by Tim from Other, November 23, 2002:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98? Win2K WinXP Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 9 of 10.

The DV500 will only capture AVI with DV codec. If you want MPEG1, rather use sonething like Nero to convert to MPEG1 for VCD.

For what the card is supposed to do, it does well.

Comments posted by Jury from Other, November 21, 2002:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98? Win2K? WinXP? Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 10 of 10.

My company had me purchase a DV500 DVD card about a month ago. I had problems with the card freezing after a few captures, and after a few calls to Pinnacle, received a new card. That one has worked great. I found it pretty easy to install and have it in a Dell Dimension 8100. I know many other Dell computers don't work well with the Pinnacle stuff.

I have only captured from a Hi-8 camera using the composite input, and have found the abilities of the card very impressive. The software package is great with Premier and Impression DVD Se, along with several other titles.

I recently purchased a DVD writer and am now creating DVD's. I find the Pinnacle MP2 export ability, directly from the Premier timeline, to be as good if not even better than the MPEG-2 files I've created using TMPGEnc. I will say however, that coming from analog sources, there are artifacts and nothing I've tried has been successful to remove them, but they are very minor.

I give it a 9 because of the struggle I had with the first card I got. Sounds like another user experienced the same issue, so if you get a DV500 DVD, and experience problems with lock-up and only being able to capture a few times, check with Pinnacle and get another card.

For the money, you can't beat it!!

Comments posted by luv2fly from Other, October 25, 2002:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98? Win2K WinXP? Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 9 of 10.

work perfect as long as you do what manual say to do, must make sure you load prem first or you will have problems.capture perfect images.

Comments posted by james from Other, October 17, 2002:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98? Win2K? WinXP Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 10 of 10.

It works great with my MSI(Turbo Limitted Edition)motherboard under Win2k. No conflicts with the Via chipset either. No dropped frames (captures from Hi-8). Premiere 6.0 + Pinnacle hardware mpg2 export is way faster than TMPEG. Good quality with high Constant Bit Rates, 6MB and above. Variable bit rate function very limited (no settings), maybe it will be better under Premiere 6.5. This card would have gotten a 10 from me if the Impressions DVD SE wasn't so limitted (only 10 items in a menu). Make sure you install Premiere first and than the Pinnacle drivers.

Comments posted by Ricardo from Other, October 15, 2002:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98? Win2K WinXP? Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 9 of 10.

No comments

Comments posted by Henk from Other, October 15, 2002:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98 Win2K? WinXP? Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 10 of 10.

Works as advertised.
Old drivers or new drivers they all work.
This is a "Got to" have card if you do DVD!

Comments posted by SteveReno from Other, October 11, 2002:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98? Win2K? WinXP Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 10 of 10.

No comments

Comments posted by Pagotto from Other, September 28, 2002:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98 Win2K? WinXP Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 7 of 10.

This card works fine on Win2K and XP as long as you follow the instalation instructions. If you don't, you will be dragged through hell and back trying to get it going and will usually end up having to reformat.

For a hobbyist, this card is excellent. As soon as you start to get good at Video editing in Premiere you'll discover that this card has its limitations. You can't have more than two real time effects and as soon as you try two real time effects with a transparency layer, the rendering engines dies and you get corrupt pixels through out your film.

I have a DV500 but now want a Canopus DV Storm.

Comments posted by Fred Snerk from Other, September 12, 2002:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98? Win2K WinXP Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 7 of 10.

I actually have a DV500DVD, but it is same as
DV500 Plus, except came with a Breakout
box/panel for DV I/O, and S-video/Composite
videos both in/out. The package also included
Adobe Premier 6.02 and other very useful editing &
video conversion SW. I have had some CPU
interupt sharing conflicts (with USB), but my Tyan
(S2466N-4M) Tiger MPX-USB, Dual AMD mother
board is full-up ( 1GB RAM, RAID 0, Dual 60GB ATI
drives,sound card (Santa Cruz), Pinnacle PCI, and
added Firewire PCI card. Pinnacles TRex
Encoder/Translator does a great job converting .avi
(DV) files to MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 files, with
excellent & good video quality respectively. Happy!

Comments posted by Nahow from Other, September 07, 2002:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98? Win2K WinXP? Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 8 of 10.

Great card, cute breakout box. 1 problem i found with it, and really isen't a problem at all with windows xp, and that is it doesn't support WDW so other programs like Virtual Dub, AVI_IO do not work with it. But since it comes with adobe premiere, and i have XP there is really no problems at all since XP uses NTFS and can support big avi sizes.. Cheers Pinnacle great product!

Comments posted by Kris from Other, August 29, 2002:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98? Win2K? WinXP Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 9 of 10.

Excellent product for the price. I was requested by
my "penny-pinching" boss to pursue the possibility
of doing DVD and VCD "on-the-cheap". Ran across
the ad for the Pinnacle DV500 Plus for $600. Went
to the forums and did some research on the
product.

Installed it according to the manual and could
never get it to work on Win NT 4.0. Tried all... the
PCI bus mastering... better video card... faster
HDD... Nothing worked. It seems that Win NT has
some serious problems with multimedia (DirectX
problems to be precise). Took the card home and
installed on a Win98se PC and worked like a
charm. So installed Win2K on the suspect
system...and BAM!!! worked great.

Had nagging troubles with audio synch on some
poor VHS analog capture, but attribute it to crappy
tapes. Had initial problems with the DVD authoring
but went to the forums and got great advice from
real die-hard pros.

Comes with great software! Love Premiere, love
Impression DVD se, love Prassi PrimoDVD pro.
Not happy with the Lite version of Cleaner though. I
have the full version at home and believe me, it
kicks the lite version 9 different ways to sunday.
Recommend you use the free demo TMPEGenc for
VCD or SVCD production. Of course, full version
Cleaner 5.0 kicks TMPEGenc's butt, but it better for
a $400 price tag.

Have captured, authored, encoded, and produced
5 DVDs, 1 SVCD, 1 MPEG-2 CD and 2 VCDs. Have
no qualms about taking this to broadcast quality.

Oh yeah... don't buy Memorex DVD-R... it sucks big
green donkey schlongs. I hope this company gets
sucked down to the 7th level of Hell. TDK, Sony or
Maxell is much better

Comments posted by dricks4509@aol.com from Other, August 03, 2002:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98 Win2K WinXP? Vista? NT4 MAC? Linux? - Rated: 8 of 10.

This is an excellent card. Nothing much I can say about this. However, I would like to see the card natively supported by Sonic Foundry's Vegas Video instead of Adobe Premiere.

Comments posted by dex8472 from Other, July 25, 2002:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98 Win2K WinXP Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 9 of 10.

I gave this card a 9. For the price you get pro level editing capabilities for a great price. You do have to know your PC well to make it work. For all the tweaking and frustrations in setting it up, I didn't give it a 10. I use the 2.1 drivers now and convert for VCD & SVCD using TMPGenc with awesome results. Another user reported issues about clicks in the audio. That is a Premiere issue handling audio tracks and video tracks that result in a CPU bottleneck. The program hiccups on the audio. Force a render on the audio or export the video out and then back in over the affected area and clicks are gone. You just can't expect a two stream DV card to handle that much data without hiccups... oh unless you pay more for a card that does... The new 4.0 drivers should take care of direct export to MPEG2 with some really fast work. Still for MPEG1 export your avi's to TMPGenc and watch it go. For most video applications you will get better results with faster gear. Real Time works with ATA66 but not usually dual stream. It works with ATA100 drives until they fill up. IDE RAID and SCSI work much better. I use an IDE RAID and have never dropped frame one, ever in 3 years with this card. With these cards, I would not buy any card, like the DC10plus, because they usually aren't made for newer OS's. Video Editing requires some seriously dedicated hardware. If you aren't doing major surgery you probably won't ever even notice but doing any serious work requires serious investment and thought into what you're putting together. My caveat in this card is to check the forums and ask questions. Dells aren't popular choices to install the DV500, for instance. Some motherboards and videocards just don't work. A little research will help a lot into whatever choice you make. I for one, love my DV500 and have paid for it over and over again already.

Comments posted by Matt Sowder from Other, July 17, 2002:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98? Win2K WinXP? Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 9 of 10.

(price in Europe, for some reason these cards have to be a lot more expensive overseas)

Great card - IF you get it to work (and that's a big IF). If you don't - don't expect to get any support from Pinnacle.

There were problems with the drivers, and with the DV encoding (red stripes). The 2.x drivers make the screen become slightly lighter during every Pinnacle transition or title (extended color space bug, the 8-235 range gets translated to 0-255), but the new drivers should have taken care of that (I dunno, still use the old drivers because of sound issues - see below). Still, this bug has been present in the drivers for over a year, in a card that targets the semi professional.

The new drivers always RE-sample the sound to get rid of some rare audio sync problems with one particular Canon camera. This results in the loss of functionality of capturing the 3rd and 4th audio track. Also there are reports on the Pinnacle web board of clicks in the audio, which could be very well explained by the resampling. Not very pretty.

I do own the DV500 for 1.5 years now, but IMHO it is better to own a standard firewire card, and a D8 camera with analog in, that has RealTime AN-DV conversion for capturing analog sources (or a mini-DV camera that has this option, if you can find one). This solution is a lot cheaper, and works just as well, if not better. For pure DV capture it should work better IMHO, though I don't know which DV codec a standard firewire card uses.

The advantage of the DV500 is that Premiere is standard in the package, which is quite a good software package, but complicated as well. Disadvantage: the card ONLY works with Premiere.

My rating is 6, because it works for me, but that's about it. For the *price* I'd expect a lot more professionality from the Pinnacle driver development, because the solutions they come up with are pretty flimsy (re-sampling perfectly good audio of all cameras because of ONE camera that produces out-of-spec audio and therefore sync problems). I am annoyed by all the transitions in my older movies after I discovered (with my own eyes) the extended color space bug. If I had to do it all again, I would stay away as far as possible from any Pinnacle product, including the DV500. It was a mistake on my behalf to buy it.

However now I have it I will make the best of it, which can be done, but only because I'm an expert in computers and video work arounds.

If you read the DV500 web board that is in the link you can see all the problems that the card has - and some of the solutions, given by users, and, *very* occasionally, by Pinnacle staff.

Erwin Timmerman

Comments posted by Erwin Timmerman from Other, March 06, 2002:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98 Win2K? WinXP? Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 6 of 10.

He estado probando la DV500 en sistemas WINDOWS 98SE y en Windows ME, he tenido problemas cuando capturo un CLIP y lo guardo para que posteriormente lo convierta a MPGE1 con TMPEGeng, FlaskMPEG, algun convertidor de AVI a MPGE1 para crear un VCD.

Al Burned un CD para vrear un VCD a traves de Impresio SE no funciona en un Player de DVD.

Si alguien me puede ayudar, mi email: jsnchezruiz@hotmail.com.

Vivo en Tapachula, Chiapas México.

Comments posted by José Francisco Sánchez Ruiz from Other, March 04, 2002:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98 Win2K? WinXP? Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 7 of 10.

Hmm... What I can say? I use this card over a year.
There is two things what I can say:

1. (about the card)- For all time I using this card I didn't have any problems with capture, edit, encoding or other stuff. Great card for makin' everything except VCD's. It doesn't do low-res, but it works perfectly with hi-res. If you looking for the card for making hi-quality video with acceptable, not to high, price - DV500+ is the BEST OF THE BEST!

2. (about Pinnacle Sys.) - Thanks to them for creating and selling this product. And only one thing, that I can't forget - so much time for waiting driver for WinXP!!! More than two months for the 1st BETA driver ...

VERDICT: THE BEST SOLUTION FOR MAKING HIGH QUALITY MOVIES, DVD'S OR ELSE FOR THE VALET WITH A FREE
HALF-OF-A-GRAND OF THE "GREEN" MONEY

Comments posted by Jaffarius from Other, February 12, 2002:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98 Win2K WinXP Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 10 of 10.

Well okay. I've been using this card for about 2 years now. Getting high quality on DV-Capture isn't a big deal. But the S-Video/Composite quality is kinda unbeatable. However, the user should not be a newbie with personal computers and operating systems. Pinnacle doesn't develop their drivers the microsoft way and depending on the system configuration it might be a really hard job to get it running. But if it's running you have a state-of-the-art product at low price.

Comments posted by Patrick from Other, February 06, 2002:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98 Win2K WinXP Vista? NT4 MAC? Linux? - Rated: 9 of 10.

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Feature
What kind of main capture features it supports
Analog VideoIn = Analog composite or/and SVHS video input
Video Card = If it is a Video Card/Graphic Card
Tv Tuner = Built-In TV-Tuner
Digital TV = Built-In Digital TV-Tuner
DV/Firewire = DV/Firewire/i.Link input
DV Converter = Analog composite or/and SVHS video input and converts to DV video
MPEG1 hardware = Capture directly MPEG1(VCD) video using hardware*
MPEG2 hardware = Capture directly MPEG2(SVCD and DVD) video using hardware*
MJPEG hardware = Capture directly to MJPEG using hardware*
MPEG4 hardware = Capture directly to MPEG4(DivX,Xvid) video using hardware*
* = Most capture cards can capture to this format using software but it usually requires a very fast computer, if it supports realtime capturing it uses the capture cards hardware and it doesn't require a very fast computer and you may get better quality but less options/settings than software capturing.

Compatibility
What Operating System our users have reported that it works on, Win95=Works ~~Win95~~=Does not work Win95?=Not tested This is user based.

Cnx = Connection
What type of connection the capture device has to the computer, PCI, AGP, USB1/1.1/2, DV or PCMCIA.

Price
The price in US dollar.

Rating
The first rating is based on a weighted rank (the true Bayesian), it requires at least 5 votes to get a weighted rating.
The second rating between the ( ) is a normal average rating.

Comment
User comments, click on view to view them or add to post a own comment.

We can not gurantee that this list is 100% correct. Don't forget to read the User Comments for more Info about each Capture card. If you find any features that are not correct contact us instead of posting a comment about it.