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I upgraded to Studio 9 several weeks ago and used it to render a large project. I took over 15 hours of event video and reduced it to a 1 hour DVD. I'm working on a Dell 1.5Ghz Workstation, with 256Meg of RAM (more on order), and 300+Gigabytes of disk storage.
Here was my experience.
No problems with installation. It uninstalled Studio 8 and reinstalled Studio 9 without a hitch. I then downloaded the 9.0.2 upgrade and update without any issues.
I was able to capture some 15 hours of raw video (about 17 13Gigabyte AVI files) without any problems. The video came from both Digital 8 and Mini-DV cameras both of which Studio 9 handled well. I really liked the record in reduced mode option which was a nice way to reduce disk usage. Working with this many files and data was no problem for Studio 9. I jumped around between the files and sucessfully built the storyboard. I ended up with around 240 clips and transistions in the final video. Towards the end things got really sluggish, especially when editing audio, and I would have to patiently wait for Studio 9 to "do it's thing" before adding or editing the next clip but it never hung or core dumped. However, I did find myself just quiting the program on occasion to clean up memory and speed things up a bit.
Where I did find real problems was in the Effects area, both audio and visual. I tried to use the Stabalize effect on some jerky video and had some initial success. When I then tried to apply it across numerous jerky shots it actually made the video considerably worse. And it was a cumulative effect. The more shots that were sequenced together the worse the effect was. I removed that effect on most of the shots and used it sparingly on the worse offenders and that worked ok.
In the audio effects I had a similiar experience. I had a whole string of outdoor shots with people and lots of wind noise. I tried using the Wind reduction effect on a single clip and it reduced wind sound. So then I applied it to the entire 20 shot sequence. Bad idea. Now I can't render the movie. Each time it gets into that section Studio 9 stops rendering. It doesn't freeze Studio 9 it just stops rendering - sitting on the same frame for hours. I am able to kill the render but each time I retry it does the same thing. I finally suspect that it is the Noise reduction code, remove it from the 20 shot sequence and everything now renders fine.
I did find one area that will hang up Studi 9 every time. That was in selecting effects. If I looked at several effects (like stabalise, B&W video, fun effect, etc) in sequence, looking for that "right" effect for a shot, it would hang Studio 9 every time. I learned to never look at more than two effects in sequence before exiting the effects area. Eventually I knew what effect Studio 9 had and then could just go straight to the desired effect and apply it to a scene. This worked with no problems.
Last area of frustration was mentioned already by another reviewer - adding CD Music. I finally figured out the correct sequence for making it work but only after several hours of frustration. It defaults to placing all CD Music inserts to the front of the timeline even though you started with the cursor on the time tick where you want the music to go. The secret is to reset the cursor to the desired input frame immediatly before hitting the add-music button. Then it will work elsewise it stuffs the music at the head of timeline. WIth a big project this becomes a major nuisance to drag the music back to the correct time mark.
Those were the four big issues I had, none of which stopped me in my tracks. I have not reported these to Studio 9 support yet because, given my experience from 8.0, their answer will be "reload the software" or some other completly meaningless answer.
My overall evaluation is positive and I will continue to work with it though I look anxiously for the 9.1 upgrade. It makes working with video and audio clips very easy. We were able to pull off some pretty fancy tricks with this software.
It does have a lot of power for a $100 software package and in the end it worked well for me.
P.S. SInce this orginal post I've had Out of Sync errors with my project which I'm still struggling with.
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