| User review:
|
If a software program came with the capture card (in my case it's ATI AIW 9700 Pro), one would hope that it's been optimized to function seamlessly with the hardware. It didn't take long for that hope to be trampled, however.
First there was this annoying delay whenever a clip got imported into a project. I discovered that I had to do a coarse scroll across the entire hourlong MPEG2 clip (and endure about a half-dozen delays lasting a total of five to ten minutes) before the clip was ready for editing. This immediately put doubts into my mind as to whether the folks at Pinnacle even tested its "Special ATI Version" of Studio 8 with the hardware it came with.
Then came my biggest gripe with the software. Every now and then sharp audio spikes could be heard on the finished DVDs. (I will share another horror story with this part a little bit later). So I went back and replayed the original MPEG2 clips on Studio, and sure enough, spikes were heard on the same frames as the DVDs. The ironic thing is that I played the same clips on other multimedia players (WMP, WinDVD, PowerDVD, and other DVD authoring software) without hearing those spikes on any of them. So what I ended up having to do was re-capture a small MPEG2 clip around the audio blip, then "patch" it on to the larger clip, then re-produce the project. Again, why was I having this problem with ONLY the software that the friggin hardware came with?
And then we come to the actual DVD burning. First of all, it takes about eight hours to render a two-hour project onto the hard disk, EVEN IF the original clips are already DVD-compliant. And after burning a disc and playing it on several standalone DVD players, I found that the rewind and fast-forward buttons cause the disk to freeze. The disc is still playable, if you plan on watching the whole movie without using the REW/FF buttons. (I should also mention, however, that the REW/FF functions worked properly for WinDVD and PowerDVD.)
The bottom line: it gets the lowest overall score, taking into account that this piece-of-junk software came with the hardware, and Pinnacle had the audacity to embed the "ATI" brand onto its intro flash. |
