| User review:
|
The following is based on my experiences with the earlier Studio 7.x, but I suspect that Pinnacle has changes neither the program nor its attitude towards its customer base, so I believe that the following applies to this version as well.
I originally bought S7 because of its function to actually display waveforms and to shift the video and/or audio tracks independently of each other. I wanted to get into creating music videos out of found footage and music, but I soon found out that that would be impossible because after I installed S7 on my Win98 machine, the Studio DC10plus card I was using started dropping frames left and right--something it only rarely did with the supplied capture program.
In addition, whenever I rendered a project, it seemed as if it was adding frames to it in order to keep the audio in sync, which produced a stuttering effect in the audio.
The problems only worsened once I switched to XP, only now there was the added problem of drifting audio sync. By the end of a 60-minute program, it began to look like a dubbed Hong Kong movie (with better picture quality, natch :)). That's when I discovered the other problem with Pinnacle Studio 7--Pinnacle itself. Their entire attitude towards users who are all having the same problem seems to be "I'm okay, you're the one that's screwy, pal," and they swear up and down that they have not encountered the problems that over half the board are complaining about and that they have no intention of fixing them.
That's why I ended up yanking the DC10plus out of my computer and replacing it with the AIW Radeon 8500DV, which came with Ulead VS6 (which I also loathe for its poor MPEG-2 quality).
I will never buy another Pinnacle product (and that includes Cubase, too!) until they change their attitude towards their user base and actually start listening to their complaints and doing something about them. Hint to Pinnacle: Hundreds of users complaining about the exact same problem is not a shared delusion--it's a software bug! Fix it! |
