Pinnacle Systems Studio AV/DV 9

Upon reading the support forums on the Pinnacle website, I came upon several users with the exact same problem. I tried solutions suggested such as cleaning the registry, defragmenting the hard drive, installing patches, several re-boots, switching the PCI card, IRQ settings, upgrading drivers etc. None of this will work, this software is plain poorly designed. Don't waste your time on this product since I am a programmer by trade and know exactly what I am doing with my computer.

Avoid this product at all cost. One example of poor product design is that the Studio 9 software does not come with an Uninstaller - so you cannot do a clean uninstall. The patches you download from the Pinnacle site will install but do nothing to improve the situation. And guess what? No uninstall facility for them too.

I think this product could use a 'Zero' star rating if there was one.


SETUP learning curve but beats anything in simplicity   May 17, 2004
P. Wilken (Ypsilanti, MI United States)
Been using the product since almost first inception. This version installed much more easily. Best advice: Find other users in your neighborhood/church/workplace. ASK! There are many of us around! Having a mini-forum locally is dynamite for solving those little buggers of problems that crop up.
I videotape and burn onto 2-6 DVDs a week and love to do WMVs with it!


Good Product, Bad Tech Support, Marginal Manual   April 23, 2004
Ray Barrington (Richardson, Texas United States)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful

I have to say that the product does work. In fact, it works pretty well, but because the manual doesn't really cover a lot of the basic problems in setting up the card and the program, I recommend caution in buying this product. If you have computer knowledge and certain degree of perseverance, this is for you. If you get intimidated by changing windows system settings, monkeying around in your device manager and cleaning your registry, you might want to think twice.

On the plus side, the firewire capture worked very well the first time and its pretty easy to do. The analog capture is more difficult to get figured out, but it works well too once you're set up correctly. You'd better have a lot of hard drive space - like an extra 20 gig for a 90 minute video.

I had to contact technical support on a couple of relatively minor issues and found out that technical support is pretty bad. You can get support via email (you need to have your serial number handy to do this). I don't recommend going this route, however, because it's a 24 hour turn-around for each question and response. And the responses are awful -- just quotes from the manual. "Make sure all background programs are closed." "Make sure your chipset drivers are updated." "Make sure you defrag your hard drive..." It goes on and on. And they won't give you a substantive answer until you promise you have done all of the "stock" things that the manual already tells you to do. I'm on day 4 with email tech support over a green line that showed up on one of my captured videos. The tech support person keeps giving me one more little "task" to do before he will address the issue of why there is a line on one video capture but not others. Email support is abysmal in its helpfulness.

Telephone support, on the other hand, isn't bad. I would like to give you the technical support telephone number, but its against Amazon's rules. That's a shame, I could have saved you 20 minutes because that's how long it will take you to find it. From what I can tell you get your first call free and they want $30 for all subsequent calls. Ouch! That hurts, especially when the manual doesn't tell you how to actually capture video using the S-video connector. (You've got to make a change to a setting at an odd place in the software and its not addressed in the manual or in the help file that comes with the product.)

My bottom line is that the product works, but you have to be ready to take your lumps on the technical support side. I've transferred a couple of home videos from MiniDV format as well as a kid's vhs tape for use as a svcd. I'm happy with both. Now that I'm past the initial learning curve, I hope I can enjoy the product more. If you're the faint of heart type or don't have a bunch of computer experience, this product is probably not for you. Once its up and running you're fine, but there is a lot of "tweaking" required to get to that point and you can't expect much help from Pinnacle.