I have been using Pinnacle Studio for a few years now and have advanced quite a bit since I first started. I found it easy to use compared to say, Movie Magix (which had some real bells and whistles but was much harder), so for the most part I stayed with Pinnacle.

About the hangups..... yes, the hangups!!!!

After changing my registry to disable Dr. Watson which caused severe problems with Pinnacle (because Pinnacle totally hates some types of AVI files), I was finally able to get it to render but it hangs during the 2nd part of the rendering just before it burns. Is this a memory problem?

Pinnacle is a great educational program for beginners who want to make tiny movies with maybe 50 pictures or so, but after undergoing my toughest project of all with about 300 pictures, 20 AVI files plus sound clips and music, only to learn it seemed too complex for Pinnacle to handle, I wouldn't recommend it for more advanced users.

There's no point where a program could hang up that could be worse than AFTER you have completed the entire project! This project took nearly a year to complete and now it's all down the drain!

I was so desperate to solve the problem that I was ready to reformat my entire computer and buy more memory -- maybe even a new drive, thinking it was my own computer, so thank you very much for your extremely helpful reviews everyone!

I am giving Pinnacle 3 points only because it's a good educational "starter" program.

Please note that I'm rating an older home version here (Studio 9) but I see some of you are having troubles with later home versions as well. Can't remember what I paid for it. Under $100 I think.

I desperately need to upgrade to a middle-of-the-road program but don't know which to buy. Do I dare move to the Pinnacle Professional version with such a serious problem in the home version?

Please, software designers, there's such a desperate need for a movie program that's somewhere
(1) between home and professional
(2) something that's as easy to use as Pinnacle and
(3) comes with nice transitions,
(4) but unlike Pinnacle, will handle all kinds of AVI files and more complex files
(5) without hanging during the 2nd part of the rendering
just before it burns!

Please also give us
(6) something affordable. $700 price ranges are far too high for the average home user!

I would not recommend this to anyone, anybody thinking about buying this needs to stop NOW. Don't waste your money. All this software is good for is headaches and frustration. Pinnacle Blows!!!!!!

Guess what. The story hasn't changed for Studio 10 or Studio 11.

Be very careful about buying this product. Investigate all the complaints on various reviews including Pinnacle's own forum site before making a decision, where you may not get your money back.

http://forums.pinnaclesys.com/forums/thread/158746. aspx

The first time I tested the program it worked great. I wasn't making a grand project, just "learning" how to capture and burn to DVD. With about a minute long clip captured, the auto burning process worked fine. I then tried again trying to capture off of an HD DVR Direct TV receiver that I had kids programs on. Well after the program loaded and I checked the settings I clicked on the Capture button. BAM A error report comes up and asks for a bug submission. After that a memory error popped up behind the first error report. I closed down, checked the settings again, and tried again. I did this a grand total of 10 times including a reboot. I defraged the harddrive and found a setting in the capture set up to enable hardware acceleration. I clicked this on. Bam, it is now capturing as I write this. However, I will be doing no editing or story board work, just DVD burns for a vacation trip.
After reading the above comments, I can agree with them in my simple experience with this program. My system is a P-4 400, 1 gig of ram, ATI 800XL, and a 180 gig 7200rpm HD. Pinnacle pretty much sucks. Do not waste your money on it.

Worst software and WORST software company I have ever dealt with. I never got the program running right because their support is non-existant. If they spent 1/2 as much money on support as they do advertising they probably would be OK. I will never - and I mean NEVER - buy a pinnacle product again. There should be laws that force companies to at least support the garbage that they put out!

most terrible video editing software. rendering is a pain. Buyers beware, it's a waste of money.

Extremely frustrating program. Crashes and freezes all the time. Have been trying to edit the same video for the last 4 weeks and have gotten no where! It also does not seem to work with other movie editing programs. Studio support tried to help, but after many many hours on the phone with them I am no farther along! Stay Away!!

I have Dazzle 120, which was expensive and does not work. I have tried to instal it on three computers running Xp Pro and XP home. Once it worked, 500 times it crashed. The patch does nothing, there is no support and the hardware will not allow other better programs to use it. Avoid it at all costs. I shall also forever avoid Studio 9, Pinnacle and the whole shebang.

Version 9.4.3 of this software always locks up when trying to render a DVD or other video files. I'd highly advise anyone thinking of buying it to look elsewhere.

what a load of crap, had this program for 12 months and only managed to complete 1 project.And that was only 22 mins long.

Worst, most frustrating experience I've ever had with a program: Studio9-where's my refund?

I want to bump this up a little. It's not all that bad. The only true professional software in this class is Adobe Premiere Pro, which seems unusually missing in this review. It's for true professionals and at every TV Network and local stations. It's a $700 product and was $1,000 when it first came out. I can't say that I was at a "proficient" level with it, but I was getting there. It was and is a very difficult product to learn... especially if you want to use all or most features. The reason I'm touting Premiere is that this Pinnacle Studio 9 is the only one that I see in this group that comes close to the "way it is done" in Premiere. Nope, it doesn't even come close but it is highly productive and uses similar timelines and transition behaviors. There are, what I call, two modes of this software. One is the very simple mode that makes it behave like the quick capture-and-make software and the other mode is very similar to Premiere. It seems that the designers at Pinnacle wasn't really sure who their target audience was and just added both. This adds an element of confusion that is unnecessary. This really isn't production software (even if it didn't crash) for a studio but would work fine for the wedding video professional. Especially wedding since you can duplicate the behavior that you would want from one wedding to the next (e.g., "your style"). There are a few gotchas until you learn this software well. Some of the first things that you will realize is how it handles the audio. Although there are different "tracks" you will first assume that each one is made for a particular purpose. It is to some extent but everything can be worked around where you have three separate tracks. The audio editing falls way short. With all that said, I agree with the rest of the comments 110%. The software absolutely sucks as far as reliability. It crashes all the time. You must continually save to protect yourself and many times a "reboot" is the only solution to continue with your project. There never seems to be a rhyme or reason when the crash will happen. I'm one of the few that was determined to put up with the crashes to get far enough along to see how closely it emulates Premiere. It is no high end solution but it does do things fast with a higher quality than usual solution. I find myself always starting with Pinnacle and if the project takes longer than a couple of hours then most likely I'll get fed up with the crashes and find myself over on Premiere inching along at a snail's pace with no (should say, little) surprises. Although the software is buggy and I think the programmers are working on top of a foundation that can never be patched, there is a neat little marketing feature to the software. When you select an advanced option, you'll be taken to a website "selling" this option that will be automatically installed real-time if you pay online. Normally this would be and extreme irritation but when you purchase one of these (I think one is free) and see how much power it adds to the program, then it is not all that bad of trade off. The marketing concept is "If you don't use that feature, then you don't have to pay for it." It will still turn off many unless they have paid $1,000 in the past for an "all frills" product and think $15 added to $50 software ain't much. With all that said, I'd say avoid this software as the learning curve is much extended due to the constantly crashing software.

Add me to the list... started using version 8 and have patched and upgraded through 9.4.3. Finally threw it out. Between the software crashing while creating simple photo albums, and crashing during rendering, and now, it gives capturing errors, claiming "aspect ratio changes" (even though three other software capture programs have no trouble). In the years I have worked with Pinnacle, I have only completed a couple of the projects I have started. The software looks great and is easy to use... but if you actually want to finish a project, be prepared for rendering problems and DVD burning problems like you cannot imagine.

I also bought the Dazzle 150 package with the Pinnacle 9 software. The hardware portion worked fairly well, but the colors did not come in well from my digital camcorder (Sony). The same tape burned good DVD's on my Phillips DVD player/burner. Many of the same problems listed in other reviews. I liked the editing software, but could NOT burn a DVD. Most of the time it would fail to render a complete video. Finally took the entire package back for a refund.

I must agree I have used pinnacle studio 7/8 and now have 9 pro, this also hangs up after a rendering a movie which I have used in previous versions, a 30 min video renders for abour an hour then hangs up, this is using 9.4.3 IT IS USELESS

I bought a Dazzle 150 analog video capture device and it came with Pinnacle Studio 9.3 SE. Capturing from the device was a breeze. I didn't encounter any problems and the quality was quite good. Things started to look pretty bad when I started editing, however. At first, by adding a few existing MPEG-1 files to my storyboard, I was able to produce somewhat of a movie and with transitions in between. However, once I got to about 20 clips, my system started getting bogged down performance wise. Anything I did in Studio 9 took about 5 minutes to accomplish - and I mean anything! From a keystroke to a mouse click, every single input action I gave Studio 9 took forever to complete. What was Studio 9 doing? Who knows! I did some research on the Internet and found a suggestion someone made regarding turning off background rendering, so I did. I still had the same problem. Everything I did took forever for Studio 9 to process. It's not like I told it to make the movie, I was simply doing things like inserting transitions, moving a clip from one position in the storyboard to another, and simply clicking on an existing storyboard clip. After about the 25th video clip, Studio 9 now took about 30 minutes to do any little thing. It's not like I have an old, slow system either. I have a P4 3.0GHz hyperthreaded, 1GB DDR400 RAM, 120GB SATA HD, ATI Radeon 128MB video card, Windows XP Professional system! Now that's pretty fast! There should be no reason for Studio 9 to have to take 30 minutes to do something in response to a simple mouse click on an existing storyboard video clip! So, in an effort to resolve this issue, I decided to go to Pinnacle's website and see if there were any patches available for download. There was: version 9.3.5. So, I downloaded it and installed it. Now, the program wouldn't start! It gave me a 'DLLMain entry point' error! Can you believe that? The patch made things worse! After reading some FAQs at Pinnacle's site regarding this issue, I did what they told me to do: 1) uninstall Studio 9, 2) remove the entire application directory from disk, 3) remove anything running from the background in memory (such as antivirus programs, anti-spyware, unnecessary services, etc.), 4) re-install Studio 9, and then 5) re-apply the patch. After going through steps 1 through 4, I was able to get the unpatched version of Studio 9 running. However, after installing the patch once again, I got the same 'DLLMain entry point' error! I still could not start Studio 9.3.5! I should've left it unpatched. At least it would've worked period! So, I decided to reformat my entire hard drive, re-install Windows XP and then re-install Studio 9. I planned on only having Windows XP and Studio 9 on my system. After installing both Windows XP and Studio 9 on my system, I had a working version of Studio 9 running. So, I decided to try out, once more, the patch. This time the patch worked! I had to completely re-install my operating system in order to get this patch to work with my OS! What a nightmare! So, I created my project again from scratch. I added some video clips and some transitions. After about the 20th video clip, which are each only about 5 minutes in length, Studio 9 started to creep. It started getting slower and slower! After about the 25th video clip added to my storyboard, I decided to give up! This is not worth the time and frustration! I took my Dazzle 150 and Studio 9 package back to the store for a FULL refund (after carefully re-packaging the box like it was new)! I will NEVER buy another Pinnacle product again! Their software is completely useless, poorly developed and obviously poorly tested. Instead, I bought a firewire card and converter and Intervideo's WinDVD Creator and ULead's VideoStudio software. Both ran just fine on my system. I didn't experience ANY slowness (unless of course it was time to make the movie) during my editing phase of using both programs, adding video clips to the storyboard didn't take 30 minutes to complete and simply clicking and keyboard actions didn't take 15 minutes to accomplish! These are really good programs that are fast, have great quality and WORK! Pinnacle's Studio 9 is the worst software I've ever encountered! You've been warned - DO NOT BUY THIS PRODUCT! Note: the Dazzle 150 device itself was great, it was Studio 9 that was the problem. Oh yeah, another point, the Dazzle 150 can only be used with Pinnacle software - you can't use it with other video editing software such as WinDVD and VideoStudio!

I never got past the opening splash screen. Computer hangs up!!!!