Sky's the Limit Video Editing: Pinnacle Studio 9

How About Stability?

We have long been awaiting Version 9. Many patches were needed to give Version 8 the appearance of stability. Sound editing, inserting photos and long sequences caused the most problems. Crashes were frequent or even constant. Even in the latest version, inserting photos into a 30 minute movie was a challenge.

Pinnacle's comment about this was that Studio is not made for long movies, and I agree. I wouldn't advise anyone to try projects of more than 20 minutes' length. But in the case of a DVD, you always want to compile films with DVD menus, and to do that you have to create long films.

The Version 9 Beta that we tested immediately exhibited an exemplary stability, particularly with long films. Crashes occur significantly less often and can be avoided. So that you don't have to wait too long for every modification with films more than 30 minutes long, you will need a fast processor (2.4 GHz or higher) and two partitioned hard drives, in order to compensate for the low IDE access speed.

However, Pinnacle Studio is not the only program that leaves you wishing for SCSI with heavy-duty projects, which no longer exist in computers for consumer use.

The two disks should not be too heavily fragmented, and should naturally run at 7200 rpm. The system disk is used for the swap file, and this is the one on which the program is installed too. Transfer and editing are done on the second disk. Once the DVD menus have been generated, you should not make any more changes to the film - and bear in mind that necessary changes should be made in the course of editing. You need to avoid waiting until the very end to edit the entire soundtrack.

Any crashes that still occur happen with the same neuralgic actions. So don't insert any big photos of more than 1024 pixels and remember that the software may crash if real-time effects that occur in the soundtrack one after another are added. That is, incidentally, not a big deal; you just need to save regularly. I never lost anything, and in the worst case you will only need to restart the computer. Overall, Studio runs robustly if you have a powerful computer, which would be more than just nice to have for video editing in any case.