I originally purchased Pinnacle Studio version 8 based on the strength of its magazine reviews which praised its combination of power and spectacular ease of use, so I have been using the product for a couple of years now.  I recently upgraded to version 9 in the vain hope that  it would be more reliable, and because I wanted to be able to edit 16x9 video.  So far, despite a few bright spots,  it has been a disappointment.

The Hardware

Lest the naysayers tell me it's my hardware's fault, let me tell you about my system.  It is a 1.8GHz Pentium IV with 512M ram and 240G of disk space running Windows XP Professional and an nVidia GeForce 4Ti video card.  I run a software development company with it, and it runs every day and never crashes, acts up or slows down.  Except when Studio is running.  I have a Pinnacle firewire adaptor and a Sony MiniDV camera which I use with it, so my entire editing path is digital.

The Good

Pinnacle Studio is remarkably easy to get up to speed with.  It comes with a straightforward tutorial, and everything from video capture, to editing, to output to tape, disk, or web is very easy to do with friendly graphics onscreen to help you along. 

Studio comes with a good variety of sound effects, transitions, menus, DVD animated menus, and other premade content that you can quickly customize to your needs (one CD and one DVD worth!)  Putting together your first professional looking video complete with titles, voiceover and anything else your heart desires, will take only a matter of minutes.

Studio 9 introduces support for 16x9 anamorphic editing including titles and menus supporting widescreen media.  This was the reason I purchased the product.  If you are looking to make widescreen DVD's or video tapes, Studio will do it for you.  More on this in a minute.

Also new in Studio 9 is support for Dolby Pro Logic surround sound.  This allows you to put sound effects or your main audio track on the surround channel if your TV has a Dolby Pro Logic decoder.  Note that this is not Dolby Digital 5.1 audio.  Pro Logic is an encoding standard that adds a center and a surround channel to a standard stereo signal.

Studio now features automatic music generation.  This is really slick for someone looking to add music to their productions.  Studio can make music to any length, it comes in a number of genres with several pieces each, and it actually sounds quite good.

Studio has also jumped on the bandwagon of automatic editing.  Give it your footage and it will put together a video with titles and music for you, completely automatically.  I can't say I've had any interest to try this feature.

Likely the most important improvement in Studio 9, are all the new audio and video plugins.  These allow you to do color correction, clean up poor video, or even make the video look like old film complete with scratches.  The color correction filter alone is worth the price of the upgrade.  I used it on my first project with Studio 9 to match the color of videos shot by two different cameras at the same event.  In the end, you couldn't tell which was which.

The Bad

Pinnacle suffers from stability problems.  I've used a lot of different software over the years, and Studio crashes and spits out more random error messages than any application I've ever had the misfortune to use.  It beats them hands down.  It disappears.  It runs for 18 hours on a render that should complete in minutes and then hangs.  You will tear your hair out.

Most of the really frustrating problems I have encountered have to do with rendering, the process where your edited video, titles, and so on are put together to produce the final output, either on tape, on disk, or as a computer video file.  The main reason for the frustration is that this process takes hours and hours, and often the program will work if you simply do the exact same render over again a second (or third or fourth) time.  But oftentimes not, and you have to re-edit, or completely rebuild a project, doing "something" different to get it to render.  The crashes during editing are much less frustrating, since you learn to save early and save often so you only ever lose a few minutes work to crashes.

Studio 8 suffered from hangs during the rendering process.  It would simply stop working, the program still responded to commands, but the rendering progress bar stopped moving.  This often happened in the same spot over and over, but not always.

Studio 9 has improved the situation by reporting error messages that don't make much sense , but at least the new version is keeping you apprised of the situation when it f**** up. 

My biggest disappointment with Studio 9 is that it still doesn't include the feature I purchased the product for based on the promotional material.  It said I would be able to edit and output videos from 16x9 widescreen material.  I thought that meant it could output 16x9 to any of DVD, Video tape, and web files.  As it turns out,  it won't output any web-compatible format in that mode.  In fact, if you create a 16x9 project, and output it using either Real or WMV, it will squish everything into the 4x3 format of a regular TV.  Contacting Pinnacle technical support about the aspect ratio of the output videos got me a response stating that the resolution for web video formats was too low for 16x9 video.  HUH?  I've since found a workaround for Windows media, however Studio crashes even more often when I use it.

Studio 9 also has severe difficulties with its DVD burning software.  Many users on the forums are reporting that DVD-RW media, which are supposed to be erasable, are being destroyed by Studio at a cost of a couple bucks per disk.  Many more are simply finding that they either can't get to the point where they can burn the disk, or when they do, it results in a coaster.  A lot of people have turned to external burning software like Nero, which I feel sort of defeats the purpose of having disk burning included.  Unfortunately this is typical of the sort of workarounds you have to do to get the job done with Studio.

Another feature I have never been able to use is their "Hardware Acceleration" feature which is supposed to speed rendering by using your video card's hardware.  When I tried it with my nVidia GeForce 4Ti running the latest drivers, it hung the machine solid.  I don't know how many GeForce 4Ti cards nVidia sold, but it was likely a lot.  I've played a lot of games with this card and never had a problem.  Studio - problem.

Lastly, Studio is limited to the size of screen it will run on.  If you are running your desktop at a resolution that Studio doesn't support, it won't fill the screen.  For a year I squinted at Studio 8 at its maximum 1024x768 resolution on my 1600x1200 desktop.  Pinnacle 9 allows up to 1600x1200 desktops, but still maintains the fixed screen sizes of its predecessor.

Conclusion

Pinnacle Studio is an amazingly easy application to use for video editing.  The tools are intuitive and there is a surprising amount of power in the application once you start to dig into it.  I really like it a lot when it works. 

That said, it really suffers from its unreliability.  There are lots of people who praise the product, but I have to conclude that they don't actually use it much.  Pretty much every project I have done has required one or more fixes or workarounds from Pinnacle to get them working.  As I write this, Studio is trying for the third time to render a DVD I put together this week (at 6 hours per try), each time generating a new and more entertaining error message.

I have eight different versions of the software I've tried over the last couple years.  None of them has been trouble-free.  Studio 9 is on its third release, and still has an assortment of significant problems affecting a lot of people.

Before you even consider buying, spend some time on Pinnacle's user forums, trust me, you're going to be spending a lot of time there if you do purchase it.  The people there are mostly helpful, although some tend to rant that the product is much better than it is, and that if you're having problems, that you must be doing something wrong.