How does Pinnacle stack up?
 

I have a Sony HDR-SR1 and it came with Pinnacle Studio. I'm wondering how this stacks up with regards to video editing compared to other products. I don't intend to do a lot of editing but eventually, I'd like to be able to splice some videos together and make HD DVDs or standard DVDs.

Is this an adequate product or are there better options at similar prices?

I'll jump in - google pinnacle studio together with key words such as crash or problem and see what comes back, also check the pinnacle forum. Pinnacle ever since the past few versions has been known to have stability issues, which can be challenging in the middle of a project. Search for other entry level editors, e.g. ulead, vegas studio, or other similar. Even if the pinnacle is free, if you start a proj. then can't finish it or have a lot of trouble, it can be frustrating. Search this board..there was a recent thread on somthing exactly like this.

Michael:

I have Pinnacle 10 plus on my system and it does HDV. I also have Premiere Pro 2.0 and Vegas 7. Sometimes if I want to turn out a quick and dirty DVD, I will go to Pinnacle. I have followed Pinnacles for years, use their editing boards, and used Studio 6 throught 10.

I haven't had horrible problems. A glitch from time to time. But finished many projects...

What Dave said is not true for everyone. Some folks have no issues with Studio. Version 10.7x is now out and it has bugfixes and will write HD to DVD for playback on a HD-DVD player.

Ulead and Vegas are also good products.

PS - I use Avid Liquid full time now and stopped using Studio with version 9.4 as all it does is in Liquid. Studio 10 was a complete rewrite (think version 1.0) based on the Liquid engine. Studio 10.0/10.1 did have issues.

very true and good point.

it only gets a little risky if you invest a lot of time in a project and then find some software quirk at the end that won't let you finish your project after you've sunk a lot of time in..you then can spend more time than you want troubleshooting the software, re-install, etc. which gets frustrating.

Hopefully the code base is better, but it seems that the QA process they have (whatever it is) gets way overshadowed by whoever is making the decisions on when the code should ship. So, if that process hasn't changed, then it could yield similar results (software quirks or bugs).

people do use it and some people have no troubles with it, and it's ease of use is certainly very appealing.

As I said, I have used it regularly, including Pinnacle 10 Plus. In fact I am doing a project now in SD that I am actually editing in Premiere from HDV because it has better editing tools, and color correction capabilities. When I render the project to SD, I will actually make my DVD output in Pinnacle 10 plus. I think the biggest strength of Pinnacle is the DVD authoring program which provides you with a pretty decent process of getting to a decent looking DVD without a lot of hassle...