Pinnacle Studio 9, Hate it Help........
 

Hello,
I have Pinnacle Studio 9 AVDV Deluxe. I hate it, :-(. It crashes all the time. And I dont have time to waste going around these problems all the time.

Anyone have any suggestions to another editing program that I can purchase that has pretty much the same effect features, and that is atleast easy to use? I'm not too farmiliar with any other editing software.

Please let me know and also approx prices, I want to stay under 350.00 total.

I have a brand new dell 8600 with tons of memory etc so the computer is new.

I appreciate your help.

If you qualify for academic pricing, Vegas and Premiere should be within your price range.

Otherwise I can think of:
Windows Movie Maker
Screenblast (Vegas' little brother. I have never tried it, although Vegas is pretty stable and has little configuration problems compared to other NLEs.)

Nothing is as easy to use. There will be an upgrade path to Liquid Edition 6 soon. I switched to Edition 4.5 during Studio 8 days and am now at Liquid Edition 5.5. The Studio upgrade to Liquid may be in your price range. The effects and plug-ins will be very familiar and LE 6 will import Studio projects.

I assume you are running the latest version of Studio. What operation is it crashing with?

I want to put CD Music on it, It crashes, and When I want to move a clip It says Operation Failed. I had this problem in the past. I have the newest version of Pinnacle.

Question on Upgrading for $299 to Liquid Edition 5.5. What is the difference? Will I have any more problems? I understand there will never be no problems. Is there alot more effects with liquid edition? Are there CD Menues as well?

I found an issue with MP3s causing a crash and the latest version is supposed to fix that. But! It appears to be a known problem as you describe and there is a workaround listed in this thread. http://webboard.pinnaclesys.com/read...hread=51&lng=1 Rip the tracks you want and then use them from your hard drive. That is probably the workaround you are already doing.

LE 5.5 is a little older than S9. There are some effects that it does not have (old film, stabilize, VST plug-ins). But it does have a new time warp (but not audio - that is in LE6 though). I know if you buy 5.5 now, you get the $49 upgrade path. Not sure that applies to the S9 to 5.5 upgrade. You could post in the Professional board and ask. The PCLE guys are starting to hang out with the new version just around the corner and could possibly answer. The LE 5.5 upgrade is going to be $199 or $49 if you bought it between Sept 9th and release.

The interface is different. The goal is the same, but the task orientation is different. I have heard that it is similar to Avid. I don't use Avid, so would not know. Some complain it is difficult, but it just is more overwhelming. After working with animation software, NLEs are easy. ;)

I can say that I have never lost something through a crash. I have had it crash before, but that is about once every 3-4 weeks when I am busy. The system save is once every 30th of a second. I have accidentally deleted media, but it told me I was going to do that and I ignored it ;)

There are DVD menus, about 40 with some nices ones. The menu creation is rather basic like a consumer package. Waiting to see what LE 6 has before I decide if I am going to spend $200 on DVD-Lab Pro. Probably will get DVD-Lab anyway (supports 16:9 and 4:3 on the same DVD).

As far as effects go, yes, more. Picture in Picture is a biggy for me. I used a split screen of a wide-angle of a football field in the bottom of a video of the marching band's performance. You could see the closer material I shot across most of the screen and the wide-angle view, only about 80 lines in height, on the bottom. It took about 15 minutes to generate the merge (I have a dual xeon 3.06) for a 6 minute clip. I then burned it to a single button menued DVD in about another 10.

I have also used auto color correction, chroma-keying, and even used lense flare, transparency, another lense flare, and audio effects to generate a Star Trek transporter effect for last year's band video.

Check out Vegas Movie Studio - it's "almost" Vegas 4 + DVD for around $99.00