Pinnacle DV 500 (who rates it?)
 

I have located a store near me that has a software called "Pinnacle 500" DV editing software which comes with some hardware in the box too.

Anybody rate it?

It is going to cost about $1000 USD!

I will be using it with my Canon xl1s.

Thanks

I was just researching the same thing, here are some reviews:

http://www.videoguys.com/dv500DVDreview.html
http://www.computervideo.net/sep02-1.html

I have been using the DV500 since it was first released back in early 2000. It is a capable bit of hardware but not for someone who wants just plug and play. This card requires quite an bit of understanding of manually assigning IRQs as well as some trial and error when it comes to slot placement. It is also quite choosy when it come to what hardware it will share it's toys with. THis is not a card to buy and just stick in your machine an fire up. THis is a card that you build a machine around from the ground up, paying careful attention to matching components like motherboards, sound cards and graphics cards.

It comes bundled with a couple of different NLE apps. One is the DV500 DVD, it comes with Premiere 6.x as well as Minerva Impression DVD Pro. The other is the Edition DV500 which comes with Pinnacle's own Edition DV NLE software. Edition is more capable than Premiere but also more expensive.

Over the years I have had trouble with the DV500 drivers but they seem to have it sorted out. The hardware in the box is a capature card with a breakout box. It gives you two IEEE1394 Firewire ports on the and one on the front of the card. The breakout box has RCA audio in/out and composite and s-video in/out. You can connect a monitor to it for realtime preview of you project. The realtime performance is limited to clips in the timeline, some effects and only the Pinnacle transitions. You can edit quite well using this package provided you get it set up properly.

For the price it sounds like the Edition version. I haven't had a chance to get into Edition but on the surface it looks like a prety good alternative to Prem/Avid/VV.

I have the DV 500 Plus,

I agree with Adrian. This is not for beginners or "I just want to edit" people.
You need patience and loads of computer understanding. I've been building computers for 5 years and even built for the Swedish military. I have good computer skills but still find this card a bit hard. Drivers are not optimal.
And even the compatibility with Premiere are quite bad. I can't get the capture feature in Premiere to work with the card. When editing with the DV drivers that comes with the card Premiere freezes. Even worse when editing in the Widescreen format and. When you've worked around these problems I still dont think it's worth the money.

I've got the DV 500 a couple years back and have since kept upgradnig to the DV 500 Plus. I agree with Andreas, this isn't a simple card to use. My problems with Premiere aren't quite that bad once I started keeping up to date with Pinnacles updates. Most of what I do is with FCP now so I don't use the PC much. I've considered just selling it (more like dumping it cheap) since it's more hastle than it's worth for me.