Why I buy this one ?
- Includes both Pinnacle Studio and PCI analog and digital video capture card
- SmartMovie automated video editing and integrated Video CD and DVD creation
- Experience a stunning array of video editing features
- Add titles, transitions, sound effects, and background music
- Add powerful one-touch video and audio restoration tools

dfw_computer_supply offers this stuff with condition New, new for:

Price : $99.99 Usually ships in 24 hours

What our customer's say!

"Capture high res video AVI files", Pinnacle manufactured great high end video boards for professional capture, overlay and editing... then they went after the home hobbyist. That's why their products all suggest you capture your home vhs tapes and burn them to DVD. That's when their reputation went south. The software crashed systems and was hard to set-up.

It has not improved much but some users are able to download drivers and patches to make the editing\DVD software work fine, and report no problems. If you know how to do this, this product will work for you.

You'll notice from the other reviews that half the reviewers rate it high, the other half, low. Some low ratings are from Pinnacle problems but many are because the system itself has too little RAM, too many background programs or has not been defragged.

So why my 5 star rating? I capture from both analog (RCA TV type connectors) and firewire (camcorder DV) uncompressed AVI at 720 x 480 then edit it in Premiere. It's easy to do and results are great. The capture software controls most camcorders and previews footage. You can capture a TV program and make fun of it on UTube. Capture controls are easy to use and allow tweaking of input. Just make sure you go to the Pinnacle support knowledgebase site and download any recommended drivers, etc.


"Very good product", Takes time to learn, but worth the effort. My only advise would be to always keep this software updated and to experiment with all of the many features.

"Pinnacle is notorious for crashing.", I've worked with various Pinnacle Studio versions since last decade, and they've all had two things in common:

1. When the program works, it's superb.

2. The other 50% of the time, it crashes frequently, and hard!

For years, Pinnacle had designed the market's top, novice-affordable video editing/authoring platforms, but for some frustrating reason, they just can't seem to keep the bugs out. This verson is no exception.

Lately, the competition in this market has mushroomed, and there are better alternatives available for the same price. At last, others have emulated the Pinnacle platform while eliminating the work/creativity-killing bugs.

My advice? Shop around. Google the competition. But save yourself the frustration and steer away from anything Pinnacle.

"Resulting MPEGs work only with Pinnacle", The capturing from VHS worked fine. Pinnacle 9 creates MPEG files from your captures. However, the DVD creation options are -horrible-. After the captures were done, I had several MPEG files that Pinnacle had created. I sold Pinnacle (and uninstalled the software), and then bought a separate DVD authoring tool with which to create DVDs from Pinnacle's MPEG files. To my horror and then I discovered that no other tool can edit the MPEGs. Windows Media Player can -play- the MPEGs, but nothing can edit them. Not Windows Movie Maker, not Adobe Premiere Elements, not Sonic MyDVD, and not Muvee. So, I had to buy Pinnacle's software all over again, just so I could convert their (secretly encoded?) MPEGs into a format that other tools could understand: WMV.

The only part of this product that is solid is the capturing video.


"Dishonest company", Do not buy anything from Pinnacle. Their software deceptively leads you to believe that you need to purchase further programs to burn DVDs. I did so and got incorrect activation codes twice before requesting a refund which they have refused to give even though the product does not work and meets their advertised return policy. I have filed a formal complaint with the Federal Trade Commission for deceptive trade policies and knowingly offering defective products.

Read this reviews before You buy...

"Better than some of the reviews", Recently purchased a Dell Dimension 3000 with a Celeron "D" 2.4 MHZ processor, 512M...ill advised, I know, but I didn't realize the mistake until the product had been delivered. Rather than scrap it and send it back to reorder, I thought at least give it a shot....I ordered a new computer specifically for video and editing. Then I ordered this product, Pinnacle Studio 9 AV/DV (from Servemart for $74 bucks + shipping), and was concerned with whether or not my system would be able to handle it.

After receiving the product, I had the PCI card and software installed within an hour...and later that evening, I had successfully transferred my video to DVD without any trouble...and I didn't even open the manual.

My primary purpose for buying this product was to create DVD versions of my home movies...all those tapes cause quite a clutter, and some of the older ones are slowly degrading. I did try some of the transitions, and other effects, and though I might use them in the future, I have yet to render a project using them. Rendering didn't take any longer than I expected...without the effects, I burned a high quality DVD in just under an hour.

My only complaint at this time is having to constantly "unlock" features by visiting the website...different features require a "key" to use..some are free, others are not. So, occasionally, you'll encounter a feature that's free, and you'll have to visit the website to get the key, which slows down your work, until you get the feature unlocked..seems that the original product key should've done that, but I suppose Pinnacle wanted you to visit their website, just to let you know it's there...

Overall, though, I'm very satisfied with the product...

****Update: Today I burned my first DVD using some of the additional features and transitions, and I experienced NO additional burn time for making DVD's...an 80 minute home movie, complete with transistions, titles and menus took approximately 50 minutes to burn with my system...though, I do recommend deleting all finished projects and defragmenting the harddrive before beginning a new project.

"Lots of Trouble with this One", After using this for a short time, the Dazzle capture device quit working. Customer service sent me a three page e-mail of things to do, including removing all USB software, registry editing, etc. Until they get the bugs out, I would avoid this like the plague.

"Never made it work", I spent several weeks trying to get this product to work and finally gave up. Technical support, as many have indicated, is a joke. It took them 12 days to respond to my first email. After that it was a response every 2 days. Basically, my system never recognized the card. Windows never popped up the New Hardware dialog, and there was nothing under device manager. I uninstalled everything and tried the install again, but no luck. I downloaded patches, and new drivers, but nothing worked. Mean while, tech support was just sending me canned answers, and not even reading my emails. If you look at the chat on pinnacles web site, there are a lot of frustrated users trying to make this product work. There is also a lot of talk about how the product does not work correctly with XP Service Pack 2.

"A first-time digital editor using Pinnacle - 1/8/05", I received this gift for Christmas - the Pinnacle Studio AV/DV version 9.1 with the PCI video card. I was all excited about this gift, because we have a bunch of 8mm video of our little Hannah, then I went on amazon.com and a bunch of other places and saw the reviews on this... then wasn't as excited. But I thought - what the heck, it's a gift, and looking on the other options (i.e. Ulead, Sony Vegas), they seemed way too expensive when this package had the PCI card and software all in one - so I decided to try it out anyways.

First, a little more background: I have no other video editing experience, so this is new to me. Also, computer specs: I am running a computer with 2GB RAM, 80GB hd, Intel Pentium 4 3GHz processor. Running Windows XP Professional with SP2 installed, as well as other software (i.e. virus, firewall, backup, etc.)

Thus far, here are my summary thoughts (1/8/05): This hardware/software package worked as well as I would have expected - very satisfied. No complaints thus far, though I have not yet burned a DVD - will post once I do that. 2/13/05: I have just burned my first DVD (it took awhile for other reasons), and everything went well. There were a few quirks (see below), but nothing that would change me from enthusiastically recommending this!

Detailed thoughts:
First, I installed the software per the instructions. The install worked very cleanly - I had no problems with installing, though installing took a bit of a long time (especially the DVD bonus effects that come with the set). Previous reviews had mentioned that there were some errors with XP and SP2 - I had none (I even checked that yes, I am still running *!?$* SP2). Install never crashed or stalled or anything. The install also updated the software automatically (even when I ran the software and checked for updates, there were none).

Next was installing the hardware (PCI card). Piece of cake, no problems. Rebooted machine, placed CD into machine for device drivers, no problems. (note that the install here adds about twenty-seven new registry items by my count.)

This morning I ran the software and captured from an analog RCA input. I made sure to hook up the RCA video to the video in and the RCA audio to my PC's audio in with the adapter included with this package (note that you will still need your own RCA male-male cables). Captured a 20 second video with audio, and it captured very cleanly. Added some transitions and background music to some scenes, and published to MPEG - no problems, everything worked as it should. The only complaint I would have is that the output was a little fuzzy, but I think that had more to do with my settings - will post more once I get time to play with the software more.

Now that I have burned my DVD, here are my thoughts from that: It was very easy to burn the DVD, although the "burn directly" function didn't seem to work. I had to compile the DVD and the burn it to DVD through separate functions - still easy, but one more intermediate step. Either way, it should be noted that compiling the DVD takes some time - on my machine, 1.5 hours of DVD material took about 1.3 hours to compile (so set it to go and go do something else for awhile). But I think that's to be expected given the compression methods. The other quirk is that my DVD writer is a DVD+RW, but my own DVD player doesn't read +RW, only -RW, so I would suggest checking to make sure your DVD player can read your DVD type (www.videohelp.com is a great help in this).

"Dissapointed with Pinnacle", I have owned Studio AV 8 since it came out. I tried to buy Studio 9 and placed an order with Pinnacle but never received a reply or the product. Oringinally my version 8 worked well after I solved a few problems by removing and reinstalling software a couple of times. I was trying to buy the version 9 because the analog video capture quit working (can't hold sync) when I applied the latest update to 8. Pinnacle is TOTALLY unresponsive to their customers!! I do not consider myself a novice having made many VHS to DVD conversions but would not by Pinnacle again!