Pinnacle Studio Users - Upgraded 8 to 9?

[Kov-Ice]

I've been using Studio 8 for about a year. I didn't do much homework before buying. It's pretty simple to use, but I've found it to be awfully buggy software.

Anyone out there have experience with Pinnacle? My main question is have any of you upgraded from 8 to 9, and did that upgrade help to stabilize the program at all? Thx.

[casey]

I have been using Studio 8 for the past 13 months and found it very stable and bug free after the 8.10.4c update. Have you updated to this version ?
a new update 8.12.7 was released on 24 March 2004 and adresses quite a few issues.
from the comments at DVDRhelp.com it seems that ver 9 is not that different to ver 8.

[morriswindgate]

you might want to ditch Pinnicle all together and go with Arcsoft's Showbiz 2 software (Demo available at the link below).
I work with a person who does a lot of video work and was using Pinnicle for a few years. As with a lot of people it was buggy and erratic sometimes.
I go the lightweight verson of Showbiz with my DVD writer and I gave it to him. He worked with it for two days before he told me that it was a much better program than Pinnicle and bought the full version for 99 bucks.
The program is very easy to learn and has a lot of usable features.

http://www.arcsoft.com/en/products/showbiz/

[Kov-Ice]

casey, ya I've kept up with the updates. You're right, the 8.10.4 version did help somewhat, but the program still crashed way too often for my liking. Motion menus won't work properly, too many titles and fades causes lockup, etc.

morris, I've looked at Showbiz a bit. I like Pinnacle because it has so many features and tries to immitate a professional package I guess. Showbiz seems lacking in the amount you can do with it from the little I've seen.

Unless there's an argument for the wonders Studio 9 can do (doesn't sound like much so far), then I suppose I'm looking more towards dropping the couple hundred bucks to move up to Adobe Premiere Pro...

[Hi Ho]

HERE is an article on Studio 9. It seems to be much improved with a lot more features including surround sound capabilities. I am thinking about buying it. I didn't buy Studio 8 because all I read was problems and bugs but I may have to check out Studio 9.