Pinnacle Studio 9.0

Pros: None, this program has no redeeming value

Cons: After hours of rendering, count on it crashing 100% of the time.

Summary: First of all, this program feels more like Adware than a commercial program for which you paid money. It is loaded with fancy wipes, fades, dissolves and video effects of every kind, but 90% of them are locked and you have to pay extra...if you spent over $500 more you would still not have all the features and effects they dangle before your eyes.

If the program did what it's supposed to do, it would be forgivable, but this program is a complete abomination. Simply said, for a huge number of users, this program does not work. Period. Attempting to render a DVD results in program lockups and forced reboots. I have wasted hundreds of hours trying to render with this program. It's insane.

I have pretty high end hardware and none of it is overclocked: a 3.6ghz CPU, 2 gigs RAM, 300gb Serial ATA raid 0, ATI 9600XT, Sound Blaster Audigy. Plenty of cooling with 6 case fans, a ThermalTake 480W power supply and Arctic Silver on my ASUS Rocket 3d Pro CPU cooler. All my other programs work great, but not Studio.

Pinnacle's so-called "tech support" will ask you to uninstall and reinstall their software multiple times, a slow and irritating task in part because of their crazy copy protection schemes that ask for a serial number without telling you WHICH program it should be coming from...the upgrade disk or the original disk. Installing the "bonus DVD" stuffs your Studio with teasers for effects you don't have and have to pay $150 more to get, taking up multiple gigabytes of your hardrive with what ammounts to advertising for extra features.

Pinnacle tech support will ask you to end every other program on your machine...even your virus scanner and firewall...and do a clean re-install windows XP. I'm not sure if they think it will will work or if it's just to get you off their backs for a while, but I suspect the latter. I purchased a new laptop (Gateway 8510GZ) and loaded Studio, Studio hangs during render on that machine too.

Just one look at pinnacle's support pages at www.pinnaclesys.com will convince you of the utter worthlessness of this program. I beg you to look for yourself before you even think of buying this program. What you are seeing is not everything, complain too much and Pinnacle will delete your posts and lock you out from the webboards. If you buy it anyway, don't say you were not warned. If it works for you, great. I am sure it works for somebody. Just not for me...on any of my four computers...nor for thousands of others that are all SCREAMING at Pinnacle for a fix.

Like I said, check it out for yourself at www.pinnaclesys.com and click Support, User Discussion Forums, Consumer webboard, Studio 9, Studio 9 technical support: Make Movie/Disc. Look for render hangs, crashes, etc. If you STILL want this program, make sure the place you buy from will give you a refund. Pinnacle has offered me a full refund. I would rather they fix the program, but at this point, I think I'll take it.