Pinnacle Studio 9 AV/DV review:3 stars (Video editing is not as simple as it looks like.) - Video editing is a little more complex than one thinks.
Video and audio will go out of sync no matter what software you will use. What happens is that quartz clock on sound card fluctuates in frequency. More expensive sound cards are more expensive for a reason. Those sound cards have better components and sync problem is minimized (not eliminated) resulting in smaller audio video sync problem. One can notice audio sampling rate fluctuations when capturing video in great program called virtualdub (virtualdub.org). It happens to be free.
Using sampling rates when capturing video is also important. My sound card works better using 48kHz than 44.1kHz sampling rate.
Operating System is important too. Windows 98SE (I assume the same applies to ME) is not suited well for video capture because audio video sync problems were the worst by far. Same hardware, same applications running on Windows 2000 rendered much better results. XP behaves as well as W2K. If this is just driver issue or not - this is another issue, which I cannot confirm. I am leaning though on opinion that OS made such a difference. Win98SE(ME) is not true operating system such as Linux, Unix, Windows 2000/XP/NT (computer science graduates will agree with me knowing those OS internals - I am talking about kernel here).
Solution:
Don't capture video in huge chunks. I usually record maximum 20 minutes. I stop capturing when new scene starts. I rewind a little bit before this scene and start capturing (this will result in seperate capture file).
I also prefer using NTFS file system (2000,XP), which allows me to have huge capture files (larger than 4GBs).
I compress using Huffyuv codec (almost lossless compression). It shrinks file size by 2.2 factor. Capturing 720x480 without compression will bring any HD to its knees resulting in dropped frames. Defragmenting HD is also important before capturing. I have devoted partition for video capturing. Some people have separate HD just for capturing (I cannot justify this luxury).
I own Turtle Beach Santa Cruz, which gives me good results. Before Santa Cruz, I had Philips Seismic Edge sound card and it was pretty good (slightly worse than Turtle Beach though - but I paid less).
By the way, there are forums devoted to video editing. Lots of knowledge and help is there (check vcdhelp.com).
I owned older version of Pinnacle and it worked fine. I had some issues with my AMD XP system using Pinnacle capture card. Fortunately, I was able to find fix to this problem on some of video forums. One guy from Germany, put some registry fix.1 stars (Audio sync can be a problem) - Note from the other reviewers that audio and video sync is a matter of luck with this product. Unfortunately I was one of the unlucky ones. With all my VHS video tape captures I saw good audio/video sync at the beginning of the tape and up to 4 seconds out of sync at the two hour mark.
I have a recent Intel 925XECV2 mother board, 3 GHZ Intel Pentium, 2GB memory, and 200 MB Western Digital drives. I am running Windows XP SP2 with updated motherboard and Pinnacle drivers. Still no luck.
I did try the Pinnacle capture program, the Studio capture method, and Vegas capture software. In all cases the audio and video went out of sync in a similar manner.
I did go to the Pinnacle support boards for this capture device to seek help. Unfortunately there are many, many posts of audio/video sync problems, and very little support from Pinnacle to address the problem. Most of the help suggestions consist of "update your driver" or "don't run other programs."
So unfortunately after many tries, I never got the product to work, and I did not find it worth my time to debug the problem further. After many attempts, back it went to the retailer.5 stars (Makes great home movies.) - Pinnacle Studio 9 makes video editing such as scene arrangement and transitions from one clip to the next quick and smooth. Not having done any video editing before, I was still able to pull together my first "movie" in a few hours - from loading the software to burning my first disc. I found it easy to use, but like all software there's a learning curve and you will have to read instructions. Although you can figure out most of the basics by messing around with it, if you don't like referring to a manual you won't get all the great features this program has to offer. I keep a few short clips in a separate project on the go all the time to practice editing techniques with before I use them in my real movie. As I learn, each new project gets a few more enhancements and a little more refined than the last. I gave it 5 stars because this program does more than I expected and enables me to produce a good quality, interesting to watch home movie for a reasonable price. Beware: It takes alot of processor resources to edit video, so the faster your computer is, the better. |
