Comments

farss wrote on 8/3/2003, 4:23 AM
From what I've read it's hard, nothing Pinnacle runs for long enough to do an honest comparison.

Then you might get the same response the other way around on the Pinnacle forums.

I'd suggest you read through both, just o see what sort of issues users in both camps are having, look at the feature lists verusu your needs and make up your mind that way.

Pinnacle now have some very high end stuff in the Liquid series that's probably OK, but its not their work, and its very expensive.
Cave_Mudd wrote on 8/3/2003, 5:35 AM
Just my opinion, of course, but I find Vegas to be a far more useful product. Studio 8 is fine as far as it goes, but Vegas has many more features and capabilities, and completes MPEG renders much faster than Studio 8. Vegas allows multi-track video streams where Studio 8 does not. Finally, Studio 8 has only a few filters and effects that can be applied to the video stream, at least compared to Vegas.

Some of Pinnacle's high end products may not have these limitations, but IMO comparing Vegas and Studio 8 is apples and oranges.....

Cave
simojo wrote on 8/3/2003, 7:40 AM
I bought Vegas after killing myself trying to use Pinnacle Studio 8. DO NOT EVEN CONSIDER BUYING STUDIO 8. Good luck trying to make anything longer than 5 minutes, performing L-cuts or J-cuts, making MPEG2 files with synced audio. Studio 8 is a good toy for making short 30-second commercials, like the one that comes packaged with the software. Vegas is a stable professional editor. I am speaking from experience--several frustrating months of Studio 8 versus several sucessful months of Vegas. Look no further than the forums. This forum, as well as the Cow and DMN are mostly about techniques. The Pinnacle forum is all about: Help my system crashed! System freezes! The patch doesn't work! How do I reinstall Studio? Why doesn't my project render? I want my money back! If you look around, I'm sure you'll find many users of worthless Studio software who will give you their copy. Just for kicks, I jumped to the Studio 8 forum: the last 15 posts, 11 are software errors. Sorry for the rant, but I wasted a few months of life trying to make Studio work. I'm happy if I can save you some time and help you avoid making the same mistakes.

Best advice I ever got on the Pinnacle forums: Buy Vegas.
hugoharris wrote on 8/3/2003, 10:33 AM
I started as a hobbyist using Pinnacle Studio 7, then tried Studio 8 for kicks. If it worked consistently, it would be fine for basic video editing. However, it had to be one of the most unstable and bug-ridden pieces of software I've ever used (and I've been using audio software all the way back to the Commodore 64...). Also, in side-by-side comparisons of DVD's burned with Studio 8 and Sonic Foundry products, the quality of Pinnacle's S8 mpeg2 codec was very poor.

I agree with a previous post - its like comparing apples and oranges. VV4 is just as intuitive (more so, in my opinion), flexible, and produces commercial quality results. Pinnacle's high end software may not suffer from the same tremendous deficiencies as S8, but S8 is essentially intended for basic home videos and little more. Why does S8 receive such glowing reviews in major PC magazines? I think it may have to do with inadequate testing, or (worse) advertising dollars. If professional level software is not what you need, I'd recommend trying something else other than S8 in any case.

As for VV4 - download the demo and try it out. Visit this forum and listen to the advice given by the regulars to amateurs and newbies like myself. You'll realize that VV4 is stable (the most stable media software I have *ever* used), and very, very powerful. If you can afford it, you won't be disappointed. And, in the short time I've been here, I've come to realize that VV4 is backed up by a dedicated development team, who also visit the forum regularly themselves.

Hope this helps,
Kevin.
BillyBoy wrote on 8/3/2003, 11:41 AM
Couldn't have said it better than Kevin already did.

I'll simply add I think in part one of the big reasons Vegas stands out is the excellent team of software developers. Not only do they have the technical side down cold, they seem to really care about the users as witness not only the frequent posts while 'on duly' also occasional posts from some SoFo guys while obviously not on the clock. That simply don't happen with companies like Pinnacle and Adobe.

I just hope now that the Sony deal is official that the SoFo team doesn't lose its home spun flavor. You got to like software created in some sleepy little college town like Madison Wisconsin.
johnmeyer wrote on 8/3/2003, 12:49 PM
A more direct comparison would be Studio 8 vs. VideoFactory. Vegas Video 4.0 is in a totally different league, with hundreds of additional features.

I have extensively used Studio 7, VideoFactory, and now Vegas 4.0. Studio 8 is basically the same as 7, but with the addition of DVD authoring capability. For its price, the ability to edit and then produce a DVD represents a tremendous value. Also, the Studio 8 interface is amazingly easy to understand and use when doing basic cuts-only editing, with the addition of narration, music, and basic transition effects. I still recommend Studio to people who basically want to trim the fat from their home videos and put them on DVD. They can generally figure the whole thing out themselves and can get results in a matter of minutes.

However, the other posts earlier in this thread are dead on the money when it comes to Studio's deficiencies. Pinnacle has never been able to tame the bugs in this product. They have never produced even one release that was stable enough to do really long projects. In addition, while it is simple to use for short, simple projects, its interface ends up getting in the way if you need to get lots of work done in a short time. VideoFactory and Vegas take a little longer to learn, and quite a long time to completely master, but if you are doing large amounts of editing, I think you can be ten time more productive with VideoFactory -- certainly that much faster and more with Vegas. I'm not exagerating. I really mean finishing a project that would take sixty minutes in Studio would only take six minutes in Vegas. The reason is not only the time lost to crashes in Studio, but also the instant response (even on slow computers) in the Vegas interface.

Maverick wrote on 8/3/2003, 1:36 PM
I, too, started with S7 but found it to be very buggy tripping over at almost any turn. The forums were helpful but and any adverse comments were often deleted by the powers-that-be unlike here where they are allowed to be discussed openly.

Since finding V4 I have never looked back.
BillyBoy wrote on 8/3/2003, 1:45 PM
Sounds like the mailing-list put up by Roxio. Back when I used "Easy" CD Creator, they didn't even have a forum, just a stinky mailing list you had to subscribe to that went through a censor that like for Studio removed posts too critical of the product.
Grazie wrote on 8/3/2003, 2:49 PM
. . .Studio!? . . . . Run away . . . . run away . . . . Did the S7 thing . .ho great an NLE that doesn't fall over [ that's me coming from VideoSlave ] . .. then I found mmmmm VideoFactory .. ahhhh . .. heaven >>>> VV3>>> Vegas4 - HOME!!!

Grazie
bgccdx wrote on 8/3/2003, 3:06 PM
I was silly enough to buy Studio 8 twice, NTSC version then the PAL version. That tells you something to start with. I couldn't believe you had to have a different version for PAL. It was, without doubt, the buggiest software I have ever bought. Don't even think about buying it is my advice, but if you do, I can sell you two copies, very cheap!
kentwolf wrote on 8/3/2003, 4:07 PM
There is no comparison.

Vegas is a professional, high quality product; Studio 8 is everything BUT that.

Search under my username + the word "pinnacle," and you can see my previous postings on this with some specifics if you want. I really don't feel like typing it all again.

I went through months of frustration with Studio 8 and finally gave up and went with Vegas + DVD. I could not be more pleased.

No doubt, there are some people who will have trouble with any program on any system. There are probably people who have trouble running Notepad or Calculator. I am not one of these people. I very rarely have any trouble running any software and/or software.

Pinncale Studio 8 is absolutely the worst software I have ever used on any computing platform; Sonic Foundry is very probably the best.

...and there ya' go.
Maverick wrote on 8/3/2003, 5:08 PM
Little update. I decided to use Studio 7's Smart Sound to create a sound track the exact required length. I found the style I liked and it produced what I was looking for but could i get it to render in any way, shape or form - no way!

It just kept crashing. I even added a video clip with and without audio but it still crashed. I then gave up.
IanG wrote on 8/3/2003, 5:40 PM
I agree with Johnmeyer - a more reasonable comparison would be Studio v VideoFactory. I used Studio for 18 months and then bought videoFactory - I tried redoing my very first VF project in Studio and couldn't even get close. If you add all the extras Vegas has to offer there's just no comparison.

Ian G.
JohnnyRoy wrote on 8/3/2003, 9:28 PM
I started with Studio DC10+ and it was a great program. I got some very productive editing done as a beginner. But I always longed for a second video track. (Studio only has one video and one static title overlay) Then I got Studio 7 and it was a full year before it stabilized enough to use. During that time I create several projects that for one reason or another I could never get to render. Very unproductive. You would open you project one day and all you’re titles were gone. Pinnacle’s reply was to just start over. That’s when I bough VideoFactory and thought I had gone to heaven. It just worked flawlessly first time, every time. Studio 8 is even buggier than Studio 7. I could not recommend Pinnacle products. Their developers deliver patches that fix one thing and break two other things. It is really scary. I would not buy another Pinnacle product.

I would also have to agree with everything else that was said in these previous posts. The forums between the two products are like night and day. The Vegas and VideoFactory forums full of question on how to achieve certain video results while the Pinnacle forms are filled with either how to get the software to just work, stop crashing, or threats to Pinnacle wanting their money back.

I also agree it’s not fair to compare Pinnacle Studio 8 ($99) to Vegas 4 ($499). Pinnacle Studio is in the VideoFactory ($69) category. So first compare Vegas to Video Factory. Then read my post comparing VideoFactory to Studio in this thread and you’ll see that Studio has much less functionality than VideoFactory which has much less functionality than Vegas. So if price is an issue, buy VideoFactory if not buy Vegas.

~jr
slambubba wrote on 8/3/2003, 9:34 PM
it's been said 100 times in this thread, but don't buy studio 8. the software has so many bugs that even orkin is scared of them. their support is even worse than the software. the first response i got from their support (after i stated i had already tried reinstallining) was:

1. uninstall and reinstall studio

after i replied to that in-depth response from them, they came up with another good solution:

2. reinstall windows

after waiting 5 days each for these responses, i was a little pissed and posted ALL (as in a lot) my problems in their forums. they threatened to ban me if i didn't stop.

i did get a response to one problem i had. studio had a problem importing most of my mp3 files. they all were created identically, but it didn't like most of them. their solution, only use wav files. now that's an efficient way to rip my cds to my hard drive!
donp wrote on 8/3/2003, 10:06 PM
I began with Pinnacle Studio 7 and considered S8 and visited their fourm quite a bit but then found out about Vegas Video.

I had Vegas Video 3 light bundled with my Canopus ADVC-1394 card loaded it and loved it and than upgraded to the 4.0c product. You cannot compare Vegas 4c to Studio 8, Vegas is a different league. Compare Vegas Video to Pinnacle Edition if you need a comparason.
woodrose wrote on 8/4/2003, 12:27 PM
Look at how many products pinnacle has. They put their time and money into their upperend software and let the consumers and forum leaders find and debug the consumer software end of their line. If I put into words what I think of pinnacle they would have to delete my post.
tserface wrote on 8/4/2003, 12:32 PM
A more fair comparison would be between Studio 8 and DVD-A. Studio 8 is much better for making DVD's than DVD-A (for the normal user). You can do end actions, it lays out the video in a thumnail view, and you can arrange the button order (tab order). DVD-A works for what it is, but the features just don't justify the price. I wish SFO would throw us a bone and add a couple of these things which would put them miles ahead imo. The user interface in the SFO products is way superior imo. It's just the lack of a few featues that hurts.
riredale wrote on 8/4/2003, 1:14 PM
Studio8 is quirky and has some bugs, but it's a very good editing package for many people. I built a very elaborate 1-hour movie in the fall of 2001 using S7, and the software worked well. All the time, though, I would constantly see many reports of anguish and frustration on the Pinnacle boards. The product seems to work great for some, and not at all for others. I think it is very sensitive to certain file configurations.

For a video beginner, it would be a good product, and chances are high that the user would be able to get a lot of use out of it.

Vegas is an entirely different animal. Much more powerful, much more flexible, and orders of magnitude more stable. Coming from Studio7 I found Vegas to take a while to learn, mostly because there was so much potential--kind of like trying a word processor for the first time, and being overwhelmed by the dozens of menu items in MS Word. Programs this sophisticated should have some sort of "switch" like the one they used to have in the Corvettes (they still might--I don't know): leave the key in one position and you have a full-power beast, but put the key in the other position, and a kinder, gentler Corvette emerges, just right for getting the hang of the car without getting in trouble.

It would be cool if a switch in Vegas similarly offered two sides: a full-featured, full-menu version, and a highly simplified, limited-feature version that just offered the basics and nothing more.
kentwolf wrote on 8/4/2003, 9:05 PM
No doubt, Pinnacle Studio 8 has many, many bells and whistles. Excellent backgrounds, buttons, themes, Smart Sound integration, etc. The main problem is that it doesn't work reliably in any sense of the word.

Vegas + DVD is rock solid.

Getting Vegas + DVD was one of the best days of my life, computer-wise...
JohnnyRoy wrote on 8/4/2003, 9:23 PM
> Studio 8 is much better for making DVD's than DVD-A

If you can get it to work! I bought Studio 8 expressly to make DVD’s and I could NEVER get it to work. It would always crash with one encoding error after another. With each patch the error changed, but the DVD was never created successfully.

I have never had DVD Architect crash once. So while it doesn’t have end actions, it does actually work!

~jr
OldTimer wrote on 8/4/2003, 10:39 PM
Stay away from Studio 8, it's just a toy. A badly broken toy.
juan2003 wrote on 8/5/2003, 12:21 AM
There are not comparison!!

Vegas 4.0 is very powerfull, than Studio 7/8. Words are words, Use Vegas 4.0 and Studio 8, and then you will see THE TRUE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BOTH!, OK!?

All the replys to yuur topic, darling Fuzzzzy, are 100% TRUES, REALS and ELOQUENTS.

The RATING for me between Vegas 4.0 & Studio 8 are: (1=poor; 10=excellet)


Feature VEGAS 4.0 STUDIO 8

-Power.......................................10...........................3
-Render a File 9 2
-Time to render a project 10 3
-FX Efects 10 2
-Plugins 10 3
-Interphase 10 7
-New features from the
last version of V.4 & S.8 8 4
-Render mpeg 1 & 2 10 3
-Number of tracks on a
project (A/V) 10 1
-Number of files to render 9 2
-Number of Tools 10 4
-More features..... more 8, 9 or 10 more 1, 2 or 3

OK! The rating was very HARD and CRUEL for Studio 8, but is the reflection of
all the replys.... is the TRUTH!!... is the REALYTY

Bye Bye :) !!
Juan Pastor
juan2003 wrote on 8/5/2003, 12:31 AM
..........There are not comparison!!

Vegas 4.0 is very powerfull, than Studio 7/8. Words are words, Use Vegas 4.0 and Studio 8, and then you will see THE TRUE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BOTH!, OK!?

All the replys to yuur topic, darling Fuzzzzy, are 100% TRUES, REALS and ELOQUENTS.

.......The RATING for me between Vegas 4.0 & Studio 8 are: (1=poor; 10=excellet)


.............Feature.........................VEGAS 4.0................STUDIO 8

....-Power........................................10............................3
....-Render a File.............................. 9.............................2
....-Time to render a project..............10............................3
....-FX Efects...................................10............................2
....-Plugins.......................................10............................3
....-Interphase..................................10............................7
....-New features from the____
____last version of V.4 & S.8..............8.............................4
....-Render mpeg 1 & 2......................10............................3
....-Number of tracks on a____
___ project (A/V)..............................10............................1
....-Number of files to render...............9............................2
....-Number of Tools..........................10............................4
....-More features.....................more 8, 9 or 10........more 1, 2 or 3

...........OK! The rating was very HARD and CRUEL for Studio 8, but is the reflection of
........................all the replys.... is the TRUTH!!... is the REALYTY

....................................Bye Bye :) !!
...........................................................................................Juan Pastor