Turning off this handy feature restored the system to rock-solid stability but significantly reduced productivity by forcing the program to pause after many types of edits to render the changes. An afternoon of detective work narrowed the problem to the program's Background Rendering function, which evidently conflicts with resource-hungry tasks such as copying and pasting clips or applying certain combinations of transitions and audio effects. However, digging further into Studio's more advanced features produced a string of seemingly random crashes-even on our clean system. Reinstalling the entire set of software packages on a similarly equipped Athlon XP 3200+ system produced a similarly smooth experience. Even with these applications running simultaneously-something no software vendor would recommend-Studio 9.0 was able to perform a variety of video-editing tasks without locking up. Then we upped the ante by loading Roxio Easy Media Creator 7.0, Sonic Solutions' MyDVD Studio Deluxe 5.0, Norton SystemWorks 2003, and 321 Studios' DVD X Copy onto the same system. We used a FireWire-attached Pinnacle MovieBox DV module for video capture and burned on 8X Verbatim DVD+R media.įirst, we verified that Studio 9.0 could be installed without incident on a clean copy of Windows XP Professional. Our testbed contained a 3.2GHz Hyper-Threaded Pentium 4 processor, an Intel 875 (Canterwood) chipset, a Plextor PX-708UF external FireWire DVD rewriter, and 1GB of Kingston Hyper-X DDR433 SDRAM. We began our evaluation by subjecting Studio 9.0 to an elaborate series of stability tests. Studio 9.0's slick, mature interface makes it easy-even for newbies-to burn a disc or capture video from a VCR or camcorder, and it does so without limiting your ability to tailor each task to personal preferences. Pinnacle Studio 9.0's pioneering three-step approach to video production partitions projects into Capture, Edit, and Output phases, each of which you manage from a single screen. It's still not totally bug-free, but we can't think of a better sub-$100 tool for creating and distributing home movies or producing video content for a presentation, a DVD project, or a Web site. Better yet, it adds a raft of powerful new features that include audio- and video-cleanup tools, support for Hyper-Threaded Pentium 4 processors, and the ability to accept third-party plug-in tools. Pinnacle has obviously worked hard to address these problems, and our Pinnacle Studio 9.0 evaluation copy was the most stable version we've tested to date.

Despite being one of the most versatile video-production packages in its class, its popularity has suffered from a reputation for maddening lockups and system conflicts. Pinnacle Studio is the kind of program that our readers love to hate.

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