Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Pinnacle Studio 8 Problems .

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Posted by Paul Cassidy (Member # 951) on 12-11-2003, 06:05 PM:

Has anyone used this product , I bought this at "Best Buys" Salt Lake and I have used it to make CD to CD burns (with some trouble) not able to do a Disc to Disc transfer , but had to save it to hard Drive and burn from there ,Studio 8 while attempting to transfer some of my holiday shoots to dics , it sallowed about 10G for 30 mins of VCD and seem to hang sometimes while rendering ,after trying untold blank discs before it actually accepted it as blank , the finished product did not look better than an ordinary DV to VHS tape transfer , I just wondering if I need to change to a better Video card as I have a Onboard ASUS P4 and I have got the latest updates form the Web .

Posted by Pete Naples (Member # 761) on 12-11-2003, 06:22 PM:

Yup used it. Prefer Premier. DV Capture does swallow hard disk at a frightening rate!

Output quality... Depends on capture quality, also I found the best was to go back to DV tape, or burn to DVD. The rendering can be very slow though........

Make sure you've plenty of RAM, and plenty of spare fast hard disk. Failing that buy a mac! With the amount of hassle 've had getting a pc up to scratch for video work, I kow what I'll be buying next time around.....

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 12-12-2003, 11:26 PM:

I had some similar troubles with disc hangup problems, particularly with capture. After some help from a couple fellow forum members I got my setup to work properly.

For the best results, you need a separate physical hard disc installed on a separate PCI controller card for dependable video capture, render and "print to tape" operations.

You're bound to have problems if you work from a disc that is being directly utilized by the operating system. It doesn't matter even if you are using a separate hard drive installed as a slave on the same chain used by the boot hard disc. I tried that and couldn't get it to work worth a damn. Using the separate controller card is the real key. Since then, I've done 30 minute or longer captures without dropping a frame (and my system is a lowly PIII 1GHz PC with 512MB of RAM). I also use the second hard disc to spool up CD images when burning CDs. I'd rarely get a glitch at all in the past, but this method is 100% reliable.

When capturing DV or printing DV to tape, you have to sustain a 3.7MB per second rate. That may not seem like all that much relatively speaking. I don't know about the Mac, but the WindowsOS loves to constantly screw around with the hard disc for virtual memory duties among other things. The OS and other apps running in the background can make it impossible to sustain a 3.7MB capture rate. I hear about people producing video completely from laptop PCs. I don't know how they manage. After the hell I went through I doubt I would try using a laptop with a single hard disc.

At minimum, get a UltraATA 133 hard disc with 8MB of cache and 7200RPM speed. I picked up an 80GB Maxtor unit for $70 and a Maxtor UltraATA 133 PCI controller card for under $40. You can even go faster by getting a Serial ATA controller and SATA hard disc (right now the standard is SATA I, 150MB speed; SATA II is due next year with a 300MB speed). If you know how to deal with SCSI you can go yet even faster that route. After much online research, I would not recommend trying to capture to external Firewire or USB 2.0 based hard discs. Better to use those for mass portable storage only.

I'm kind of surprised few (if any) computers are sold set up to capture and output video properly out of the box. It seems very likely the next computer I purchase, I'll be buying a second controller card and additional hard disc for video purposes as well.

[ 12-13-2003, 11:01 PM: Message edited by: Bobby Henderson ]

Posted by Paul Cassidy (Member # 951) on 12-13-2003, 01:37 AM:

Thanks for the tips , I have tried MPEG transfer on a 2min clip to VCD and this worked fine , I plan to change to 120G Hard Drive , install more memory and a AGP Video Card as I am using onboard video Card on a ASUS P4S333 VM , this PC will need to be set up just for Burning VCD & DVD Discs and use another PC for normal work , the other way to save on Disc space as I've read ...is to capture in Preview Mode then after editing to render in full MPEG or DV

Posted by Ron Lacheur (Member # 1126) on 12-13-2003, 04:02 AM:

Bobby Said:
" I'm kind of surprised few (if any) computers are sold set up to capture and output video properly out of the box. It seems very likely the next computer I purchase, I'll be buying a second controller card and additional hard disc for video purposes as well. "

One company that claims this is Sony with their Vaio computer system. Their systems are really bad though and it requires alot of tweaking to get the capture right.

Posted by Pete Naples (Member # 761) on 12-13-2003, 05:29 AM:

You shouldn't need to go as far as a seperate controller card, after all yuo'd be putting it in a PCI slot, that;s got to be slower than an on board, surely?

I've never experienced disc hang ups. My editing machine has 40gB for the OS and applications, and 120gB 7,200rpm HDD purely for video. Works fine with Pinnacle and Adobe Premier Pro (note: NOT Prem 6/6.5)

Paul, you need to capture in the highest quality you can, if you capture in preview and render up the way it'll look yucky!

I've found this forum to be quite useful.

Posted by Daryl C. W. O'Shea (Member # 1303) on 12-13-2003, 10:30 AM:

Onboard IDE controllers utilize the PCI bus. That's why video card issues can kill transfer rates.

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 12-13-2003, 01:37 PM:

You won't get any performance hit from using a PCI UltraATA 133 controller card for a second hard disc. On-motherboard IDE controllers aren't going to get users any faster disk I/O performance --for the primary reason UltraATA discs don't outstrip the bandwidth of the PCI bus.

Basically, your hard disc is typically the slowest piece of hardware in any computer. Slow hard disc speed has put a glass ceiling of sorts in place on computer performance. Hopefully the faster emerging standards of Serial ATA will open up more headroom for users to truly see substantial gains from the fastest CPUs.

Posted by Michael Brown (Member # 890) on 12-13-2003, 06:25 PM:

I have on-board sound rather than a card.

I can't even get Studio 8 to install.

Posted by Ron Lacheur (Member # 1126) on 12-13-2003, 08:41 PM:

You'd be best to change that to a M-Audio or a Soundblaster card, Michael.

Despite what they say in the motherboard manual, onboard sound " cards " are of horrible quality.

Posted by Paul G. Thompson (Member # 655) on 12-14-2003, 12:25 AM:

Sometimes mine just quits in the middle of a project. I am not overly pleased with the quality of the finished product, but it is better than nothing.

Posted by Paul Cassidy (Member # 951) on 12-14-2003, 03:01 AM:

I'm wandering if it may also be the Burner that is at fault as well , as the Software was bundled with the "Digital Research Technologies" Dual Format 4x DVD Burner I bought , I have found that the Drive does have some problems playing and recorgnising Audio CDs sometimes , DVD Discs are no problem ????

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 12-14-2003, 01:51 PM:

I've never heard of "Digital Research Technologies" or their line of DVD burners. So I would not really be able to say what issues (or lack of) that burner has. But I normally stay away from products sold by companies I've never heard of or are sold as the least expensive on the market. You do indeed get what you pay for.

I'm in the market to buy an external Firewire-based DVD+/-RW burner. But I'm only considering models from credible vendors, where the player models themselves have lots of reviews written about them. For me, that narrows the choice between Plextor's 8X DVD-/+RW model and Pioneer's 4X unit (which uses their highly regarded A06 model +/-RW drive).

Posted by Paul Cassidy (Member # 951) on 12-15-2003, 12:47 AM:

According to their home page they are Americas No1 Supplier of Computer peripherals ??? and the burner I bought is pictured on the Home Page .....

http://www.dr-tech.com/

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 12-15-2003, 05:39 PM:

Ok. After seeing their page I recognize their products (I've seen them on shelves at Best Buy and a few other brick and mortar places).

The company's prices are cheap. But I could not find any reviews on their DVD burners online, particularly in the first places to look for PC products reviews (CNet, PC Magazine, PC World, etc.). Not good if you want piece of mind for your purchase.

Of course, brand name alone isn't everything. Iomega sells external DVD and CD burners. But they're slower than average and overpriced against most other credible products. It seems the most popular players in the DVD-/+RW burner market (at least in terms of good reviews) are Pioneer, Plextor and Sony.

Posted by Paul Cassidy (Member # 951) on 12-15-2003, 06:27 PM:

Well Bobby youre right , it was the cheapest in the "Best Buys Store" but is does do the basics OK , but it is alittle picky about which Audio CDs it plays , all other Dics are no problem ???

Posted by Paul Cassidy (Member # 951) on 12-17-2003, 02:01 AM:

Well I've just beefed my PC up with an extra 80Gb of Hard Drive and extra 256Mg Ram and Now trialled an 45 min burn onto DVD and it was a great success with the sort of quality I have been looking for , I'll still do a bit of tweaking and add an extra Fan for rendering , but I'm abit happier now .