Pinnacle Studio 12 Review

I'm NOT a pinnacle employee and had some experience with first releases (8, 9 and 10). All dramatic but updates improved them all.
Perfectly happy with Pinnacle studio 10.8 I needed AVCHD support for my new Canon HF100.
Against better thoughts I purchased version 12 Ultimate and 12.1.3 (yes it was not 12.0) arrived in the box.
Installing the software went (slow but) without a problem and even previously bought codecs were accepted.
Apple .MOV (FullHD H.264 compression from my Canon 500D SLR) works fine in this (updated) version.
AVCHD SDHC cards from the HF100 also are "imported" without any problem and much faster than importing DV tapes from an older Canon MV590 (not strange is it...).
For now I had no problems with the software.....
Burning AVCHD (form Canon FS100) on DVD and played with a Panasonic BD60 on a Panasonic TX-P46G10: WOW!!
OK rendering might be faster (but wat is fast enough).
I don't use the load of templates and gadgets and make output fair simple to prevent overkill because I think content is important then the effects.

My PC system is ("home" build):
OS: WinXP (SP3).
MB: Asus P43twins1600 with 4Gb RAM.
Processor: Intel Core2Duo E7400 2.8Ghz.
Video: NVidia 9500GT with enabled ($$) PureVideo hardware decoder.
HDD: 4 pieces with more the enough free space (OS, software and data on separate drives).
DVD: 2x NEC AD-5200A.

I'm a pastor in North Texas and I'm looking for decent software that will allow me to create "movies" where I use motion backgrounds, add song lyrics on the backgrounds, and have the song included.

I've never used Pinnacle, but my brother-in-law has used version 11 on two computers, from Windows 98 to Vista, said he never had any trouble with it. He uses the standard version.

As I read these comments, I noticed something: many state what hardware they have, few list which OS they are using. Of those who do, most seem to be using 64-bit Vista. Most Windows computers sold to the average buyer have 32-bit Vista.

I know that many programs that worked in XP and earlier versions will not always work on the 64-bit Vista. This made me wonder if the problem is (1) a compatibility problem with the 64-bit Vista, (2) a still unresolved problem with Pinnacle, (3) something else I'm not aware of. I do know that Windows is notorious for bugs as it is (which is why you'll often find the "experts" video/graphics people using Macs).

Not placing blame, just offering another things to consider. Thoughts?

Hi. I've just made a music video, and it played perfectly well on Pinnacle when I edited it. But then I made it an MP4 file, and it screwed up the HD footage and made the audio (the song) all skippy. Why doies this happen?

Pinnacle is quite simply rubbish. I started with version 9. I never even managed to get it to burn a single DVD without returning an error halfway through the process. Having wasted several days editing the video and not getting any results as i couldnt burn it to a disc, this caused extreme annoyance.

Version 12 is similar, albeit slightly less sluggish. I mustve been insane to buy it. It doesnt effectively use more than 2 processor cores, its slow to preview video, slow to render video, crashes halfway through rendering most of the time, costs too much, extras cost too much, its full of irritating bugs which never get fixed, and is generally the worst optimised program I have ever seen.

Do yourself a favor and get PowerDirector. The speed of that program vs pinnacle is astounding and so far it has never crashed. Not once.

For reference my current system is based around a 3.2GHz Phenom II quad core, with 4Gb of ram and a radeon 4870 1Gb.