Product Review: Pinnacle Studio Deluxe
It's been a while since I have done a product review and I have meaning to more. Well I recently made a trip to Best Buy and they had a deal on Pinnacle Studio Deluxe ($299 in store, $100 rebate). I have been looking forward to this package for a while. Fry's normally carried this product but the packages were always opened because they were returns. The one I got from Best Buy was sealed, I guess because they are a little more professional than Fry's.

The product comes with a PCI Firewire card, a break-out box with analog ports, some cables and Pinnacle Studio Version 8. I installed the card in one of my systems that I do a lot of video editing and installed the software. The Pinnacle Studio software is really simple. Sometimes too simple. Capturing video is a snap and so is video editing. Rendering video seems kind of buggy but I will find out more about that when I can contact customer support. The coolest thing I found about this package was the rendering to VHS. If the break-out box has no video going through it, it will display color bars, like a test patern. When in renders the video it does it a DV quality at a full screen image. Really nice. When you are capturing it will also let you preview the capture through the video out. On the downside, this is not an ordinary capture card. It won't work with Real Producer or most capture programs but it does most other programs abilities by itself. At $299, this product is worth looking at. With the $100 rebate it is really good, figuring that most good capture cards will run $100 alone.