Wow. The idiocy of Pinnacle tech support never ceases to amaze me. Even somebody brand new quickly learns that "converting" a file is often detrimental to quality. Every conversion is one step away from the original. Especially when compression is introduced. I'm dumbfounded that they would say that...
The sad truth about Pinnacle products is they don't work right, and they are poorly supported. I mean seriously poorly supposed, an F- grade. They always release buggy products (with the exception of a couple mega-bucks professional tools) and never seem to fix the flaws. Customer support is also ... out there.
I hate to simply tell you to dump it, after you spent money on it, but that would probably be the best solution. The words "Pinnacle" and "problem" seem to go hand-in-hand.
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You have a nice VCR. You have a nice capture card. You are using a great codec. I also use MJPEG and uncompressed AVI quite a bit too. While using one of those may alleviate this Studio 9 issue, the odds of you defeating one problem just to face another is very likely (sound sync issues, crashing software, etc).
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Advising you on an editing program depends mostly on what you want to do:
- Budget is one factor.
- The next factor is do you plan to always work in 720x480 files?
- Are you exporting these directly to MPEG-2 files from the editor? For burning to DVD.
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ADOBE PREMIERE
I use Adobe Premiere 6.5
The current version is Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5
They also make Adobe Premiere Elements 1.0
Premiere 6.5 is fine, and comes with an excellent MPEG Encoder. The PRO has lots of extras most people never use, and it costs a lot more. The Elements version only works with 720x480 video.
If really the full version (not pirated fakes), these are a steal:
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http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...category=185&i tem=3963131971
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http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...category=41877 &item=7140998577
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Another freebie that exists is Avid Free DV. A stripped version of AVID Xpress DV. I have not worked with it much to date, so not sure how cooperative it is with exporting to MPEG encoders. It is also limited in the kind of input (mostly DV AVI, 720x480).
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Another issue is do you really need an editor? Or at least an NLE of this caliber. Are you simply transferring the tapes, and maybe clipping out unwanted footage? Or are you adding effects and transitions, and doing all kinds of fancy things to the video? More than digital scissors and paste (cut, splice).
You may not even need an editor like that. We can work on getting a much different (much cheaper) solution for you.
So ... what is the full plan for these videos, what other software have you got, after Pinnacle Studio .. what do you do next (or want to do next)?
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Get back to me on the many above questions...
Let me know if any of this helps, more questions, etc...