Graduating to Pinnacle Studio Ultimate
by
Brett Bumeter
Today, I put together a viral video and ran into a number of snags working the video with Camtasia, which is more of a screen capture program on steroids as opposed to a video editing software program. It will work in a pinch, but when you want to mix together multiple tracks of audio, or run multiple videos at the same time it starts to get a little stressed out.
A week ago I ordered Pinnacle Studio Ultimate (actually the MovieBox version) and I had it shipped the slowest way possible as I had several projects to close up and didn’t want the distraction of the new software to deal with.
The software got here today, and out of the box, it was crap.
That was soon fixed after I ran the update and then I was off to the races. I mention the crap part, because the out of the box experience really left something to be desired.
There was no explanations of the hardware setup other than a couple sentences with vague statements like, you can use the inputs plugs.
Now, these instructions might have been sufficient if the software worked out of the box, but it did not. I suspected initially that the software was fine.
When I went to trouble shoot the hardware (wiring) there were absolutely no guides to review or and nothing to confirm my settings.
So next I turned to updating the software.
I had version 11.05… and 11.1… was now available, not a big number difference for something that made the product non-functional out of the box.
The Actual Upgrade, Now that was a source of severe irritation. To upgrade,you have to go through help and click upgrade.
Nothing Abby-normal about that.
The trick is that the upgrade click defaults you into a home grown Pinnacle browser (internet explorer-esque). The browser requires that you login, but it does not prompt you to login, does not provide a login hyperlink or anything else.
I tried phoning support and while on hold, stumbled across an online version of support. The login for this was so complex (and incorrectly documented) that unfortunately I can not describe it here and if I had it to do over again, I would have run Camtasia to capture it!
Once I was logged in however, I went back through the Help Menu upgrade option and this time, I was sent to an upgrade page.
At that point there was an upgrade program that kicked in, but it got confused by running itself twice. I had to kill the upgrade through taskmanager and execute the upgrade manually through explorer.
As soon as the upgrade was finished and I rebooted, I clicked on the program and everything was running like a charm.
Wrapping things up
I am happy that the software is working. At about $100 I think it is still a bargain, but given the money I have seen Pinnacle spend on marketing, I would hope that they might do a little better on their customer interface on the internet and the out of the box experience. This was the type of situation that makes you want to cancel your wine clubs subscriptions and join a whiskey club instead. Fortunately, I can get back to work now that it is finally working.
Oh, one other thing, some of the other ‘bonus’ software (BIAS SoundSoap) that I received, requires that I enter in the license number every single time I start up the software. That is very very annoying too.
