Now that people have been using them for a while; how do you feel that Studio 14 compares witht he preceding versions?

 What do you like about it?

 What don't you like?

Considering upgrading soon, but wondered if there are new bugs that I should wait for them to patch.

If you have been reading this forum you should come to one conclusion very quickly. Wait for at least a year...........................................................................................

Buddy

budtow:

If you have been reading this forum you should come to one conclusion very quickly. Wait for at least a year...........................................................................................

Buddy,

That's good advice for any software.  Windows 2000 didn't become reliable until SP4, Windows XP not until SP2, Pinnacle Liquid not until 7.2 (which happens to be the last), and the list goes on.  Maybe Pinnacle will do what Microsoft is doing with Vista, namely not spend too much time fixing S 14, but come out with S 15 next year with the problems fixed.

One can only hope!

VE7AXO:

    not spend too much time fixing S 14, but come out with S 15 next year with the problems fixed.

no, no, no....

They've been doing that since ver 10........never fixing - just new version (10>11 was the WORST!  New ver with all of the previous probs!) 

I have no experience with Studio 14.  I do have experience with 11 and then with 12.  I migrated to 12 hoping it would be more stable than 11 and was sadly disappointed.  When it works, I'm not that unhappy with it but it is FLAKY AS A THREE DOLLAR BILL!

I've been fooling with computers since the 60's and am a professional computer repair person.  I suppose I could have kept a log of all the snafu's but I haven't.  I can assure you that there is a feeling you get with solid software and it has never been there for Studio.  Breathe on it and it will fall apart.

 Consequently, I will throw no more good money after bad.  My advice - Be afraid, be very afraid.

alexcomp:

 ... I could have kept a log of all the snafu's but I haven't. 

How about a short list of key recurring instances where problems occur?  A few details help.

For instance, does your preview screen often go black, as described in this thread?

http://forums.pinnaclesys.com/forums/permalink/205569/202410/ShowThread.aspx#202410 

Any opinions about the comparable performance of PD8, PE8, SV, Corel, Nero, or Roxio?  Nero's editing features are so spare, that it can't really be compared, but the others warrant comparison.

With Vista Ultimate 64, audio would not play properly most of the time.  Seemed to be a conflict with sound resource allocation - very annoying.  This far, this issue has not come up after my upgrade to W7.

 Recently, I've been doing a few simple video projects and I've had several crashes where the program just keeps on cranking on a "make movie" but never finishes.  A while back I was doing some complicated effects and I could break the program reliably when it came to a certain effect in the rendering process - no I could never remember and describe it properly.

 Burning a disk earlier today, it took forever to complete the disk - ten minutes or more grinding away on the leadout.  I've owned and followed this software for three or four years now and I've seen dozens of comments about various issues and the general perception that the Pinnacle people just keep on cranking out new versions but never get the previous ones "settled".  I couldn't agree more.

My little tests have gone okay so far, but I've yet to complete a project.  They just released the 3rd patch for Sony Vegas Pro 9--sometimes it takes a while to work all the bugs out of a new program . 

Pinnacle Studio has been for me, however, the best video editing program I've worked with in terms of usability and being able to work with every file format my various cameras produce.  I've tried a lot of different editors and this has been the best for me in many ways.  If they would only allow more than 2 video tracks I'd love it even more, but you can't have everything.

 BTW if you think PS 14 has issues, just try Premiere Elements 8--I tried it and did not buy it.  It howls at the moon.

Two things that are slowing me down with S14. One is that it seems (editing HD) that it's a lot more resource hungry that 12. While background rendering it's hard to move the scrubber and get smooth audio payback so I can adjust the lenth of the picture to match the beat in the music. Another that really slows me down is the mouse wheel. In S12 I could fly forward and backwards in the timeline by spinning my mouse wheel. In S14 each click of the wheel is 1 frame so I just about have my mouse wheel worn out now and a sore finger. I haven't run across a way to change the sensitivity of this.

Perhaps if you decresed the size of your preview movie you could free up some resources, have you tried that?

 It's evident that some patching is to be done, but that's to be expected I suppose.

This is all a bit of redux . In the days of Studio 7 editing DV challenged the existing hardware. Now with some of the highly compressed HD variants out there, we are back to square one. The rules that applied back then are even more relevant today.

Do not attempt to fit a square peg in a round hole. Stay with proven tech that has worked for other users.

Your pc should be as clean as possible, most software problems can be traced to conflicting codecs.

Anti Virus and disk indexing are not you friends as regards to intrusion in a running process.

If you are attempting to install on a underspecified pc, be prepared for wasted time.

Use quality components on a pc build. Many instabilities can be traced to cut rate memory. I assemble my own pc's free from all the trials that come on most manufacturer's boxes.Many of these trials install their own codecs that can interfere.

Do not click ahead of what the pc can do. The one potato two potato three potato is a good rule.

Version. *.0 can be expected to have some problems, you should ask yourself what the new version will give you that you really need.

Lastly Studio has always been marketed as a consumer app, capable of some really cool stuff, but is not intended for mission critical professional work. Various vendors, not the least Avid market applications that are rock solid, and do exactly what is on the box.

Is makin a BR DVD using AVCHD finally working, I mean Not degrading the PQ  when using AVCHDas the source, like from a Canon HG21? And can I save to file in AVCHD? And is there no forced re-encoding?

Eugene

Eugene

Not Sure what you mean. An AVCHD HD burned onto std red DVD is bitrate limited to insure compatability with the majority of players that will accept AVCHD disks.

A "real" BD disk can be authored in excess of 35mbs, but if the original media is much lower, depending on camera settings, little is gained.

BD disks can be either VC-1 or MPEG2.. I cannot speak for VC-1, I saw much less quality loss outputting red HDDVD red disks than red AVCHD disks. The HDDVD disks required no transcoding from the fused Liquid timeline, HDV to AVCHD took hours, and at best quality, a noticable dropoff.

Eugene1:

Is makin a BR DVD using AVCHD finally working, I mean Not degrading the PQ  when using AVCHDas the source, like from a Canon HG21? And can I save to file in AVCHD? And is there no forced re-encoding?

Based on what I read, Studio 14 can export directly to h.264 formats, whereas with S12.1 one could do that only by way of creating HD disc images and then finding the m2ts file in the STREAM folder.  However, the manual and screen shots do not allow a non-owner to determine if the S14 bitrate ceilings are any higher than S12.1.  The other quandary is that, although S12.1's stated ceiling was 17mbps for AVCHD-DVD and 25mbps for BDMV-MPEG, playback of the resulting files do not seem to show anything over about 20mbps.  Since most Sony or Panasonic AVCHD is 17mbps or lower, that might not signify a real restraint anyway.  Only an owner of a Canon (the latest Vixias or perhaps a EOS 5D Mii DSLR), with clips shot at 24mbps or higher, would be able to verify with precision.  In principle, BD can be up to 35mbps, but that setting is meaningful only if the source video was shot at such a rate, the video motion is fast or complex, the lighting is good, and used a camera with a big sensor.  Otherwise, as with 20mp stills shot with a digicam with a 1/2.3" sensor, the real result is only a bigger file.

Studio 14 still does not offer "smart render," and that function remains (even with PD8 or Nero) limited to video exported without effects.  If one inserts transitions or overlays, or even a few still shots, the whole video must be recoded.  I don't know if a simple title at the outset of a timeline prompts a full recode, though.

Studio 14 does use a different AVCHD codec than Studio 12, but I know of no side-by-side quality comparisons.  These would have to involve files in native format, not YouTube uploads.  It is quite unlikely that any review by a "trade" publication will delve into such details. Most get no deeper than comparing the interface color or counting the available transitions.  If I had to meet a 1-day deadline for a review and get the same chump-change, no matter how serious or superficial the review, I'd probably be just as lax, but more cautious about any blanket praise or criticism.

TVJohn:

Lastly Studio has always been marketed as a consumer app, capable of some really cool stuff, but is not intended for mission critical professional work. Various vendors, not the least Avid market applications that are rock solid, and do exactly what is on the box.

Yet it is puzzling that some people with quad core, 64bit Win7, Nvidia 9xxx systems report trouble.  My core 2 duo system is almost ante-delluvian, yet I manage (with great care) to edit rather lengthy 1440x1080i AVCHD projects.   When my preview screen blacks-out, I know I've pushed to the limits of my GPU and must reload, or conduct any further complex edits as a sub-unit, later importing it into the final project.

As for disc image burns that never finish the "writing final file," I note this occasionally happens to me in SD but not BD.  Why one and not the other, I have no clue.  However, the problem in the SD projects seems to be in proportion to the complexity of the menu and chapter structures, plus the size of the project.  The alternative solutions include:

1. Delete the render files and re-render. 
2. Simplify or rebuild the menus and chapters.
3. Find the VOB files in the disc image beset with the WFF hang, change their suffix to MPG, import them into a new timeline, recreate the menus, and then burn to a separate image.  The stress on the rendering is evidently very low when the streams are thus pre-edited.  The image burns fast and there is no WFF problem.

Until a consensus list of "known issues" appears for Studio 14, it seems rather hazardous to bear the hassle and hazards.  Better the devil one knows....

Has anyone with S14 successfully burned to DVD+R DL?

Has anyone with S14 successfully burned to DVD+R DL?