Product: Pinnacle Studio DV
Company: Pinnacle Systems
Website: http://www.pinnaclesys.com
Estimated Street Price: $199.00
Review By: Julien Jay

Features

Once your card & your camcorder are properly setup, it’s a child game to capture videos! Launch the StudioDV software, click the capture tab and push the record button. The video will instantly start playing through your camcorder and you’ll see it in the preview window. You’ll be able to capture videos in real time with a resolution of 720*576 in real colors at the incredible speed of 3.6Mbps. With such an important data transfer rate, you’ll have to have enough free hard disk space. Ten minutes of high quality video fits on 2.2 GB! But the quality of the captured video is really good!

Well due to the digital Mini-DV standard the quality of the captured videos is great and unbeatable! You’ll never see so beautiful videos from your computer or from your TV once you’ll mount them. However like in previous releases of the Studio DV software we regret the fair preview quality when mounting the videos. Hopefully once the film is compiled the quality is great and unrivalled!

Studio Software

As with other Studio Hardware, Studio DV comes with the Pinnacle Studio software (version in the box: 1.00 but the last one available through the Web is 1.0). This great software is in fact ”movie maker” software. Plug your DV camcorder to your Studio DV board and click capture! The Studio software will capture your video, and automatically detects scenes. It’ll allow you to change sounds or to add music from sound files or from your CD-Audio tracks to your favorite movies. 

You’ll even be able to record your own voice directly from Studio. You can choose transitions between each video scene (more than 100 transitions effects are available, thanks to SpiceRack!) and you can even add great titles by using the pinnacle award winning title software: TitleDeko (you’ll also be able to make scrolling titles!). The time code toolbar will make your job easy to better manage the scenes. Sure you’ll be able to cut, add, paste video pieces in one scene. A graph shows you the hard disk used space when you capture videos. You can change/adjust the brightness, contrast… before capturing videos.

 Obviously this wonderful red Studio DV board captures stereo audio from your camcorder (It supports PCM sound at 32 or 48 KHz) It’s really a good, easy-to-use software. With this great device, you’ll transform your bothering videos in funny ones that you’ll be proud to show to family or friends. The final video can be saved in different file formats: AVI, MPEG or even RealVideo to send your videos over the Internet with streaming technology. The software can be automatically updated via Internet. Sometimes professional users will wonder themselves why they continue to use Premiere when the Studio software is so simple and user friendly.

To transfer your mounted film let your Mini-DV camcorder plugged onto your DV board and set in REC mode then in the create film tab push the record button. Your mounted and customized video will be automatically recorded on your mini-DV camcorder on the tape of your choice. Now you just have to transfer the film to a VHS VCR or to carry your camcorder to show your films to friends & family! Please also note that Studio DV also allows you to capture fixed pictures from your video if you want to print the face of your friend after a celebrated dinner.

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