I have used Studio 8 for some time now but this past week, while editing a wedding video I encountered a big problem. The audio quits when I am previewing the clips. The video runs fine. I have to quit the program then restart again in order for the sound to start up again but once I start any editing process, especially putting in transitions, the audio quits again. Inspite of this, I tried burning the movie onto a DVD and the sound came out fine except that I want to do more editing on the movie to fine tune it. My OS is Windows XP, CPU is Intel P4, 2.1 Gh speed, RAM is 512 Meg; captured video is in the external firewire hard drive. Can anybody help me?

[melliott1963]

Firstly, Studio is a notoriously 'buggy' product. Have you downloaded the latest patch for version 8 which will bring you up to version 8.12.7?

Your PC specification should easily be able to cope with video editing. A recommendation, however, is that you don't have anything else running at the same time as Studio.

Sorry I can't be of more help, but I've just ditched Pinnacle Studio, having used it since version 1.0, because of all the 'niggly' little problems that crop up for no apparent reason.

Thanks for your response. My studio version is 8.12. I have had good luck with this until now. I used to use Adobe Premiere LE version but had so much problem with it that I gave up on it and got Studio instead.
I decided to re-install Studio 8 after uninstalling it but then I could not get it restarted because it keeps saying that there is a problem with re-installation licencel. It keeps telling me to reinsert Disc One and go through the reinstallation process but the result is the same. So out of despleration, I went to System Tools and did "system restore" to a previous date when my program was working.
What are you going to replace your Studio with?

[melliott1963]

Well, after much deliberation and testing Ulead and Sony's offerings, I decided I prefered Sony's Vegas products. Vegas Movie Studio is good, and will probably suffice for most people, but I really really liked Vegas 5, so have decided to dig deep into my savings and go for this. It does everything I need and more, and runs really smoothly and fast on my PC, so, with any luck, I won't need to go through the constant cost of upgrading to every new release like I did with Pinnacle. In fact, over the years, I've probably spent more on Pinnacle Studio than Vegas 5 costs.

What I would say however, is that all four products I tried (Ulead's Video Studio and Media Studio Pro and both of Sony's Vegas products) all seemed really stable and I didn't experience a single crash or 'odd moment' like I've suffered with Pinnacle.

Despite going for Vegas 5, I'm going to use TMPGEnc's DVD Source Creator to convert from avi to MPEG as, from my experience, it seems to work about twice as fast as Vegas using the same quality VBR compression.

Hope this helps.

[vonhosen]

I use Vegas 5 & DVD Architect 2 (have been using them since Vegas 3) & they are fantastic stable prosumer products.

Sonic Foundry (owners before Sony bought them last year) & Sony have always offered very competitive upgrading whenever a new version comes out as well