Get a FREE fully-working copy of Steganos Security Suite 7 (worth £49.99) when you sign up to the Practical PC Newsletter. Review: Pinnacle DC10+
Iain Laskey looks at a cheap way to edit your precious holiday videos.
| Product | DC10+ |
|---|---|
| Company | Pinnacle |
| Web | www.pinnaclesys.com |
| Price | £149 |
| We like | Good for beginners |
| We don't like | Let down by capture foibles |
| Rating | 7/10 |
| Requirements |
While many people have moved over to digital video using either Digital8 or DV, a lot of camcorder users are still more than happy with their Hi8, Video8 and VHS-C machines. The digital users have the luxury of Firewire and its ease of use when capturing and re-recording edited footage. However, the analogue users have to look to slightly more complex hardware to do the job.
The Pinnacle Studio DC10+ consists of a PCI card and editing software. The card installs effortlessly as does the software. The card offers composite and s-video in and out connectors totalling four sockets in all. The audio side is handled by your own sound card which cuts costs but may cause problems. More on that later.
Capture
I started by capturing some Hi8 footage. The DC10+ whilst not in the semi-pro league does manage to capture footage to a commendable standard. At capture time you can adjust the brightness, colour and so on to help compensate for a sub optimal recording. The brightness adjustment can work wonders and brings out a surprising amount of detail on dark indoor shots. You can also choose the quality of the capture between three preset standards as well as a custom one.
Unfortunately, the first niggle raised its head here. The capture software component seemed to have trouble properly initialising the hardware. If I captured some footage, edited a bit and then went to capture more, it often showed a corrupted screen requiring a full power down/reboot to get it working properly again. I found that other packages such as the excellent (and free) VirtualDub could capture the footage quite happily when the Pinnacle Studio software just showed garbage. Another oddity was the larger number of dropped frames when using the Pinnacle software. VirtualDub had far less.
Pinnacle has upgrade patches you can download and install as well as a custom PCI patch which claims to improve the dropped frame situation. The test machine sported twin UDMA100 40Gb drives and a PIII/950 so I would have expected no frame drops at all.
Whilst the capture problems are annoying, they aren't show stoppers and the quality of the resulting AVI files is very good indeed. I grabbed some footage then copied it back to an S-VHS deck via an s-video cable and compared the original to the copy and the differences, whilst there, were minimal which is creditable at this price point.
Editing
The actual editing is done via Pinnacle Studio software which is common to various products in their range. It allows all the expected functions including a wide range of transitions, most of which you'll probably never use. A glaring omission is any kind of 3D transitions. You can add music from a CD as well as a voice over and adjust the levels of each. One major bonus is the built in music generator which produces music in a wide variety of styles and moods to whatever length you specify. A large number of samples are used to ensure high quality sounds so when you specify an ethnic sounding slow piece 4 minutes and 8 seconds long, that's just what you'll get.
The built in title generator works well and has lots of preset styles although you can create your own style if needed. These can be used in conjunction with the transitions to create some nice effects.
I mentioned earlier that your sound card may be an issue. The system works by taking the audio from your sound card having first been digitised by the card in to a digital stream. More expensive cards have good analogue to digital conversion accuracy with tightly controlled clocks. Cheaper ones often have slight errors here which in the normal course of events wouldn't be a problem. However, if the software is expecting the card to be digitising audio at 25K and it is actually working at 25.01K then the audio will slowly drift out of time with the video and on a longer clip say 8-10 minutes, an obvious audio synchronisation problem can occur. Some users have found differences as great as 3-4 seconds over a half hour movie before changing their sound card. Something to watch out for.
Output
The final output can be made to tape or an AVI file. Whichever you choose, the chances are some rendering will be needed. Any transitions, titles and effects need to be rendered before the final output is made and this could well be time to make the tea on a longer project. As other packages often render this entire movie, this smarter way of working is a great time saver though and is to be commended.
Pinnacle's web site has lots of useful information as well as a bulletin board which is actively monitored by Pinnacle. The latter can provide a great resource if you have any questions or are experiencing problems.
Conclusion
The Pinnacle Studio DC10+ is a fine system for the price albeit not without its faults particularly on the capture side. However. If you can work round these, the quality is good and the Studio software is extremely easy to use yet able to produce quite impressive results. Power users may want to consider upgrading the editing software to the newly released Studio 7 if you find you outgrow the supplied Studio software.
