Laptops UK
Pinnacle Instant CD/DVD 8.0 | |
Brand: Pinnacle Systems EAN: 0613570209577 Label: Pinnacle Systems (UK) Manufacturer: Pinnacle Systems (UK) Model: 0613570206170 Platform: Windows Me, Windows NT, Windows 98, Windows XP Publisher: Pinnacle Systems (UK) Release Date: October 10, 2003 Sales Rank: 1321 Studio: Pinnacle Systems (UK) Accessories:
Editorial Review: Amazon.co.uk Review: Designed as a general-purpose application suite for anybody with a CD or DVD recorder, Pinnacle Instant CD/DVD 8.0 consolidates Pinnacle's Instant applications behind a new interface. This is a pretty comprehensive suite of programs designed to handle most of the things you might want to record onto a CD or DVD. The easiest way to approach it is from the starter screen, which offers four tabs for the different kinds of task you might want to complete: Create, Copy, Media and Extras. All the applications have been given a new look, reminiscent of the Apple Aqua interface. The Create button leads to four options for creating data, audio and MP3 discs under Instant Disc and VideoCDs and DVDs under Expression. Instant Disc works in a similar way to Nero or Easy CD, and makes it easy to save things to recordable discs by dragging and dropping files or audio tracks. Expression is a very basic video editor, which enables you to split and join sections of digital video, add a front-end menu and burn the results to a VideoCD or DVD. The Copy functions of Instant CD/DVD 8 are handled by Instant Copy and Instant Backup, and cover copy, back-up and restore. Instant Copy does just that, copying non-protected CDs or DVDs from one disc to another. You can also create a disc image to hold on your hard drive for super-fast access through Instant Drive. Instant Backup offers little extra over and above the backup program supplied with Windows. Media functions are provided by Instant Audio and Instant Music. Instant Audio handles the compilation of MP3, Wave, Aiff, Real Audio and WMA files, recorded from a variety of different audio sources. It also supports the new MP3Pro format, which halves the size of MP3 files while maintaining their audio quality. Instant Music is a drag-and-drop sample sequencer, where you can pull together music in up to 16 stereo tracks. One hundred high-quality wav samples are supplied, all in a strong techno idiom. Samples from other sources should work, too. Extras include Instant Write, which sits as an icon on your desktop for you to drag files over to burn them directly to CD or DVD, and Instant Cinema, which plays DVD movies in the same way as WinDVD or PowerDVD. --Simon Williams Pinnacle Systems (UK) See more information on Pinnacle Instant CD/DVD 8.0 at Amazon UK or at Amazon.com Average Rating:  Rating:  - It is nearly 2009 and this is still rubbishPinnacle Studio 7 is the worst piece of software I have ever used in 20 years of working on PC's. No support from the maker, it will just about copy CD's but try to do anything with DVD's and it crashes XP every time. Avoid like the plague. Rating: - Continual system crashesI bought this software for my HP Pavilion a250n and it caused the system to crash numerous times. Finally, I uninstalled the software only to find out that my disks could not be read without the UDF support. I would advise anyone considering this software to use another company's. The company put out a patch but my xp system still crashes. As soon as I get finished finalizing all the disks I burned I am removing it from my computer forever. Rating:  - Works very well for me!I wanted to backup directly to DVDRW using drag and drop as well as xcopy. Pinnacle is the only product I've found, so far, that does that. (There may well be others.) It seems to work very well on my system. I've seen the speed comments from others, but cannot agree that it is 'slow'. Since I run this every night using a bat file, it doesn't matter anyway. If you're looking for an easy to use product for backing up to DVD, go for it. I have been running the product for a while without adverse effect to my system. I've no comments about all the other features it has. Rating:  - OK but ?too simpleThis came packaged with my pc which is pretty powerful performance all bells and whistles and worked fine for the first few months but then started playing up. It mysteriously stopped recogising my cd/dvd rw and I had real trouble writing to discs at a crucial moment. I had to download the trial version of nero which sorted the problem and I could write to disc again. There was no way of telling what was going on and the help / support wasn't that helpful. It was good while it lasted and I'm left in a bit of a quandry now as to what to finally purchase as the nero software hasn't great reviews on the amazon site either? I think I'll try nero and write a review after using it for the demo period. Any good and I'll buy that. Rating: - Depends what you want to doThis is basically "does everything" software, for playing cd', dvd's, ripping, burning, editing video, making data discs...the lot. Obviously you need a decent CD/DVD burner drive. And a HIGH spec PC with loads of RAM, hard drive space and a FAST processor (mine's a 3.3GHz AMD). Got this with mine, and initially it was fine. You probably need a firewire card + cable, but it's a doddle transferring film from my miniDV camcorder (sony HC30), editing it, making menu's, and burning. The problems start if you try and do anything more clever such as using avi, divX, wma or mpg files. The program will only accept a very limited number of formats, and sometimes you don't find this out until you've spent ages editing and get to the burn stage: the process stops at 25-50% and just keeps re-cycling ad infinitum. Other times the program crashes during edit, usually when scrolling quickly through the video (?can't cope with the volume of data?). Or n my latest attempt, the whole thing goes fine, but in the final product the video and audio are at slightly different speeds, so as the film plays they become out of sync, which is REALLY annoying. So by all means make CD's, data discs, play DVD's and edit/burn home movies. But for DVD's from other sources, so far it's garbage. Pinnacle Instant CD/DVD 8.0 | |
