Pinnacle Studio Reviews 199

Audio mutes by editing and exporting. Too many crashes as well

Pinnacle used to be great.. I had it running on an AMD FX-8350 pc.. Edited a lot of video and then upgraded to studio 22... No probs.. Upgrade to studio 23 and issues started. I haven't been able to edit video and export for nearly 2 years. I've tried everything.. They say re import your files etc.. Blah Blah..
I complained and pinnacle support said "get the new version".. So I upgraded to 24.. I also upgraded my PC.. Ryzen 7 3700x, 64gb 3600mhz ram.. very fast pcie ssd etc..
Studio 24 starts to slow then just shuts down and it won't restart till the PC is rebooted.. No error message. Support kept asking for the error message which did not exist.. Then run as administrator and set priority to high.. No good.. I asked for my money back.. And am looking at other products that don't need a subscription...

I still have studio 21 so I may try that again also. I don't recommend Pinnacle studio.

It may be called Pinnacle but it is NOT the pinnacle of video editing. The software is fully featured and offers many options for the casual and expert video editor. But it has remained unstable throughout many iterations and Studio 24 is no exception. To put it simply, it crashes A LOT. Within one hour I had 5 crashes just navigating between menus. No even rendering or importing files. I am bewildered why Pinnacle allow this as they have failed to create a stable platform for video editing.

I even reinstalled Windows 10 but I still crashes. I cannot tell you how disappointed I am with this latest release. It simply isn't fit for purpose.

Studio used to be a great program.. Going back a long time.. I upgraded my PC, that is it's all brand new with an X570 board and Ryzen 7 3700x, 64gb ram etc... And the program struggles. It becomes non responsive and never comes back.. Having spent hours editing and not even finished for it to freeze is just not on.. Time to look at something else

I bought Pinnacle Studio 18, I guess around 7 or 8 years ago and I loved it. It was a relatively inexpensive way to get great videos done like the big boys but at a fraction of the cost. I've kept upgrading until Studio 23 Ultimate. With each upgrade, it seemed to get worse and worse until now I can't export a video without the audio cutting off before the end. I've emailed back and forth with their tech team and they kept give me the same old generic uninstall/reinstall, change these settings and it will fix your problem. 8 days later they're still giving me the same old crap and nothing is really being done. This company has really gone down the tubes. I would not recommend that anyone spend a dime with this company or on their product.

I wish I could give it less than one star. Everything is wrong with this. I don't think it was thought through before released. I paid for it through Paypal and now I am going to try and get a refund through them.

I have spent hours trying to make this work!!!

The program crashes a lot and is so buggy just can’t work with it, and it’s not my computer which is top notch as well. :(

its worse program ever crashes like helkl

After months of hair pulling and neighbor-disturbing yelling at Pinnacle Studio 23 Ultimate, I posted a detailed description of a reproducible issue with rendering on Pinnacle's user forum website. I was witnessing certain sections of the timeline repeatedly re-rendering even though no changes to that portion of the timeline had been made. I also noticed that the affected timeline segments would be rendered up to the 99.9 percent mark, followed by an exact 90 seconds of inactivity before that section's render indicator completed. You can find my 'discovery'
in the "Movie Editor" sub-section in the thread "Render Issues with Newest 23U Patches". I went so far as to create a video on You-Tube documenting the 90 second "PAUSE". You'll find the link in one of the messages. The thread has had over a thousand views but only 25 views of the video have occurred so far. I would be very interested if any other 23U users are experiencing this BUG. I tried to include the video's link, but that isn't allowed in reviews. Reluctantly, I have switched back to 21.5U as 23U is unusable in its current state. And as usual, Corel has rushed a new version out the door before it was ready and before fixing all the known issues in the previous version. Who do they think they are? Microsoft ???

I have been using this software for 14 years, starting with version 9 and currently using V12.1, 19.1 and 23 on 5 different PCs in my business. This software has quite literally powered my business for all those. That said, I have a love/hate relationship with it.

Crashes are a daily occurrence on all versions, however, since they introduced crash recovery with V12 nothing is lost.

Pinnacle Studio has the best workflow of any NLE and is surprisingly powerful, especially the new versions, far more user friendly than Sony Vegas Professional for example and much much faster at getting the job done.

The problem lies with it's quirkiness. Do things in the right way and you won't have many issues, do anything lightly out of the ordinary and you have a lockup situation on your hands.

I recommend going to the forums and talking to the avid fans (pun intended) who will help guide you and have seen almost all issues before.

I never had a problem with customer support, even getting a refund for one product in under an hour.

So many crashes, horribly long rendering time, digital error upon error in the finished product, digital and audio errors that come from transitions and titles, and non-existent "customer service" department that only leaves it up to you to fix through reinstallation, etc.

Lost many, many months (literally) rendering and rerendering files only to have digitally damaged end-product...and redo, redo, redo.

DO NOT buy this software. It's loaded with features--but it simply doesn't work and is not stood-by with a customer service dept that is beyond horrible.

I bought this software Pinnacle Studio 23 because they offered a full refund if i was unsatisfied.
The software is buggy, many of the tools and features did not function and this caused me great misery.
I asked for my money back as clearly the product was faulty, perhaps rushed to market unfinished.
At any rate DO NOT BUY. They refused to refund my purchase:
"Thank you for contacting Corel Customer Support.

We've forwarded your issue to the concern team and there is no fix as of now. Please await for an update. Thanks for your time and patience..

Thank you,
Nishanth
Corel Customer Support"

OK, I have used Pinnacle studio for so many years, And it would seem, that when you buy a version, and a new one comes out, Like they keep advertising (Pop ups)

your Original version that you paid for Has Problems, You contact support, First thing they say, Your version is not supported, Upgrade, (More Money)

I have just spent 3 days in Support, as my Pinnacle 20 stopped working and kept crashing, support can only say upgrade for the cost of £59 and it will be ok.

I haven fallen for this Trap so many times with Pinnacle as I need it to complete my work, So i have upgraded at a Cost.

No More, after this time, there are other Editors out there that offer better support, and are not out to con you with upgrades

I had Studio 15 and then purchased 23 Ultimate. The program worked fine for a while but as the project got longer, it was painful to always manually enter data to get effects right plus hourly crashes. I was patient but now that I am 99% complete on the video, I now find that the export drops my audio track near the end of the video. No reason for this. I also had a previous support issue where the Video Ball effect that worked great on my Studio 15 version is completely whacked out on the 23 version. Videos within the ball are upside down and cropped, with artifacts of video frames poking through the start and end frames. After going to support, I got instructions on clearing and re-building the effects libraries which I did and it still didn't resolve the issue. I compared the .axt files for this effect between Studio 15 and Studio 23 and they are exactly the same, so I don't get it. I used to love Corel products, but this is very disappointing.

I have Pinnacle 23 and its super buggy. it keeps kicking me out. It works great outside of that, but (a big BUT) it's very hard to work when you keep getting kicked out or it becomes glitchy.

I do like Pinnacle Studio BUT BUT BUT.

It does keep crashing (and I have a very good PC), but at least it doesn't seem to lose work after a crash and you can continue.

WHY OH WHY is in not possible (if you want to) to upgrade. The only choice is to buy the new version from scratch, as if you have never had it before. This cannot be called an "upgrade" and is a running sore.

The programme started to go wrong just recently, so I looked at the Pinnacle official help. They said, try the following which might or might not work, and then started to suggest that I needed to do all sorts of fundamental changes to my PC (move the entire My Documents for instance and do a lot of other things). Their tone was as if it was a tiny suggestion (they may as well have said "smash your computer, then buy a new one". Actually, I looked online, and I was recommended to delete a load of files in the AppData folder so that the programme would go back to installation settings without having to reinstall. That has worked, no thanks to Pinnacle. There were really annoying faults which I thought seemed like I was doing something wrong, like putting in text it was not visible on the screen even when typed in the box at the top right. Plus the programme started crashing EVERY TIME I pressed "import". I was relieved that I didn't have to install the programme again, because I had to do this once before and it was a huge hassle (when I got a new PC). My other experience with Avid is with Sibelius music software, where they bought up the original programme, did very little except give the interface a quasi-modern look, and found ever-more imaginative ways to take people's money.

So: good basic programme. Some quite significant issues with the programme (why should they accept that this programme crashes, or entirely clogs up when you have made a few videos). Very bad and confusing customer services. It makes me very angry that so-called updates are just buying the programme from scratch, which I feel totally not looked after as a customer.

I've never dealt with something so glitchy in my life. The audio ALWAYS gets messed up. The ONLY way to make videos is very short clips, over and over. Even then it likes to mess up. Video/audio shifts only when exporting the final movie or mutes completely. After the last update, it would mute in the audio settings only. Now it mutes audio clips randomly WHILE editing. I tried customer support to be told, "We don't have that issue on our end." Wow. Such support. Much wow.
Yes I have a good computer. Yes I'm tech savvy. THATS THE ONLY REASON IT WORKS AT ALL.

BUT HEY! after you spend .. x amount of hours learning the glitches, the movie itself looks pretty good.

I told them to stop a refund but they did not, I contacted them for over 10 times. They said the money has already been refunded. But I looked in my bank I did not have a refund. Bad Customer Service.

fortunately I tried the free trial for Pinnacle Studio so I have not forked over any money but it doesn't change the fact I have wasted many hours of my time telling myself there must be a way to do this until I walk away, than come back with no better results, Pinnacle is barely functional and would be more precise to say it is disfunctional.

I share the views of the others reviewers here only I wish I had read their reviews BEFORE shelling out and wasting money on this totally useless 'upgrade' First up I have been a Pinnacle studio user right from the very start. the earliest versions (up to 15) were great. Good reliable stable program that worked well. In got taken over by Avid. They completely redesigned it (I was on the beta test panel) I never really understood their logic in to getting to consumer oriented products) It was more high ended that the original and and totally different. However after some initial bugs and problems it worked pretty well.However this was taken over by Corel. The earlier versions 18 19 & 20 worked pretty well. When I upgraded my video editing PC it worked fast and I got tasks done. Since then in spite of adding all sorts of bells and whistles the core program has got progressively worse until this awful manifestation (23) appeared and now it is practically unusable for longer projects. Instead pf being a fast program that enables me to get projects completed it is sluggish, constantly hangs up. i can never get to use the fancy new features as the core program is so buggy slow and unreliable. Sometimes I just wish for doing fairly straightforward edits that I could go back to the original Pinnacle. (I think I still have the install disks for 14 or 15) It would be interesting to see how it coped compared to this ghastly version --- watch this space!!! I am really disappointed with this and in spite of doing all the tweaks I know, having a dedicated fast drive just for rendering 64 bit Windows 16mb memory etc it it hopelessly slow and prone to freezing and taking far to long to get projects done. Methinks l i will dig out my old vers 20 or 21 files and go back a couple of versions! Maybe back to 15 and see how they fare
One thing i WONT be doing is to upgrade any further unless it comes with an ironclad money back guarantee - which I would likely need to claim! I just dont have confidence in any more upgrades