Pinnacle Studio MovieBox 12 Plus (PC)

When the Firewire I/O ports decided to pack up on my main PC I had a choice of trying to find other ways of getting DV footage onto my existing computer, or face buying a new PC altogether. For a time I was recording onto DVD disk and reconverting the VOB files back to DV within Premiere Pro. At top quality there is a slight loss but buggering about with reversed field priority made that an eventual non-starter unless I 'filmised' everything by discarding one of the fields - another quality loss.Right now, I'm glad I tried the former route, although thinking that there would be a choice of converters to bring IEEE1394 signals in through the ubiquitous USB port foundered somewhat on finding exactly nothing. Luckily, I found this family of products which threatened to resolve this issue and read up as much as I could. I have used Pinnacle's Studio software before in its earliest incarnation, this was a revelation and cost-effective alternative to a prohibitlvely-expensive dedicated video capture card. It had a breakout box to capture a tiny resolution video through the parallel port which you could actually edit which the software converted into a edit list to control the camcorder and edit video recorder. The result - with care and a following wind - was surprisingly effective despite glitches and oddities here and there.For this MovieBox, apparent issues with rank drivers and required patches was something I was confident I could deal with so went for it. It does DV capture and output which was all I really ever wanted it, and within my preferred editing program Premiere Pro. Just as well really, for the Studio 14 editing software looks good and probably tastes good. But the inevitable crashing became too much by taking the entire PC down with it - this is appalling for a mature product that when it works, works very well.My reason for the three marks? The breakout box does what I wanted and does it well (through other programs than Studio) with the bonus that it works my more powerful laptop, meaning I have reason to keep that longer now. Future-proofing also means a wider choice of economical PC's in future without a Firewire port. Until I find any patches that will help the software though, Studio itself sadly remains as enigmatic as ever to me.

Works very well. I wanted a system to capture analogue video sources. This does the job very well without any frame dropping on my system.

The Movie Box did not recognise either the Hi8 analogue or the digital sony dv handycam. No advice other than the very helpful Check your cables!repeated ad nausium. It was only after the system crashed and I was directed by windows to the right bit of the unitelligable pinnacle web site to download a patch did it work!Pinnacle seem red hot on charging for extras, like you get one phone call to a Dutch help site for free after that you pay!As for the sowtware read my review on pinnacle studio 12 1

Having struggled for ages on a prehistoric version of which would not work properly, plus the fact that we had miles and miles of analogue film from an old camera, which, we had no chance before of transfer! That was until we found Studio Moviebox 12 Plus. We have now downloaded all the films and edited them and this was the easiest thing since sliced bread. The whole programme is a gods end, as I am no whizard at doing these sorts of things. So, If I can do it without any cursing (or very little)! so can you. I would certainly recommend this to anyone. The only down side being that the Hollywood clips to add to the film are not what one would call fantastic, but you can get by, and there are others to buy separately when required. I am certainly pleased that I saw this and bought it.

I read Adie Barrett's 3 star review, he had done exactly what I want to do, transfer DV video tape to DVD. I needed a 20 minute show for our son's forthcoming wedding. I loaded the Moviebox programme onto my computer, plugged in a borrowed Sony handicam and switched on. Over the years I've used a few editing systems starting with Pinnacle's Studio 8 and progressed to Adobe Premiere Pro and got on fine with them all. After a couple of minutes moviebox opened in edit mode, my first surprise was that it took 3 minutes to enter capture mode. I did manage to capture 25 seconds of video but the capture had dropped 43 frames with no audio capture present. Trying to close it down it froze. I uninstalled and reinstalled, exactly the same thing happened. I've poked and prodded but there's no improvement, Adie and I have swopped ideas and I have phoned the helpline, I may have a one off duff package but it has to go back, hence the one star rating.