Pinnacle Studio MovieBox DV 9.0

Pinnacle Studio MovieBox DV 9.0 Review: Once I set up the wires to connect power and hardware from the videocassette player to the computer, it converted the signal to digital on an external hard drive without any problems in real time. Completing MPEG encoding takes a lot of time (hours).

Editing is somewhat tricky. I tried several editing programs (MyDVD and NeoDVD) in addition to Pinnacle before I caught on to the editing.

Video editing takes lots of hard drive space what with step one files for conversion to digital, step two files for editing, and step three files for encoding the movie. I also used DVDShrink to reduce the overall size of the file package for burning while making it more compatible with local DVD players. I used two 120GB firewire external drives with fans. Because of the long hours of constant computing, I used a powered dual fan cooler under the notebook. Hard drives, video player, notebook cooler and computer made a nice stack with the cables hanging down behind and Pinnacle off to the side. I needed a six point surge protector power source.