Pinnacle Instant CD/DVD 8.0

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

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.


Does what I wanted it for.   November 19, 2004
 3 out of 4 found this review helpful

I purchased Pinnacle Instant CD/DVD 8.0. purely for it's ability to copy DVD's. As another reviewer has said it does this job very well indeed. I use Nero for all my other burning requirements but in terms of a straight copy of a DVD the Pinnacle software is the quickest I've used. Try combining it with 'DVD Region Free' and I think you will find it really surpasses itself especially in being able to compress a dual layer DVD onto a single layer copy.