Pinnacle DV500 DVD Review

The DV500 DVD was the first dual stream video editing card to break into the Prosumer market. It started off as the DV500, was later revised as the DV500 Plus and then in 2002 was software updated to the DV500 DVD. The addition of the DVD was to emphasise that the product now had the ability to export to MPEG 2 using a C-Cube chipset (hardware acceleration). The product's external breakout box (pictured below) was also updated to include a DV port that was previously only available on the card itself.

The great attraction of the DV500 product, irrespective of the various names it went under, was that it came with a wealth of software that would otherwise have cost more than the card itself. Adobe's Premiere was included as was Adobe Photoshop and various other packages like TitleDeko, Pinnacle DV Tools, Impression DVD SE and Hollywood FX.

However, the DV500 was always an in-between kind of product targeted neither exclusively at the professional market, nor at the home/consumer market. Perhaps that was the reason for it's phenomenal success. Home buyers bought it as a cheap route to getting Premiere, professionals bought it because it was the most affordable of the prosumer cards. Another reason for it's popularity could have been it's support for both analogue inputs and outputs plus a firewire port if you did plan to upgrade your camcorder at some point. All of this was via the breakout box that was a handy way of getting the connectors to the top of your desk to save fiddling around at the back of your PC.

The real-time claim was always to be taken with a pinch of salt as the real-time capabilities were very limited. As far as special effects were concerned - and real-time editing for that matter - products like the Matrox 2500 (now the Matrox RT.X100) outclassed the DV500 DVD. But the reason we would most advise against this product is that Pinnacle seem to have lost interest in developing, and perhaps even manufacturing, the DV500 DVD. More on Pinnacle's future.

Features of the DV500 DVD

Digital and analog input/output - for all VCRs and camcorders 
New break-out box with integrated FireWire 1394 port 
Even faster Pinnacle DV² Codec 
MPEG2 import for re-editing of DVD projects with intelligent rendering 
Real time keyframeable effects 
Fast and slow motion effects 
Real time slow motion in preview quality 
Optimized workflow for DVD authoring 
Analog and DV capture without file size limitation 
Analog cutlist playback 
DV cutlist playback 
Automatic scene detection to Premiere Storyboard 

Software Included

Adobe Premiere 6.5 
Pinnacle Impression DVD SE 
Pinnacle Performance Tools 
Pinnacle Hollywood FX 
Pinnacle SceneCutter 
Pinnacle TitleDeko RT 
Pinnacle DV Tools 

Matrox RT.X10 vs DV500: click here

Comparison of the various versions of the DV500 product

Support for the DV500 series of products

A glowing review for the DV500 DVD

Download the datasheet (Warning: PDF, may take a while)