Pinnacle CineWave CLASS ACTION SUIT

There is a rumor going around the production community about a
class action suit being filed against Pinnacle for the way in which
they have halted support for several products including Cinewave.
It is suspected that both Pinnacle and AVID (Pinnacle's projected new owner) are behind all of this.
Has anyone heard about this and how to sign up?

What's the point? It's not too difficult to see that Cinewave was coming to the end of it's natural lifespan with or without Avid taking Pinnacle over.
*Cinewave was way overpriced compared to competitors like Blackmagic and AJA
*CPUs have become much faster since Cinewave was launched so the days of needing to do RT effects on a capture card are over - software fx is clearly the way everything is going because it is far more flexible.
*I'd put money that Cinewave probably would not have been able to support the Dynamic RT in FCP5.
*From a business point of view, it's totally understandable that Pinnacle would want to concentrate on Windows based editing software rather than have the one lone Mac product that was becoming increasingly isolated in the FCP market.

The only thing that is still great about Cinewave is the mixed codecs capability but products come and products go...that's the way of the world.

Martin Baker
www.digital-heaven.co.uk

Pinnacle have had an awful habit of dropping any support at all for products once they're no longer flavour of the month. They did that to me with a DC30 card, and they've done it to countless other people. After my experience with that, and of reveiwing a Targa card for a magazine where even with direct help from Pinnacle, it would never quite work as described, I would never, ever recommend a Pinnacle product to anyone. It seems that they did the same with Commotion, and the same with Cinewave, not even keeping the drivers up-to-date for later versions OS X, and even if they couldn't get it to work in FCP5, they could have perhaps just made it function as plain I/O without accelleration to help people retain value on their investment.

So, perhaps, in a way this case it without merit, as plenty people saw the writing on the wall, but does joe public, pursuaded by his VAR to spend the big dollars know what us industry professionals know?? I heard stories of people buying full on Cinewave systems very recently and they're getting royally screwed. And this is following the classic Pinnacle pattern above, where they stop support of popular products and force people to buy the next product to keep working with new NLEs or whatever, or even to fix long standing bugs when they never even got the drivers working right in the first place. So whatever the merits, Pinnacle totally deserve to have their assess sued off. IMHO, of course.

Graeme



[www.nattress.com] - Plugins for FCP-X

Tried that when they dumped my $4500 Targa 2000 Pro...had to eat it. This is why I moved to Avid (before FCP). You pay through the nose, but you KNOW that they are not going anywhere.

I would never recommend any Pinnacle product. A law suit won't produce anything, I'm afraid

- Joey

"A law suit won't produce anything, I'm afraid "

Yeah, the only people who make any money on these kind of lawsuits are the legal teams. Whenever I get those class action settlement letters in the mail, I have yet to see one that's over $10.00 for the end user.