I can't think of a much crappier install than Pinnacle Studio 12 for automated deployments other than perhaps some Adobe stuff. Their msi gives you absolutely no way of filling in the information ahead of time for your serial number and registration information. I wonder if the folks at Pinnacle have heard of a little thing called large friggin workstation deployments! I started down the horrible nightmarish road of having to use AutoIt to manually pump keystrokes into the registration dialogue box. Oh man did I hate that! OK rant over. All that being said, I kind of stumbled upon a solution.

Here is how I got it working.

First I ran the install and manually went through the registration process. Evidently this creates a bunch of files in "c:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Pinnacle\Pixie". If these files exist before you start the install process on a workstation, the registration information will already be setup in the registration dialogue. Hmmm fascinating!  

So basically I just setup a little pre distribution script that copies those files down before I start the silent install of the MSI. 

xcopy /y/e/s/i/q/r "\\Network Location\pinnacle-studio-12\Pinnacle" "c:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Pinnacle"

The network location is the "Pinnacle" directory that goes under "Application Data"

Once that starts just kick off the "Pinnacle Studio 12.msi" using whatever standard parameters you normally use for a silent install of an MSI. In ZENWorks I just set it to "Show Progress" and set the User Interface Level to "Progress" as well. Then you know when its finished at least. If you are just running it as an msiexec.exe command line, I would suggest the following

msiexec.exe /i  [path to msi] /qr

Or for a completely silent install

msiexec.exe /i  [path to msi] /qn

Disclamer:

I haven't tested this in the lab where it needs to be installed yet, but it works in my test environment just fine. I'll update this later after I do the install in production. 

Update 4/1/2010 1:41pm cdt:

I successfully distributed Pinnacle Studio 12 in lights out mode to 16 workstation in the lab. Lights out basically means that no user had to login. I just remotely rebooted the workstations and the package installed with no interface. Once a user logs on there are a few seconds of MSI installations that ZENWorks does for each user that logs in. It worked great!