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"