Pinnacle Studio Plus 10

Introducing Pinnacle Studio Plus v.10, the most advanced and powerful home video editing solution available today. Get Studio’s easy, intuitive process, plus added power and control to unleash your creativity. Quickly and reliably capture and edit your media from popular consumer electronic devices, including the newest HDV camcorders. Pinnacle offers three versions of Studio, with the Basic version ($69.99 direct) lacking the overlay track necessary for picture-in-picture and chroma-key effects, speed adjustments, and the ability to create DVDs with more than one menu. Most of our comments refer to the Plus version ($99.99), though a MediaSuite edition ($129.99) adds image- and audio-editing tools not discussed here.

From its inception, Studio was designed to be an easy-to-use consumer editor, with features customized for consumer video projects. Studio's clutter-free, three-window interface is very intuitive and remains largely unchanged in the new version. Studio's efficient workflow is also unchanged. We especially like the ability to split and annotate clips in the Album, which helps isolate clips to include in the project. And we also like the storyboard and timeline setups for sequencing content.

Transitions include an extensive range of standards like dissolves and wipes, with optional theme packs for weddings, sporting events and the like—a key feature Premiere Elements can't match. In terms of special effects, Studio's automatic color correction is best in breed, as is its image stabilization feature, which Premiere Elements doesn't offer. Studio Plus includes additional corrective filters (like RGB color balance), with fun artistic effects like old film, earthquake, lens flare and lightning that provide great accents for home movies. You can also purchase extra packs of effects for even more editing creativity.

Studio's still-image pan-and-zoom capabilities are flexible and intuitive, and audio features, which include a real time audio mixer and SmartSound background music creation, are also superior to Premiere Elements. Though Studio's canned DVD menus need updating, the program's DVD authoring capabilities are extraordinarily flexible, with unlimited menu branching and menu customization.

The Plus version features an additional audio and video track for chroma-key and picture-in-picture effects. With the dedicated title track and two additional audio tracks for background music and narration, Studio offers three video design layers and four audio tracks. While sufficient for most projects, this can't match the flexibility offered by Premiere Element's 99 audio and video tracks.

Historically, readers have liked Studio's features and usability, but some complained of stability issues, and this is the primary focus of Studio's new release. Specifically, Studio 10 incorporates the preview and rendering engine of its prosumer stablemate, Liquid Edition, which is highly regarded for stability, real-time preview capabilities, and multiformat file handling. To assess the stability of both Premiere Elements and Studio, we transferred the project files and content of our test project to the home computers of two PC Magazine staffers, solely to render and produce our test DVD, which seems to be the most frequent breaking point of the software. While certainly unscientific, our results were mixed. On one clean test system (new installation of Windows XP, with no other programs loaded), the program loaded and worked without a hitch. But in more real-world trials, using PCs that have been in service a few months and have the typical range of programs loaded, things didn't go as smoothly. One staffer couldn't get the program to load on one machine, and on another, it loaded but ran very slowly. Our third staffer couldn't get it to load at all.