Product Reviews

Pinnacle Studio Plus has always seemed better suited to casual home users than video enthusiasts, but this version still manages to pack some unusual and impressive features into its approachable interface. A stabilise effect is surprisingly successful at reducing camera shake, while background rendering generates temporary files when the processor is idle to give smooth previews of work in progress, even when complex effects are applied.

While version 9 introduced features for more advanced users, such as a second video track for picture-in-picture and 'green screen' overlay for special effects, version 10 goes even further with the introduction of keyframes, which allow effects settings to be morphed over time. It's easy to add and delete keyframes, but moving them requires typing in numbers rather than simply dragging them, which seems unnecessarily finicky.

We were amazed to find support for high definition video and surround sound - two features usually reserved for editing software costing hundreds of pounds. We had no problems capturing images from a Sony HDR-HC1

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camera and previews of the high-resolution footage were impressively smooth. HD footage can be exported either as an MPEG-2 file or as WMV HD, the latter with surround sound, and surround mixing is surprisingly easy to achieve too. However, while HD output is possible at resolutions up to 1920x1080, the quality of the video appears to be no more detailed than with standard 720x576 resolution files.

These weren't the only problems we encountered during testing, with crashes and other serious errors occurring on an hourly basis. It may have been a problem with our specific hardware or Windows installation, but experience with previous versions of Studio Plus on other PCs suggest otherwise.

Pinnacle has introduced an error-reporting utility similar to the one built into Windows XP, but it has yet to bear any real fruit. Until it does, Studio Plus remains a pain to use.

BUYING DECISIONS

Pinnacle Studio would be good for less technical users if it weren't for its stability problems. However, this issue aside, Sony Vegas Movie Studio is still the most welcoming video-editing software for new users to learn and more experienced users will find it extremely quick to use too.

Premiere Elements 2 is the most versatile and precise of the three, so if you want to create complex video montages it's the obvious choice. However, its interface is clumsy in certain areas. Movie Studio 6 is more powerful than its predecessor, and although it hasn't caught up with Premiere Elements, the gap is pretty small. With its superior DVD authoring and the added benefits of the Platinum Edition, Vegas Movie Studio is perfect for budding editors of all abilities.