Product Reviews

Any application in its ninth incarnation, by the laws of natural selection if nothing else, must be doing something right. Pinnacle's home video-editing and DVD-authoring application enjoys a reputation for ease of use, but previous versions of Studio have been bedevilled by stability and performance problems.

It's early days, but Studio 9 does seem to be far better behaved than its predecessors. Installation went without a hitch, and capture and editing sessions were free of the kind of incidents that have characterised our previous Studio sessions.

The interface doesn't look a great deal different, though, with changes in this area being mostly cosmetic. Tabbed panels at the top of the screen divide the movie-making process into the usual three steps: Capture, Edit and Make movie.

As well as DV capture with automatic scene detection, you can now capture and edit with low-resolution preview files. This speeds up the processing of effects and transitions and uses a lot less disk space than editing full-resolution DV files. When editing is finalised, the entire project is recaptured at full resolution and all the edits automatically re-applied.

Clips can be transcoded into MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 format at the time of capture, and the custom settings provide control over bit rate, resolution and audio settings for those with the knowledge and confidence to use them. New to version 9 is the ability to capture and edit 16:9 format 'widescreen' video.

As far as major new features go, Studio 9's crowd-puller is SmartMovie. To use it, you must first arrange a selection of clips in the storyboard and select a backing track. SmartMovie works quickly, cutting and re-arranging clips, adding transitions and effects, and in no time at all you have a finished result in one of five edit styles: Fast-paced music video, Slow and romantic, Old movie, Wild and crazy, and Simple and elegant. Of these, the last does the least, merely arranging the clips in sequence with simple transitions and adding title and credit screens. As for the others, you'll either love or hate the random fast-cut, effect-laden results.

It's not a new idea - muvee autoProducer 3 and Microsoft Windows Movie Maker 2 both do it extremely well. Studio

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makes a reasonably good job of it too and it's exactly the kind of thing that will appeal to first-time users, because it's a simple way to get results quickly.

It also provides feedback - if you get something wrong, like forgetting to add the music, Studio gives you a nudge in the right direction. It also provides hints, like suggesting that the music track is shorter than the video.

There isn't much scope for intervention, though: you can elect to use clips in random order, but that's about all. Overall, SmartMovie could do with a few more presets and the audio needs tidying up too; it just starts and stops dead. A fade-in and -out option would improve things enormously. The results are nonetheless impressive and, at the very least, provide something you can improve with manual editing.

Talking of which, Studio 9 includes a number of new filters and correction tools. Three new filters appear under Cleaning Effects in the Effects tab of the video toolbox. Auto Colour Correct does a fair job of removing colour casts; for example, where the camcorder white balance has been incorrectly set. Noise Reduction removes video noise and could be useful for cleaning up low-light scenes and footage shot at night, while Stabilize is an image-stabilisation algorithm that works in the same way as digital image stabilisers on camcorders. The stabiliser reduces shakes and jitters by cropping in on the image and moving each frame in the opposite direction to any perceived movement. This is quite effective, but the downside is that the image is cropped by about 20 per cent and quality is reduced. Other new plug-in video effects include Posterize, Sepia, Lens flare, Noise, Water drop, Emboss, Mosaic and Old film.

New audio effects have also been introduced, such as a noise-reduction filter. It didn't manage to eliminate the strong wind noise on our test clip, but did go a long way to reducing it. Meanwhile, five VST audio plug-in filters - Equalizer, Grungelizer, Karaoke, Leveler and Reverb - provide a good deal more control over audio parameters.

A surround mode has been added to the Volume and Balance tool and, in addition to stereo panning (moving stereo sound from the left to the right speaker), you can position audio in a triangle between left, right and centre speakers, at the front or from a single rear speaker. Surround sound is encoded in Dolby Pro Logic format for DVD output.

For existing users of Studio, this new version will provide a compelling argument for upgrading if plug-in audio and video effects filters are high on your wish list. However, if the user forums on Pinnacle's website are anything to go by, the existing Studio community will be a little disappointed at the lack of a second video track, chromakey editing and better support for capturing from Sony MicroMV camcorders.