Pinnacle Studio Plus 10

Despite its popularity, Studio has been plagued by stability issues for a number of years. Studio 10 has continued this tradition, with angry comments on numerous online forums, particularly Pinnacle's own. However, it's worth noting that while version 10 was released in the US, Europe has at least been blessed with 10.1, which seems to have fixed many of the bugs, and a 10.1.2 update for that is also available.

Other than the slightly halting real-time playback already mentioned, we also found that Studio ate huge amounts of memory - at least 360MB - which might explain the instability some have encountered. We didn't find it particularly error prone during testing, but this can depend a great deal on your hardware configuration. So despite the step forward this release marks, we can't recommend Studio Plus 10 over rock-solid competitors such as Adobe Premiere Elements 2. If it sounds like an upgrade you'd like to make, we suggest seeing how the forthcoming 10.2 update shapes up before committing, and keeping an eye on Pinnacle's forums to see if it fixes the problems.

Author: James Morris