Labs

Studio 11 Ultimate sits at the top of Pinnacle's trio of Studio titles, although at Amazon's current prices it's just a few pounds more than the cheaper versions. We love that Ultimate includes a green sheet for overlaying yourself on to a newsroom, Manhattan skyline or outer space (with the help of the software's Chroma key feature). It also has a bumper collection of video and audio effects, including impressive but potentially bewildering third-party plug-ins for adding film-like qualities to video, cleaning audio and panning across photos.

The software itself is far from bewildering, though. Its interface is the cleanest-looking of all those here, and there's lots of handholding for inexperienced users. The preview window is far smaller than it needs to be, but an option tucked away in the preferences allows full-screen previews on a second monitor, keeping the editing controls available on the first. Sadly, though, adjusting any setting stops playback.

Text animation is almost non-existent, and with just two tracks for videos, photos and text, it's the most limited of the packages here when it comes to

AVCHD is supported, and we had no problem dropping .m2ts files captured with a Sony AVCHD camera on the timeline. Panasonic AVCHD files weren't recognised, but changing their extension from .m2t to .m2ts solved the problem. AVCHD preview quality was smooth for a single video stream on our 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo PC (which just meets the minimal requirements), and looked great in full-screen previews, where we could appreciate the high-definition detail. However, playback practically ground to a halt when trying to fade between two AVCHD clips. A background rendering function uses idle processor time to produce temporary files for smoother previews, but we found it rarely kept up with our work rate.

Support for other file types is disappointing. HDV cameras are supported, but we were unable to import HDV files saved with the widely used .m2t extension (renaming them didn't work). This is the only software here not to support QuickTime, ruling out videos from a lot of digital stills cameras. Photoshop PSD files weren't recognised either, but the software did accept TIFs with transparency, so images with irregular shapes could be overlaid on top of video. DVD authoring is well catered for, and high-definition footage can be burnt to HD DVD without menus - or it will be when HD DVD writers are available.

Studio has its drawbacks, but it's one of the easiest packages for inexperienced users to grasp. Vegas Movie Studio and Premiere Elements shouldn't seem intimidating, but if they do then Studio is a respectable alternative.