Product Reviews

With one of the longest product names in computing history, this latest incarnation of Pinnacle's home-oriented video-editing software comes with more extras than ever. There's the same bundle of effects, transitions and animated DVD menus that accompanied the Titanium Edition (What's New: Software, Shopper July 2006), plus lots more besides, bringing the installation to a whopping 4.2GB. This doesn't excuse Pinnacle's decision to present the software on five DVDs. Installation took well over an hour and we had to keep our wits about us to ensure we'd covered everything.

Considering that the software's name has three suffixes to advertise its additional content, we were amazed to discover that most of the effects and transitions installed required us to spend more money before we could use them beyond a demo mode. Prices such as ̀14 for an image overlay that makes your video look like a camcorder viewfinder are ridiculous, and buying all the premium content would set you back over ̀800.

Ignore the premium content, and the effects and transitions libraries are still great, with a solid set of corrective tools such as automatic colour correction and image stabilisation plus plenty of impressive special effects

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such as 3D explosions, fractal fire and earthquake simulators © ideal fodder for homemade disaster movies. However, if you're serious about special effects you'll soon get frustrated with the single video-overlay track, the crude object motion controls and the daft way that effects keyframes behave when trimming and splitting clips.

Our concerns over previous versions of Pinnacle Studio have been less about power and more about reliability. For over five years, each encounter with Studio has been punctuated by bugs, random errors, crashes and spontaneous reboots. In this respect, version 10.6 appears to be a big improvement. We suffered two crashes while testing, which is around a tenth as many as we've experienced while testing other versions. The bugs we identified last time have been remedied, too, but we also experienced some new ones: previews sometimes played without any sound and once, after adding some text to a project, without any picture either. The software often became unresponsive for short periods of time, even on a Core 2 Duo PC.

Buying this latest version of Studio is a gamble. Every time it stopped responding or behaved erratically, our hearts sank as we assumed the worst. Often we were pleasantly surprised, as Studio sprang back to life after a few seconds. However, competing software such as Sony Vegas Movie Studio manages to manipulate video without unexpected little rests.

Even without with these concerns, Studio is a decent but not outstanding editor. It's more capable than Ulead VideoStudio or Roxio VideoWave and, on a good day, more pleasant to use, too. However, Adobe Premiere Elements and Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum beat Studio hands down for power and, once you get over their more professional-looking appearances, are just as straightforward to use.