Product Reviews

Pinnacle Studio has been helping home users turn raw video footage into edited movies for years and, while it can't compete with Adobe Premiere Elements or Sony Vegas Movie Studio for sheer power (see last month's What's New), it has some welcome touches that keep it in the running. The last update saw the arrival of background rendering, which is the best solution we've seen to the challenge of providing instant, smooth previews as you edit. It does this by rendering complex scenes to a single temporary file while playback is stopped. It also includes video stabilisation to compensate for shaky camera-work and encoding to MPEG2 during video capture, which Adobe and Sony's low-cost editors can't match. Studio's DVD menu design is far more flexible than Adobe's too.

This latest version may sound like an interim update over Studio 9, but it has plenty of worthy new features. Most significant is the addition of a second video track, which makes it easy to cut from one video clip to another while keeping the first's soundtrack running - a trick that's useful in pretty much any editing project. The additional video track also facilitates new effects including picture-in-picture, although the more

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capable Pan and Zoom effect renders the Picture-in-Picture controls redundant. A Chroma key effect allows you to specify a colour to act as a transparency mask for blue-screen style overlay techniques. This has a good range of settings, but it doesn't like using black or white as the keyed colour. Meanwhile, a 'Delete (leave gap)' option means you can delete video clips without interfering with clips placed after it or on the other track. We'd prefer an option to switch off ripple editing altogether so that clips don't move at all when others are edited.

Another new feature is animated slideshows. This is actually more of a technique than a feature - the online Help simply gives instructions on how to run a few images together with transitions and use the Pan and Zoom effect to pan across the pictures. It's laborious, but the results look great.

You can fade effects in and out, but the inability to morph between effect settings means Studio isn't ideal for creative projects. However, its corrective effects are well above average, thanks to image stabilisation and a surprisingly useful Auto Color Correct effect. The interface can be a bit clunky at times, taking a couple of seconds to register certain mouse clicks, but the superior preview quality goes some way to make up for this.

However, there's one problem that's harder to excuse. We've often experienced crashes with previous versions of Studio, but this time it was worse than ever. We had trouble during installation, the program quit without notice on a number of occasions, and sometimes just double-clicking an icon on the desktop caused a spontaneous reboot. As we've had similar experiences with previous versions tested on other PCs, it seems that Pinnacle has some work to do to sort out Studio's stability.