Product Reviews

Pinnacle Studio is one of the best-known video-editing programs for home users. Cut-down versions are bundled with new PCs and the full version is often included with Pinnacle's capture hardware. Studio Plus 10 is the first new release since Pinnacle became part of Avid, the dominant firm in broadcast-level video editing, but it appears to be business as usual for this low-cost editor.

Version 10's highlight is its support for HDV cameras, such as Sony's HDR-HC1. Capturing HDV is as easy as capturing from MiniDV cameras. However, Studio Plus saves footage as a .m2v file for the MPEG2 video and a separate .wav for the audio, which may hinder imports into other applications.

The software handles HDV editing superbly, with much smoother previews than Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum can manage. A button switches to instant full-screen previews but, disappointingly, the preview appears to be limited to PAL resolution. You need to export HD projects to see them in all their glory. You can render them in MPEG2 and WMV formats, although we found that many players couldn't play the exported files correctly. When

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outputting to WMV, you have the option of adding surround sound, and surround panning is surprisingly easy to achieve, but creating DVDs with surround sound requires a £6 upgrade.

Studio 9's effects were hampered by an inability to morph settings over time other than using fade-in and fade-out points. Version 10 has addressed this with key frames: choose effects settings for various points in a clip, and the software morphs between these settings for the frames in between. You can add, delete and move key frames.

Studio Plus 10 includes a program called Instant DVD Recorder. This burns footage from an external source straight to DVD Video disc, but it failed in our tests. In our first attempt, it started writing and then decided it didn't like our HDV camera as a source, wasting a blank disc. Using a MiniDV camera it worked for a minute, but then it started dropping more frames than it captured, omitting large sections of the tape and reducing our 10-minute footage to less than two minutes.

Sadly, this wasn't the only part of the software we found unreliable. As with previous versions, the main editing program suffered more than its fair share of errors and crashes while performing a variety of tasks. Video-editing programs are often less reliable than other types of software, but Studio remains one of the worst in our experience.

Studio Plus can't compete with Adobe Premiere Elements 2 or Sony Vegas Movie Studio (What's New, Shopper December 2005) in terms of editing power. It's more approachable, with its option of a storyboard-style clip compiler and clean interface. However, this friendly approach is squandered by the reliability problems, making it frustrating to use.