Pinnacle Studio Plus 10

A new engine and extra features help produce quality video projects on a budget

We’ve seen Pinnacle’s popular video-editing program, Studio, return year after year with minor tweaks and additions. This time, however, there’s something different going on.

Pinnacle was acquired by Avid in 2005 but, aside from a little rebranding, the new parent company’s influence on this entry-level product has so far been minor.

Instead, many of the changes in the new-look Studio come courtesy of a previous acquisition – the German video-editing software company Fast, whose Liquid Edition now provides the engine that runs Pinnacle’s program.Essentially this is good news for Studio users.

Liquid Edition’s technology is, says Pinnacle, more powerful. More importantly, it’s also more stable than Pinnacle’s own notoriously flakey Studio code. Stability is, of course, difficult to measure.

The program certainly didn’t fall over while we were testing it, but only time will tell whether Pinnacle’s claims are well-founded.Studio is now available in a range of different permutations.

At £50, plain old Studio is the entry-level, budget version, with cut-down features and simplified workflow. Pinnacle Studio Plus is aimed at slightly more adventurous users.

For an extra £20 it gives you a number of additional filters, effects and transitions, as well as two layers of video in the timeline and compatibility with a range of high-definition video formats. HD (High Definition) compatibility is definitely a plus point but is unlikely to sway anyone other than semi-pros at the moment. It’s good to have HD on board nonetheless, especially when it has been integrated so seamlessly.

Both Studio and Studio Plus can be purchased as software-only products or in tandem with either an internal or external capture device. The external solution is of particular note since it features a bidirectional Firewire to USB2 converter.

Given that all PCs have USB and all camcorders have Firewire, but not necessarily the other way round, this innovation falls into the ‘why hasn’t anyone thought of this before?’ category.

We tested the software-only version of Studio Plus, which provides just about everything that any desktop video editor would ever need, from capturing to editing, right through to outputting your finished work.

The program’s interface has been left largely unchanged since version 9, aside from a slight scrub-up. Generally speaking this is a good thing, since the trio of timeline, preview window and context-sensitive, tabbed album window is a winning combination. Even the most inexperienced will find it hard to go wrong here.

Pinnacle also provides wizards for many tasks and includes its own take on the now obligatory one-click automated movie-editing option, called Smartmovie.The most welcome improvements in Studio 10 are often the most subtle.

Audio scrubbing in the timeline, for instance, is very useful, as is the ability to maintain the audio pitch whenever you slow down or speed up a clip. Even better is the fact that most effects can now be implemented using keyframes, which allows for much tighter control.

Perhaps the best improvement, however, is the way in which it provides realtime, full-resolution previews by leveraging the graphics card’s GPU and memory, rather than the main system CPU – another relatively simple innovation that could make an enormous difference to a lot of users.

If you’re after a video editor that’s easy to use yet feature-rich, Pinnacle Studio 10 is definitely a package worth considering.

System requirements
Windows XP
1.4GHz processor
512MB of Ram
1GB hard disk space (3GB for bonus materials)