Review: Pinnacle Studio 11 Ultimate video editing software

Increased high-def support puts Pinnacle's movie editor ahead of the pack

For the first time in ages there's something to get genuinely excited about in the world of home movie making.

High definition (HD) has been a term that both camcorder manufacturers and software developers - including Pinnacle - have been bandying around for ages.

But with HD hardware prices obscenely high and technology stuck in a strange in-between stage, it has been hard for even the most enthusiastic videographer to take the plunge.

Now, however, there are newer, more promising HD technologies coming into play (such as the H.264-based AVCHD format championed by Sony and Panasonic), while HD camcorders like Sony's HDR-UX3 are finally starting to look slightly more affordable.

The latest version of Studio 11 - Pinnacle's home-use video-editing application - can, of course, be used with standard-definition miniDV, DVD and analogue camcorders. It can even be used to cut something together from the blurry mess you filmed on your camera phone should you so wish. But HD is clearly where Studio 11's heart is.

On the surface Studio doesn't seem to have changed a great deal. Vista users will find that the application's interface now works properly with Aero (unlike the previous version of Studio), though this is little more than a cosmetic concern.

Other than that, Pinnacle seems to have stuck with its tried-and-tested three-tab (Capture, Edit and Make Movie) layout, which is a perfectly logical way of managing a movie project and keeps the screen relatively clean and uncluttered. The workspace is now scalable, however, meaning that users of widescreen monitors can take advantage of the shape of their display.

Useful (but hardly earth-shattering) additions come in the shape of automatic web publishing (which posts movie clips on Yahoo Video rather than Youtube) and a self-generating music engine called Scorefitter.

The biggest selling point for Pinnacle's editing app at this stage in the game, however, is the fact that Studio 11 Plus and Ultimate editions support native editing of HD footage recorded in the aforementioned AVCHD format.

This is something that not even the Adobe Premieres and Apple Final Cut Pros of this world can currently claim to do, so it makes the application a must-have among early adopters of the latest HD standard.

It's worth pointing out a couple of things here. Firstly, those intending to edit AVCHD movies will need to have a fairly powerful system in order to do so. A 2.4GHz dual-core processor and 2GB of memory is the minimum recommendation for a Vista system.

Additionally, the current cost of HD DVD and Blu-ray burners makes it prohibitively expensive to create true HD discs. Pinnacle has a clever way around this, though. With Studio 11, it's possible to burn small amounts of HD-quality footage to a standard blank DVD, producing a 'mini' HD disc with around 30 minutes of HD footage - a bit like an HD equivalent of the Super Video CDs (SVCD) that were popular before DVD burners became widespread.

It seems that compatibility issues could be a problem here, though. We tested out a mini HD DVD we created in a couple of different HD DVD players and it wouldn't play at all in one of them, though it's possible this could be due to the media we used, rather than the software itself.

Currently there's no Blu-ray equivalent either, though Pinnacle assures us that this will be addressed with a free downloadable patch at some point soon.

We tested the Ultimate edition of Studio 11, which costs £90 and comes with Dolby 5.1 surround sound encoding out of the box and includes a selection of bonus filters and effects.

Cheaper versions are available, though it's worth noting that the basic (£40) edition of Studio 11 lacks the all-important AVCHD support and HD DVD output.