Pinnacle Studio 11 Ultimate review

Pinnacle Studio is a friendly, home-oriented video-editing program that would be excellent if it were reliable.

Pinnacle has acknowledged past problems and resolved to address them, but so far we have yet to be convinced. However, our first impressions of version 11 were good: installation has been streamlined and the program launches faster. It supports Vista but we tested it using XP Professional.

The standard version, Studio 11, costs £24. Studio 11 Plus (£41) adds support for HDV and AVCHD high-definition formats, lots more effects and keyframe editing to enable effects settings to change over time. The flagship Studio 11 Ultimate (£54) adds 5.1 Dolby Digital encoding, some third-party effects and a green screen - literally, a six-foot square piece of bright-green material to use as a background when filming scenes for chroma keying.

AVCHD editing is new to version 11, but the minimum requirements are very demanding and even then, transitions may not be previewed without background rendering first. AVCHD previews on our 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo PC with 1GB RAM and 128MB graphics were hopeless. AVCHD is a challenge for any editing software, but Sony Vegas 7 coped with it on the same PC, and the forthcoming Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 8 promises to do the same. However, Vegas supports Sony but not Panasonic AVCHD cameras, so at least Pinnacle's software supports both brands.

The Ultimate bundle's third-party plug-ins are a mixed bunch. ProDAD Vitascene uses colour correction, diffusion, specular highlights and other tricks to produce an impressive film-look and other effects. It's powerful and highly customisable, but also resource-hungry, tricky to use and doesn't integrate neatly with Studio. BIAS SoundSoap reduces unwanted sounds from audio tracks but, despite a simple-looking interface, will bewilder casual users. StageTools MovingPicture creates pan and zoom effects, but unlike Studio's built-in Pan And Zoom, it works only with photos.

Studio's success hangs on its stability. Version 11 isn't trouble-free: automatic background rendering of the Vitascene plug-in hogged so much processing power that even moving the mouse became a struggle, so we had to disable background rendering and put up with poor previews. Crashes were rare, though, and we didn't spot any other problems, which leads us tentatively to conclude that Studio has resolved its reliability issues.

We still prefer Adobe and Sony's low-cost editors, but if a beginner-friendly interface is more important than sophisticated editing tools, Studio 11 finally lives up to its promises. The extra software in the Ultimate version is of questionable value, but the green screen is an inspired extra that's well worth the extra £13.