Pinnacle Studio Ultimate 12 review

There are plenty of video editing programs available, but one of Pinnacle Studio's key strengths has always been the ease with which complete beginners can copy across their camcorder clips and get editing right away.

Within its simple screen layout, media files - movie clips, photos, sounds and titles - are collected up in one place and then dragged onto the timeline at the bottom of the screen, where your movie project is constructed. Version 12 (Ultimate Edition) is no different. The upper right of the screen doubles as a video playing Preview window and a DVD menu simulator. Like its predecessor, the timeline supports two video tracks, a titles track, a sound effects track, and also a track into which you can record and edit a spoken commentary. You can import DV and HDV footage from tape-based cameras as well as AVCHD high definition recordings, which demand more processing work.

The new Montage feature is very welcome, providing an impressive range of multi-layered PiP (picture-in-picture) motion effects and titles, all designed to add interest to any humble home movie. 12 templates are provided to spice up the beginnings and endings of your projects or create eye-catching sequences within it. Multilayer Mix, essentially a freeform layer control tool within Montage, has seemingly unlimited uses. Select a theme, drag and drop any media clip into it, and you can see an instant realisation of your ideas, with very professional results.

Also new to Pinnacle is Magic Bullet, a set of professional quality processing tools that give you control over the look and feel of individual sequences or a whole video. With an interface that's built into Studio, Magic Bullet gives you the power to control the appearance of your movies to a very high standard. ProDAD Vitascene, first introduced in Studio 11, lets you add visual elements such as sparkles, flashes and glows to objects within a scene, with keyframe-based control over their movement. It's great fun to apply these to titles or to elements within a Montage sequence.

Working titles

One thing that hasn't changed is Studio's Title generator, which really could do with a spruce-up. It's not bad, but other editors such as CyberLink Power Director 7 and Adobe Premiere Elements 4 do the job better. Still, at least it's easy to create, add and modify a title, to which effects and transitions can then be applied.

We successfully imported AVCHD high definition video footage using a decent but not outrageously powerful test PC with a 2.1GHz AMD 64 X2 Dual Core 4000+ processor and 2GB of RAM. DVD authoring and export to Blu-ray discs is also supported. So you can burn an AVCHD project to Blu-ray disc, but with media being so expensive it might make more sense to write an HD project to standard DVDR discs, although compatibility with all Blu-ray players isn't assured.

Is Studio 12 worth the investment? Yes, if you're a first-timer looking for a quick and easy approach to editing standard and HD video. We'd like to see a few changes, such as more than two video tracks and a better Titles facility, but all in all it's a creditable application that benefits from the additon of Montage and Magic Bullet. However, it can't sit on its laurels; there's stiff competition from the likes of Magix Edit Pro 14 and Cyberlink Power Director 7. Try the free demo downloads before making your mind up.

Author: Colin Barrett