Pinnacle Studio Ultimate 19 review

The other new features are harder to get excited about. An audio ducking feature makes speech easier to hear by automatically reducing the volume on other tracks when speech is detected. It works well when speech has been recorded clearly with a microphone near the person talking, but most home videos aren’t shot like that. The software was unable to distinguish between speech and other sounds in the main soundtrack, and ducked the music volume up and down fairly indiscriminately. This is not a feature I particularly felt the need for, and this implementation hasn’t changed my mind.

Audio Ducking reduces the volume of music to make speech more intelligible

There’s now explicit support for the XAVC-S format used by recent Sony cameras, with XAVC-S exports at up to 4K. Last time I tested Pinnacle Studio, at version 17, 4K support had just been added but preview performance wasn’t up to scratch. This time it appears to be better but it wasn’t consistent. Footage would sometimes play smoothly but at other times drop to around one frame per second. Even more annoying were the waits of up to 10 seconds for the interface to catch up when making basic timeline edits. Different hardware and footage will give different results, but in my experience Adobe Premiere Elements and Sony Movie Studio Platinum handle 4K editing more efficiently.

Unresponsive controls were often an issue when editing 1080p footage, too. Simple tasks such as dropping media onto the timeline or applying colour correction caused the software to respond in fits and bursts. These delays were seldom significant, but even the slightest delay makes precise adjustments much harder to achieve. Pinnacle Studio comes close to a Recommended award, but this is the reason it falls short.