Pinnacle Studio Ultimate 14

Skipping the unlucky number 13 to jump from straight from version 12 to version 14, Pinnacle’s Studio Ultimate has added a number of welcome new features.

There are actually three versions of the program available. We tested Studio Ultimate, which costs £80, but there’s a less expensive version called Studio HD that costs £50 but which lacks some of the advanced features found in the Ultimate version. You can also get the Studio Ultimate Collection for £100, which includes a number of extra effects and even includes a green cloth screen for filming your own green-screen effects sequences in which you can use the software to insert yourself (or anyone else) into any backdrop.

There are a lot of small improvements in this update such as the ability to upload videos to Youtube in high-quality, widescreen format. We also liked the new stop-motion option that allows users to grab a series of individual frames from a video clip, or from live video being shot on any camera. These frames can then be combined to create stop-motion animation sequences (a la Wallace and Gromit).

However, our favourite new feature is the Motion Titler that allows users to create animated title sequences (but isn’t included in the basic Studio HD). This includes dozens of predefined animation effects that control how text initially appears on screen and then how it disappears. So you can make the text slowly scroll onto screen from the left-hand side and then make it quickly fly off the top of the screen after a specified interval. The Motion Titler was easy to use – we had a lot of fun experimenting with different effects in video projects.

Our only complaint is that Studio 14 requires a fairly powerful PC to run properly. You’ll need a PC with at least a 1.8GHz processor to run the program, and Pinnacle actually recommends 2.4GHz or faster.

If you’ve got a powerful enough PC then Studio 14 provides an excellent selection of editing tools that are simple enough even for beginners to video editing.