Pinnacle Expression

Aimed at the time-starved home video enthusiast and digital photographer, Pinnacle Expression is a simple all-round DV and digital image-editing package that allows you to turn raw footage into a movie or slideshow in a matter of minutes.

Installation is a straightforward affair and, once you open up the software, the icon-based on-screen menus are so intuitive to use you will rarely find yourself referring to the accompanying manual.

Capturing directly from a digital camcorder via Firewire is easy, and there's also the option of importing digital images and video from existing avi or mpeg files on your PC's hard disk. At this stage you can also choose between scene detection options.

Click through to the edit and preview screen and your footage will already have been dropped into a default menu layout.

A pulldown menu on the left of the screen displays a choice of backgrounds, music, fonts and layouts, and a remote control on the right of the screen lets you find your way round your project with ease.

Clicking on the Edit icon takes you through to a very basic storyboard with a choice of two views: icon, which gives a bird's eye view of the whole project via thumbnails, which provides greater detail about each item displayed.

Editing your movie is essentially limited to dragging and dropping, combining and separating movie scenes and splitting individual scenes at specific frames.

If you are creating a slideshow your options are limited to rotating, cropping and reversing an image, but you can play around with brightness, contrast, hue and saturation.

We successfully burned a movie to disc in two clicks of the mouse.

This package is not going to win you the Palme d'Or at Cannes but it will let you create respectable movies and slideshows from that raw footage that's been cluttering up your hard disk for so long.

DETAILS
PRICE: £29.99 (£25.52 ex VAT)

CONTACT: Pinnacle 01895 424 210

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

• Intel Pentium III or 500MHz AMD Athlon processor and higher
• 128MB of Ram; Windows 98, ME, 2000 or XP
• CD-R or CD-RW writer
• DirectX 8-compatible graphics card
• 100MB of free hard disk space
• Minimum 1GB hard disk space for project and temporary files