Pinnacle Studio 8

Studio 8 is Pinnacle's home video-editing application. As well as the standalone software it ships with, there is a variety of hardware options for DV and analogue capture and output.

Our previous experiences with Pinnacle software have not, on the whole, been happy ones. Installation has been problematic and early software releases have been bug prone and unstable, suggesting that the company's quality control is not all that it should be.

Unhappily, Studio 8 does little to change that opinion. On launching, Studio 8 offers to check for more recent versions on the Pinnacle website. There was indeed a more recent version (8.8.17) than the one installed from the CD (8.3) and we downloaded the patch. This patch corrects a number of issues, including the welldocumented AV sync problems, crashes during rendering and stability running on dual-processor systems, and adds some new features and expanded support for capture boards.

With the patch installed Studio wouldn't run at all. Uninstalling and re-installing the program (twice) failed to resolve the problem, suggesting that Pinnacle's uninstaller doesn't clean up properly. The only solution was to install it on another machine, which was successful, albeit with its own problems. Needless to say we didn't bother with the patch.

The installation hurdle turned out to be well worth climbing. Studio 8 is a terrifically well-designed application with which you can achieve excellent results very quickly. The workspace is organised into three tabbed panels: capture, edit, and make movie.

Captured footage can be automatically transcoded into mpeg1 or mpeg2, or at a low-resolution 'preview' quality for fast editing - the footage is subsequently recaptured at full resolution and all your editing is automatically applied. Studio 8 provides a choice of scene detection options, based on the shooting time and date stamp, video content, or regular user-defined intervals. Alternatively, you can create new scenes manually by pressing the space bar during capture.

Editing is every bit as simple as capture. The edit screen is split into three sections: a tabbed album window which can display video clips, transitions, titles, photos, sound effects or DVD menus; a small preview window and, at the bottom of the screen, a storyboard window which can be reconfigured to display a timeline or a text outline view of project components.

To add transitions you drop them between clips on the storyboard layout. The video and audio toolbox buttons in the topleft corner of the storyboard provide access to customisation features for transitions and audio effects. For the standard transitions the degree of customisation is fairly limited - you can change the duration, or reverse the effect, but there are no keyframes. The inclusion of additional Hollywood FX filters does, however, provide scope for getting from one clip to the next.

Additional buttons in the video toolbox provide access to tools for creating titles, DVD menus, making colour adjustments and adding video effects. The title editor provides a good set of tools for creating overlays complete with background images and text in a variety of styles, and creating rolling and crawling titles is a straightforward affair.

One of the better features of Studio is that DVD features are included in the main editing application, rather than bolted on as an afterthought. For example, you can add chapter points on the editing timeline and edit DVD menus here as well. Studio is also the only home video-editing application here that supports motion menus - with a video running as a backdrop to the menu screen - and includes several templates on the content CD.

We'd like to recommend Studio 8. While not as easy to use as Ulead Videostudio, it is a powerful application with excellent DVD authoring features. But because of the installation and stability issues, we recommend you approach it with caution.

Contact: Pinnacle Systems 01895 424 210
www.pinnaclesys.com

System requirements:

• 500MHz Pentium
• 128MB of Ram
• Windows 98SE ME, 2000 or XP
• 300MB of disk space
• 4GB per 20mins of DV video