Review: Pinnacle Studio Plus 10 Titanium Edition

At the tail end of last year, Pinnacle released version 10 of its video-editing program, Studio. But less than six months later and there's already a new member of the Studio family - Pinnacle Studio Plus Titanium Edition.

The latest version brings together all the revisions that were implemented in the Studio10.5 update, along with a selection of additional 'professional-level' video effects.

The 10.5 update itself includes a large number of performance enhancements, such as slightly faster launch of the application and increased support for AMD processors. Sadly, still only two layers of video are available in timeline editing mode.

The only real significant new feature is the ability to export video to either Ipod or Playstation Portable (PSP)  friendly formats.

The various other fixes and improvements certainly go towards making Studio a dependable video-editing platform but, since the 10.5 update is free to download for existing Studio 10 users, it has little genuine value in itself.

More interesting are the bundled effects, which are normally sold separately for around £50 as RTFX Vol. 1.

Since Pinnalce Titanium Edition sells for the same price as the Studio Plus 10 standard version, this works out as something of a bargain.

As it is, the effects themselves are a bit of a mixed bag. The Tint and Sharpen filters are fairly useful and the advanced Old Film filter could come in handy, but many of the remaining effects, including Mosaic, Hall of Mirrors and Stained Glass Advanced, are as gimmicky as they sound.

That said, we stick by the comments we made in our initial assessment of Studio 10.

It doesn't have the kind of sophistication or level of control of higher-end products like Adobe Premiere, but with a simple interface, built-in DVD authoring, support for high-definition formats and plenty of help from various wizards and one-click automated options, Studio - Titanium Edition or otherwise - is still definitely one of the easiest, most well-rounded video editors on the market.

System requirements:
1.4GHz processor
512MB of Ram
1GB disk space (3GB for bonus materials)
DVD-Rom drive
Windows XP