Pinnacle to release new consumer video editing package Studio 10

Westlake Village (CA) - Back in March 2004, we reviewed Pinnacle’s consumer editing program, Studio 9. The program offered a decent video editing package for people who have reached the limit of the built-in Movie Maker program of Windows. Now, Pinnacle is set to release the new version Studio 10 next month. Company officials made a trip to the Tom’s Hardware Guide offices in Westlake Village to give us a sneak peak of the new features.

Pinnacle will release two versions, Studio 10 and Studio Plus 10. The regular version will allow users to import, edit and export their videos. The plus edition adds in High Definition video recording and editing. While Studio 10 has many features, Pinnacle officials say that anyone wishing a more professional editing program will want to go with Pinnacle Liquid Edition or even the Avid editing suite. Incidentally, Avid, a company known for their high-end video editing package, acquired Pinnacle in August of 2005.

GUI of Pinnacle Studio 10

With Studio, users can import still pictures, audio and video into the editing timeline. Major media formats such as jpg, mp3, mpg2, WMV, and Divx, will be supported. Cross-fades and several dozen other effects can be added to video tracks and many of the special effects can be previewed in real-time because the computer’s GPU assists in the rendering. To show this off, company officials combined a water ripple and a lens flare effect on top of a video track. We were able to preview the effects in slightly less than real-time. "The key is to have a good graphics card and in this case, a good graphics card is more important than the CPU," Pinnacle officials said.

Studio 10 will also have some compelling audio processing features. One such feature, "Smart Sound", will automatically fit a music track to the movie. There are 25 songs that users can insert into their movies. The program will automatically adjust the length of the music and fit it to the video. In our in office demonstration this worked well, with the music gradually fading just as the movie ended. The drawback was that it took several seconds for the computer to process the audio information.

Another feature is the ability to pan sounds around in a surround sound Dolby 5.1 environment. After a sound is selected in the audio track, users simply drag it around a picture of a living room. Jet planes can seem to go from left to right, front to back, or whatever way you choose. In addition, the effect can be keyframed to move to different locations at different times.

Video editing is meaningless if users do not have a decent way of exporting their created video. Most editing applications have DVD authoring as a separate program, but Studio 10 has a built-in authoring program. Consumers are lead by a wizard that lets them pick chapter layouts and the output format. In addition to outputting to DVD, video can be converted to major formats like Windows Media, Divx or Real Player.

For those who don’t want to do any video editing at all, Pinnacle includes a direct capture to burn feature which burns a DVD directly from camcorder footage. Users can plug in a Mini-DV camcorder and have the footage bypass the hard-drive and go directly into a burnable DVD. Pinnacle officials told us that this is suitable for someone who just wants to convert their family videos from tape to DVD.

Pinnacle Studio 10 will hit store shelves mid-October 2005 and carry a retail price of $69.