One of the few mainstream software markets with several applications of roughly equal weight is home-video editing.
There's Adobe Premiere Elements and Corel's Ulead VideoStudio 10 Plus, as well as the subject of this evaluation, Pinnacle Studio Plus 11. Pinnacle was purchased a couple of years back by the professional video software and hardware company Avid, and some of the pro code is said to have found its way into this enthusiast product.
Pinnacle Studio Plus 11 comes on two DVDs, one containing the program itself and some sample files, and the other with extra goodies, such as transitions and video clips. There's also a 300-page manual to get through, which unusually doesn't mean 30 pages written in 10 different languages. It's well written and well illustrated, though in places a little technical for the beginner.
HD for all
There are three distinct phases to preparing a video and these are reflected in the tabs across the top of the screen: Capture, Edit and Make movie. The Capture screen deals with uploading video clips from a video camera, DVD or disk file and highlights one of the main innovations in the program.
Pinnacle Studio Plus 11 is completely HD compatible, so you can load material in HDV format, but also in Advanced Video Codec High Density (AVCHD) format, designed for Blu-ray discs.
Rather than using any system of proxies, and assuming your PC has the specification to handle it, the software can capture, edit and burn HD video. Even without an HD or Blu-ray drive in your system, you can burn 20 minute HD videos to standard DVDs, in much the same way you could burn short, standard-definition videos to CDs, before the mass adoption of DVD writers.
HD video demands a reasonably capable PC and a dual-core processor with 1GB of main memory (2GB for Vista) and a 128MB graphics card is recommended. Storing and burning HD video takes around 12.5GB per hour, so you'll need substantial hard drive storage, as well.
The bigger picture
Pinnacle Studio's main editing screen looks superficially similar to previous versions, with a preview panel on the right, thumbnails of video clips on the left and a storyboard at the bottom.
The thumbnails can be overlaid with other panels, specific to the work your doing, so there's one for soundtracks and another for transitions, for example. The storyboard can be exchanged, too, for a multi-channel timeline or a simple file list of video clips, in running order.
