The interface was always clean and simple, with numerous features popping into view once appropriate icons on the main window were selected. In other words, possibilities and options became available on a 'need to know' basis.

Pinnacle Studio's latest incarnation is Version 14 and it is an evolutionary rather than revolutionary improvement on its predecessors. There are three versions available, namely Studio, Studio Ultimate and Studio Ultimate Collection, the one reviewed here.

One option is to buy the 372-page paper manual which I recommend. In the boxed version of the Ultimate Collection, you also get a folding green screen backdrop for chroma-keying.

The Studio interface

The key element of Pinnacle Studio's operating paradigm is the 'album'. This is a context-sensitive collection of features accessed by selecting one of the buttons to the left of the upper panel.

There are three tabs at the top left of the Album window called Import, Edit and Make Movie. These represent the three main steps in going from your video or collection of still images, through the editing process to the ultimate destination which may be a video file, a video tape or a DVD.

The options available within each tabbed pane relate logically to what you need to complete that stage of the production. Studio opens to the Edit pane because that's probably where you'll spend most of your time.

To the right of the upper panel is the single Player (preview) pane below which is a standard set of playback controls as well as a frame counter, volume control and DVD preview button. There's another slider above the Player pane for changing its size. It's also possible within preferences to set up Studio to preview on a second computer monitor or on an external TV, provided this is supported by your graphic card.

Finally, there's the Movie window which can be toggled between Storyboard, Timeline and Text views, depending on your needs.

Depending on which version of Studio you bought some options or plugins may not be available. Only in Ultimate Collection is everything accessible. In the cheaper versions you will be directed to the Pinnacle website to purchase an upgrade Activation Key. Studio also sends you to the website on other occasions, tempting you to try, then buy additional software.

The MOVIE Window

This is the action centre of Studio. In Timeline view, there are three video tracks available, the Video track, Overlay track and Titles track, one below the other. The Video and overlay tracks also have tracks for their sync audio, and there are two more audio tracks, one for Sound FX and Voiceovers, the other for Music.

You can switch to Storyboard mode and see your project laid out linearly along a series of 'filmstrip' lines. This is a good place to make changes to the order of chunks of your video, as the storyboarding name implies.

A third mode is Text view, in which detailed information about each item on the timeline is displaed, much like a edit decision list (EDL). This can be handy for making very fine adjustments to durations of clips or transitions: you simply enter the new numbers in the appropriate field in the clip Properties window.

Audio clips display their waveforms and volume changes can be made by left clicking on the volume envelope and dragging it to a new level. Quite complex envelopes can be built up this way. Unfortuantely there's no way to alter the height of the tracks, so the precision is limited. There's another way, though which is to use the audio mixer, which includes facilities for surround sound mixing and placement. Movements of the faders are reflected in the volume envelope at the cursor's current position, and the gain values are listed numerically for each track. This can be done in real time during playback. It's not a pro mixer, but it works fairly well.

Menu options in detail

IMPORT

The Import window is fairly simple, allowing you to capture from a camcorder, VCR, or other devices such as memory sticks, rip from a DVD or Blu-Ray disk, import a set of stills, or capture a video as a series of stills for use in stop-motion animation. The destination folder is selected here and its available space indicated clearly.  The import process is straightforward once the Start Import button is pressed.

EDIT

This tab handles a massive range of options and it is here that the immense power of this software is tapped, although as is typical of Pinnacle products, the range of options is not immediately apparent. Each of the buttons shows a set of thumbnails of the various clips, effects, transitions and so on, but it's really important to notice the extra options available via the dropdown menu at the top left. For example the transitions thumbnails initially displayed are the 2D set, but the dropdown reveals six more categories, each containing anywhere from a dozen to more than a hundred presets.

When you roll over each thumbnail an animated preview appears in the Player window. Brief descriptions of the various options are as follows:

Show Videos

Thumbnails of all of your video clips appear here, either as files (whole clips) or scenes, if scene selection was used for capturing. Thumbnails can be displayed with or without duration information.

Clips are added to the storyboard or timeline by dragging and dropping.

Clicking the little video camera icon at the top left of the Movie window reveals a new tool, the Clip Properties window, with its own new set of left-hand buttons. Here you adjust all sorts of aspects of a single clip

Show Transitions

Once again you just drag a transition's thumbnail onto a pair of clips on the timeline (or storyboard) and double click the transition to open its properties window. Here you can adjust the duration and direction of the transition and watch the result in the Player. All transitions and effects will play back immediately, but the more complex ones will only display in lower resolution until background rendering has caught up. Background rendering is on by default but can be turned off if necessary.

To remove a transition or effect you select it, then click the little trashcan on the top right of the timeline.

Show Montage Themes

Montage themes are pre-packed clips designed by graphic artists to give your video a polished, integrated look and feel. Most themes provide Opening and Ending templates and many also include Segue templates, used for transitioning from one scene to another. Montage themes are handled just like any other clips and have their own properties window. Studio Ultimate Collection comes with seventeen presets with tantalising names such as Downtown light, Seasons, Video Wall and so on.

Drag a Montage to the timeline and double click it to open its Properties pane. As an example, Video Wall presents you with a wall of 20 video clips lined up on a vertical wall that swings in to fill the frame. There is also title text in front of the wall. Text is edited by replacing YOUR TEXT HERE with whatever you like. Clips in the video wall are chosen from the mini album by dragging them to the respective numbered Drop Zones.

This is an extremely simple and rapid way to produce some quite complex and attractive composites. There's not much scope for modifying them but that's not the point: they are well designed and there are sufficient templates to cover many common projects, including weddings, travel and some pretty avant garde ones like Extreme.

Show Titles

Pinnacle have always had simple but effective titlers and Studio Ultimate Collection takes this much further with the addition of very effective Motion Titling. Titles are always added to the Title Track in the timeline and they usually feature a transparent background, allowing the background video to show through. As the website makes clear, Pinnacle is Avid, so in typical Avid fashion the titles and overlay video tracks lie below the main video track. No dramas here, but other software such as Vegas always does it the opposite way, with the upper tracks dominating those below (which I think is more logical).

The Titles Properties window gives a fair degree of control over how the text will look and move, all made much simpler if you just choose the preset you like. Once again you have individual control over the beginning, middle and end, via Enter, Emphasis and Exit windows. This window includes a special timeline where all of the layers in the title are visible and can be altered. Layers can be grouped and/or locked giving quite a range of options, including selecting a background colour and style if required.

Show Photos and Frame Grabs

Self explanatory, this tab handles all of your still images, including frames grabbed at full resolution from your video clips.

Show Menus

DVD menus are handled by a special tool in Studio. Intriguingly, they are simply selected from the range of presets, and dragged to the very beginning of your timeline. To have a Main Menu followed by a Scene Select Menu, you simply drag one of each onto the beginning of the timeline. It all seems to simple to be of much use, but if you delve into the excellent manual, and especially online video tutorials the penny drops and you'll find you can quickly build quite complex menu systems to guide users through your finished DVD or Blu-Ray disk.

When you drag a menu to the start of the timeline (it's edges will be green if it's correctly placed) a pop-up asks you if you want chapters created for you at fixed intervals, or at the beginning of clips, or if you prefer to add chapters manually. You can choose static or moving thumbnails and also choose the action at the end of each chapter.

Show Sound Effects

Studio comes with quite a good set of basic sound effects and, as always, the More Sound Effects option takes you to the Pinnacle website where you can buy more.

Show Music

Music is handled by Scorefitter, a streamlined and integrated version of SmartSound, (reviewed by Frank McLeod in the October issue of Auscam). This comes with nine styles of music, each having several songs, and each song having up to ten versions. The music sounds good and is generated to match either the length of your project, or a duration you dial in. In fact you could use Scorefitter as a music generator to create royalty-free music for use in other applications, or as the bed for tracks you can embellish with acoustic instruments or synths.

MAKE MOVIE

The final step in your production is to output your video in any of the numerous formats supported by Studio. The window is pretty much self explanatory, with settings for Disc, File and Tape being quite comprehensive and easy to understand. Licenses for MPEG-4, H.264, MP3 AND DivX codecs require entering Activation Keys into a special window. These must be regenerated and sent to you via email if the software is changed to a new computer, or if the hard drive fails. I know piracy is a problem, but it's infuriating when you're in the middle of a project and for one reason or another you have to replace a drive or reinstall the software, then get the activations, then enter them all before you're back to work. In fact the best solution to this issue I've seen is the little USB dongle that is provided by Propellerheads for their stunning new program Record. Check their website at www.propellerheads.se to see how it works. I love it!

How does Studio perform?

Unlike Sony Vegas Pro, my NLE of choice, Pinnacle Studio 14 does exploit the GPU on your graphics card to assist the CPU and provide good playback performance. With Vegas and Studio installed on a Q6600 2.4GHz computer with 3GB RAM and an ASUS EAH4850 graphics card with 1GB RAM, I was surprised at how sluggish Studio was to operate. The program itself takes well over half a minute to load and every time you choose a new menu item there's a distinct pause of 2 - 10 seconds until the new menu page opens. Playback was reasonable but, compared to Vegas Pro, the Pinnacle software is frustratingly unresponsive. On the same machine everything in Vegas is instantaneous, which gives that slick highly responsive feel I've come to both love and expect. It will be interesting to test Studio on a new Core i5 or i7 machine with Windows 7, but with a full gigabyte of dedicated graphics memory the performance was disappointing.

Responsiveness aside, the word that came to mind in describing Studio was 'surprising'. Surprising because it looks a bit like a toy, but in fact contains some extremely powerful and useful features.

For example the audio effects include noise reduction, de-essing, chorus, a 'grungelizer' and even vocal removal for making karaoke music tracks.

Similarly, the video FX list is large, including various tools for colour correction, blurring, embossing, old film, stained glass and so on. There are also special tools for picture-in-picture editing and chroma keying. One of the most powerful features is the Magic Bullet Looks SE plug-in by Red Giant. This is a highly featured, fully customizable post-production suite for special effects, colourizing and much, much more. This inclusion alone is worth the price of the entire package (The latest full version of Looks sells for US$400!).

Import formats

    *   Video: AVCHD*, BD Blu-ray*, DV, HDV, AVI, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, DivX ® *, MPEG-4*, 3GP(MPEG-4)*, WMV, Non-encrypted DVD titles (incl. DVD-VR/+VR), QuickTime ® ; (DV, MPEG-4*, H.264*)

    * Audio: MP3, MPA, WAV, AC3*, WMA

    * Graphic: BMP, GIF, JPG, PCX, PSD, TGA, TIF, WMF, PNG, J2K

Export formats:

    *   AVCHD*, BD Blu-ray*, HD-DVD, DVD (DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R or DVD+RW, dual layer), S-VCD, Video CD (VCD)

    * Apple ® iPod ® , Sony ® ; PSP/PS3, Nintendo ® Wii, Microsoft ® Xbox compatible formats*

    * DV, HDV, AVI, DivX*, RealVideo ® 8, WMV, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4*, Flash, 3GP*, WAV, MP3*, QuickTime ® (SD format)

    * Dolby ® Digital 2 channel and 5.1 channel audio*

 Conclusion

Pinnacle Studio 14 Ultimate Collection is a powerful video production suite based on a very simple user interface. It has a rich array of features that will make it relatively simple to create high quality high definition videos for distribution on tape or disk, or in many other formats for web distribution.

Despite this the program is somewhat limited by surprisingly sluggish responsiveness and by the small number of video and audio tracks available. It would definitely be possible to produce a broadcast quality program using this software. The obvious comparison is with competitors such as Premiere Elements and Vegas Movie Studio. I think that for flexibility, responsiveness and especially for the unlimited number of tracks, Vegas Movie Studio would be the pick of the crop.

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 Vendor:  Lako Pacific/www.lakopacific.com/1800 657 601  

Price:     $249.95

AusCam Ratings

Performance:     6
Documentation:               9
Features:             8
Installation:        8
Value:    8
Help:      9

We Liked: Powerful array of audio and video FX, cleverly implemented Montage Themes     and DVD menu system, Scorefitter music generator.

We Didn't Like:  Sluggish responsiveness, severely limited number of tracks, Activation Key process

By David Smith

Dr David Smith is a physiologist-turned-film maker. David was Associate Producer of the IMAX feature Australia Land Beyond Time and was Senior Researcher on the ABC TV series Nature of Australia. He wrote and hosted David Smith's Earthwatch on ABCTV and was 'resident zoologist' on the Don Lane and Bert Newton Shows.

In 1987 David set up his company, imaginACTION pty ltd (www.imaginaction.net.au) and has sinced written, directed and/or filmed numerous documentaries and educational multimedia projects. He has also written six books, including two Penguin eco-thrillers. Over the past five years David has moved towards medical and health-related projects, including trauma surgery, schizophrenia and emergency medicine.

David is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts and a professional member of the AFI and has always been keen to share his knowledge, especially with young budding film makers. David can be contacted at david@imaginaction.net.au.

 

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