Pros: Incredible output, features, ease of use. Rock stable. Professional tools at a home amateur's price.
Cons: Some add-ins are wastes. Optional add-ins pricey. No easy copy of text view format content.
The Bottom Line: The first Studio that almost never crashes. Professional features and versatility make klutzes capable of producing high quality videos that can't by matched with software costing hundreds more.
reframmellator's Full Review: Pinnacle Studio Ultimate 11 Full Version for PC (8...
Winston Churchill is reported to have said that democracy is worst form of government – except for all of the other forms that have been tried. I’ve had the same sort of love-hate relationship with Avid’s Pinnacle Studio personal video editing software since 2002, when I got “volunteered” into editing a highly complicated 32 minute video for my son’s crew banquet. After consulting a number of magazine reviews, I settled on Pinnacle Studio, then in Version 7. The results were unbeatable, but putting it all together took one of those stubborn “I’m smarter than any stupid machine” mentalities that entailed reconstructing the entire video from scratch to produce copies of the video for those who requested one. As nearly as I can figure, it came down to a corrupt file or edit somewhere that effectively made it impossible to render the file – that is, convert it from a PC file to a videotape or DVD readable on home electronics equipment. By using the list of files and edits I was able to rebuild the entire video and render flawlessly – but until I tried that last-ditch approach, I was stymied. And I wonder how many users would be stubborn/desperate enough to do what I did.
Upon reflection, I accepted some of the responsibility for the problem. It was a very complicated project, with over 200 still photos, 40 captions, 20 video clips, and about as many audio files. It had been highly edited, so some sort of corruption along the way of the sort to hang up the entire project seemed inevitable.
All of this is to say that video editing of anything more than the most basic variety is incredibly rewarding but not for the easily discouraged and/or computer newbie. It takes a lot of work and a lot of patience. You are very likely to expand your vocabulary, if you catch my drift.
That first project had me hooked, so I read reviews and got a consistent theme – Pinnacle Studio seemed to have unequalled capabilities but also unequalled bugginess. Even so, when sales came along, I upgraded to Studio 8, then Studio 9 Media Suite, then Studio 10.5 Titanium. With each upgrade came theoretically increased capabilities but also real increased instability, to the point that Studio 10.5 was not only unusable but also made my entire PC unstable. So I uninstalled it and waited for a sale on Sony’s Vegas Studio. The reviews on Vegas said it wasn’t exactly intuitive and took a long time to learn, but was rock steady and produced extremely nice output. I installed Vegas 7 Platinum and waited for some spare time to learn and experiment. Well, months went by until I was tasked to construct the video for our company’s annual meeting. The weekend before, I sat down with Vegas. I’m not saying it isn’t a good product, but I am saying I found the learning curve would be too steep with a hard deadline looming, and I didn’t see many of the features I liked in Studio. So I turned to the Pinnacle web site and saw that Version 11 was out. Magazine reviews said that the instabilities of the previous versions were a thing of the past, and the fraction of hostile user reviews was lower than I observed for previous versions. So off I went to pick up Studio 11 Ultimate.
Avid offers three flavors of Studio 11. The Ultimate version offers extras such as ChromaKey capabilities, extra transitions, and video/audio effects, including the “Pan and Zoom” technique made famous by Ken Burns in his PBS documentaries. Pan and Zoom is the technique in which the camera pans and/or zooms on a still photo. It’s a pretty cool and very professional looking technique.
Version 11 has most of the look and feel of earlier versions. There are tabs to provide the tools you need when capturing video, editing the project, or making the movie, respectively. There is a preview screen, and, when editing a video or audio clip, a separate editing subscreen pops up to allow you to splice the clip down to the exact frame (1/30 second) you require. Studio gives you three options to view your project. A text view lists each clip, with details, in order – more on this later. The storyboard view shows the sequence of clips and is the sort of high level approach often taken by marketing and advertising types who are putting together a new concept. The timeline is the one I, and I expect most users, will use most often. Against the project elapsed time, you can view tracks for video and associated audio, video overlay (such as titles), sound effects and voiceovers, and music. Each track can be edited and muted either globally or by clip. Local editing can often be accomplished by clicking and dragging the clip on the timeline, or by double clicking to produce a sunscreen to allow more detailed editing.
That sounds complicated, so let me give you an example. Let’s say I’m putting a still photo and video clip in a project with a music “bed” of, say, The Beach Boys. I can drag these three clips onto the timeline, line them up, and lengthen or shorten them as I desire. I can mute the audio from the video clip with one click, and I can raise or lower all or part of the music track volume on the timeline. I can add transitions and titles. If I want to make a very precise edit – say, for example, I want parts of the music to line up exactly with a transition or event – I can double click on the video to open the editing subscreen where I can edit the clip length down to the frame and see it on the screen (although it takes a lot of processing power to do this and you may experience a delay.) The really cool thing is that the editing occurs only in the project – your original video or audio is unchanged.
The Pan and Zoom feature is amazingly powerful and effective at any price, let alone something in the $100 price range. Let’s say you’re including a class photo and you want to show the entire class, then zoom in on the teacher in the upper right, then pan down to a student in the first row on the right. Put the same photo in the project three times, back to back to back. Select the P/Z feature. If you want the greatest possible magnification of the entire class, you can zoom in and select the same zoom for the start and end. For the second clip, you can select where you want to start and end the pan, and starting and ending zoom levels. There is a feature that allows you to match the beginning settings of the current clip to the ending settings of the previous clip. By doing this, you will end up with a complex “camera” Pan and Zoom movement that will appear in the final production as a smooth, continuous movement.
There are many other features as well. You can bring up the audio portion of the video to mix with or dominate the music track or voiceover, and vice versa. There are plenty of title and transition options, and many customized event add-ins for birthdays, anniversaries, graduations. . . . The ChromaKey feature provides a green cloth that you can stand in front of so that at a later time another picture or clip can replace the green background. You can be seen in the video standing in front of (London’s) Big Ben or a weather map – the same technique they use for forecasters on TV. The point here is that highly finished and polished projects are possible, limited only by your creativity and patience. And, for the first time in the Pinnacle Studio series, the stability of the software is not a limitation. It didn’t fail on me in over ten hours of editing – not once.
Now for the extra thoughts on the text view. It lists every clip, insertion, title, transition, effect and segment length. This is the list of files and edits that I used earlier to reconstruct the infamous corrupt project. That’s really nice, but the annoying thing about this text view is that I’ve been unable to find an easy way to export this view to either a text editor or spreadsheet. I’ve had to copy the data laboriously by a combination of individual copy and paste commands and hand copies. Having this view can be a lifesaver, but the ability to export the data easily should be a no-brainer.
The only other quibble I have is that many of the effects and transitions are a little on the cheesy side. You have to kiss a lot of frogs to find the princes or princesses. Avid offers additional plugins, but they are likely too expensive for the average casual user. It would be nicer if the purchaser could have more ability to customize his selection of effects.
All in all, this is an incredibly powerful video editor. You can astonish your friends and yourself with both your creativity and your technical production abilities. The instability that used to be synonymous with Pinnacle Studio appears to be a thing of the past. It’s easy to get up and running quickly, producing nice stuff, and there are enough capabilities to grow with the vast majority of budding Spielbergs and Hitchcocks. It's hard to touch this wealth of features anywhere else at this price point. Highly recommended..
Achieve sophisticated effects and transitions featuring light rays, color matching, artistic film looks and much more Add drama and documentary-style ...More at Amazon
Achieve sophisticated effects and transitions featuring light rays, color matching, artistic film looks and much more Add drama and documentary-style ...More at Amazon Marketplace
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