Pinnacle Studio 10 is available in three versions.
The basic version costs £49.99; Studio Plus (reviewed here), offers additional features including picture-in-picture overlays, chromakeying, speed adjustments and more versatile DVD authoring; and Studio Media Suite which includes extra photo album, audio-editing and DVD burning applications.
The studio interface uses tabbed panels to split the process into three stages – capture, edit and make movie. In Edit mode an Album provides access to your captured clips as well as transitions, titles, DVD menu templates, sound effects and other resources.
The movie window can display a storyboard or timeline view and there’s also a text view option which simply lists the clips in sequence. The Player sits in the top left corner of the screen and can be expanded to provide full-screen playback.
One of Version 10’s new features is real-time full-resolution previews. The success of this feature will depend to a large extent on the capabilities of your CPU and GPU, but on our test system this proved to be a disappointment with frames being dropped by the handful.
Even with no effects applied playback was less than smooth, but this may have been a consequence of graphics card incompatibility.
On installation Studio warned that it couldn’t run 3D video hardware acceleration on our Matrox P750 graphics card.
That said, we don’t see how this should adversely affect playback of unedited clips which wasn’t a problem with any of the other applications. The dual screen output which diverts video previews to a second monitor worked very well, however.
One of the advantages of the Plus version is that it includes an overlay track which allows you to create picture-in-picture and chromakey effects.
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