Pinnacle Studio 9 Plus - Video Editing Software Description:

Pinnacle Studio 9 Plus - Video Editing Software review:
5 stars (Excellent - as long as you have a reasonably recent PC) - I've been using Pinnacle for a couple years. This software is outstanding. Extremely powerful, yet reasonably intuitive to use. After learning a few basics, you're off and running to create powerful effects -- from corporate videos to very cool home videos.



Good points:

- Imports video nicely from dv camera

- Breaks video up into scenes automatically for you

- Easy drag, drop, cut, etc. to get just what you want into the timeline

- Easy to modify the volume on the soundtrack and to add a music track and/or voiceover

- Very powerful transitions -- the cool things you insert between segments of the video to make people say "wow, cool, how'd you do that"... you just drop them between scenes in your timeline and it does the rest

- Preview without rendering time

- If you want to dig deeper, you can -- title tools, transition effects can be highly customized, panning photos, etc.



Drawbacks:

- It's not a super high end product at this price -- there's only a couple audio tracks for instance.

- I've had trouble with it on older hardware (more than a couple years). When you have hardware conflicts, it is terrible. It seems to randomly freeze and hang your machine, you lose your work, etc. It's awful. That probably accounts for most of the negative reviews.



However, if your hardware will run it you will love this and be a great video editor in no time.


4 stars (Nice product. Off and running in a matter of minutes) - I purchsed Studio Version 9.3.9. Had no problems installing or running on my Dell Desktop or Laptop. Found program easy to use, importing video worked great (wish preview window defaulted to slightly larger size), Moving and trimming clips was easy, splitting clips was easy after viewing help file. Put togtethe 3 video tapes, edited clips and readied for burning DVD in a matter of about 5 hours (2.5 hrs importing and about the same editing/ setting up menu). Would recommend to others. Only improvement I would suggest is that after burning DVD, program ask if you would like to delete the large DVD files from the hard drive.


4 stars (Pinnacle Studio 9 - Pretty Good) - I am used to using Roxio easy media creator to make my dvds, so this was a huge change. It was difficult to figure things out on my own, but eventually did. I can tell the program is extremely powerful and I have not even begun to tap into it's resources. However the most disappointing thing is that in most cases one must pay extra fees to unlock these resources.