BIOS: Technology Means Business

Studio is Pinnacle Systems' flagship consumer video-editing software suite. The suite is now available in two packages: Studio is designed for entry level storytellers who are looking for a quick and easy way to enhance and share memories with family and friends, while Studio Plus is intended for more advanced video enthusiasts who require additional power and control. Both products are loaded with a wide range of new features that further streamline the three-step 'Capture, Enhance, and Share' process. Studio costs £41.70 (inc. VAT) while Studio Plus is £57.87 (inc. VAT).

More and more consumers and small businesses are embracing video and digital photography not just because of cool technology or neat new devices, but because capturing treasured moments, sharing stories, and showcasing products and services is an important part of our lives and work. Pinnacle has taken an impressive step forward with Studio 10 to ensure that users have access to a wider range of exciting formats, including like HDV. High Definition (HD) support is unlikely to sway anyone other than semi-pros or those in the US at the moment, but it's still great to have it onboard nonetheless.

Studio 10 incorporates popular features like built-in DVD authoring with motion menus and custom navigation, as well as Pan and Zoom, enabling you to create video slideshows from digital photos. With Smart Movie II, you can develop home movies in minutes, choose styles and genres and apply them with just a few mouse clicks. In addition, you can create and preview effects in real-time, perform instant transfers to DVD, and organise videos, photos, audio and music files with Pinnacle's Media Manager.

Studio Plus 10 incorporates all of the features of Studio and adds more powerful components for advanced editors. Additional features include picture-in-picture (PIP), Chroma Key effects (green screen) and, most significantly, full HD editing, particularly creating HD slide shows from digital photos. You can also take advantage of keyframeable, real-time effects with preview, choose from hundreds of standard and bonus effects and transitions that are format independent (SD and HD), and then preview your work in full resolution on a primary or secondary computer monitor.

Now with Studio Plus you can continue to edit while you are rendering high-quality format and resolution-independent SD and HD output transparently in the background. In other words, you can keep working on your project while you are simultaneously rendering your project to the top quality format of your choice. This great new feature will sharply reduce, and in many cases even eliminate the incremental time needed to render out your final project for CD, DVD or the Web.

The software is one of the most advanced and powerful home video-editing solutions available, but its intuitive tools make it a snap to get great results. This is thanks largely to the simple three-step process that guides you through capture, edit and share steps, in addition to the on-demand assistance. Studio's CD and DVD authoring workflow also allows you to easily create DVDs with motion menus and custom navigation on the fly for playback on most consumer DVD players or DVD-capable computers.

Thankfully, Pinnacle hasn't changed the program's interface since version 9, aside from a slight scrub-up. This is great news because the timeline, preview window and context-sensitive tabbed album window are a winning combination. We also liked the ability to split and annotate clips in the Album, which helps isolate clips to include in the project. And we also liked the storyboard and timeline setups for sequencing content.

Studio also excels at transitions. Version 10 include an extensive range including dissolves and wipes, with optional theme packs for weddings, sporting events and the like. Studio's automatic colour correction is the best of the bunch too, as is its image stabilisation feature - which Adobe's Premiere Elements doesn't even offer. Additional corrective filters (like RGB colour balance), along with fun artistic effects like old film, earthquake, lens flare and lightning, provide great accents for home movies. You can also purchase extra packs of effects for even more editing creativity.

One tool we really appreciated in Studio Plus was the metering feature, which constantly measures remaining hard disk drive space so you can avoid consuming the whole the drive during a project. SmartAudio is also neat, allowing you to choose a music track and set an exact time for the music to run. SmartAudio will stretch or shorten the music length so it doesn't end in the middle but ends with the video, leaving the listener with a sense of completion. Finally, the three audio tracks and voice-recording studio make sound recording versatile, and you can choreograph your edits on a timeline.

On the downside, Studio offers only three video design layers and four audio tracks. While sufficient for most projects, this can't match the flexibility offered by Premiere Element's 99 audio and video tracks. In addition, capture, import and export of HDV, MPEG-2s and DVD titles and burning of S-VCDs and DVDs requires free product activation via the Internet at first use. It's also worth bearing in mind that output of DivX and MPEG-4 files is only possible if you already have the codecs installed on your computer. Importing and exporting DivX and MPEG-4 and output in Dolby 5.1 format further require Pinnacle's optional Advanced Codec Pack. [8]