Review by Jeremy Haggard

While Pinnacle Studio may not win any major movie editing awards it is pretty killer for home use. I have used final cut pro on macs and that software is pretty easy but highly complex, Pinnacle Studio is a little more challenging but is really not that much more difficult. The installation went well on my year old computer, it took about 30 minutes to get it installed and be up and running with minimal drag on my system. I tested it by using previous video clips and editing them together just to see how long it would take and what effects I could throw in in addition to testing rendering speeds. At the end of my test I was pleased with the results. While it wasn’t as fast as I would have liked it to be my system is a year old and frankly was not designed for video editing but it was able to keep up. I have a new system coming and will be installing this on it for additional testing once it arrives. The interface is not bad, pinnacle has a really good layout. Simply you load your videos up, drag them to the video timeline window. You can then mix multiple audio tracks controlling each channel pretty easily. Adding transition and effects is as easy as clicking on the part you want it and clicking the effect you want, then a little fine tuning. One of my favorite features is the ability to rate effects, this way when you are looking for your favorite ones they can be easily located and the effects you don’t like you don’t have to keep thumbing through. Another great feature is the ability to balance your background audio with the foreground audio, very easy to do. There are a lot of great videos on youtube that show you demos and examples of how to use this, I would check them out, I really like this software, it’s pretty easy to use once you get the hang of it and offers a lot of really great features and effects that rival Microsoft Movie Maker. BUT not everyone needs the features this have, if you just want basic, bare bones video trimming and titles you don’t need this and movie maker will work for you. If you want full control including audio track controls and filters for the video along with other transitions I do recommend this.