Review by Wendi Barker

This installed easily with absolutely no issues on my Windows 7 laptop. The program has some great features that will make finally doing something with our family video files fun.

I have no problem at all with the program until I try to work with media files on my computer, at which point my computer overheats and has a thermal shut-down. After some research, it is a problem with my laptop’s graphics card, and has nothing to do with the program at all. So, I’ll talk to the things I’ve been able to explore so far.

Navigation is easy and the menus make sense. I have a standard dvd reader/writer, but not blu-ray or 3d, although it would be fun to upgrade to that in the future.

I can’t wait to try the live-screen capture feature!nnPinnacle’s Studio 18 has 3 different versions: Regular, Plus and Ultimate. This version is the Plus, and is their mid-range program. When you look at the comparison chart - the benefit to this version is the live-capture feature, while the Ultimate has additional features including Blu-ray authoring, additional effects, music and speech cleaner, etc. I’m assuming this is for the more advanced users.

As a semi-novice to video editing, I think this software is great, and it comes with 6 weeks of free OnDemand training.