Review by The Technologist

Ive been using Pinnacles Studio video editing software since version 9. To be honest, I never thought it ever was a great program from a technical standpoint, it was just so easy to use. Earlier versions of Studio often crashed in the middle of editing a project losing any unsaved work in the process. In 2005 Avid bought Pinnacle and really did a lot of work behind the scenes to make the product more and more stable, without making any major changes to the user interface. Avid made the product sleeker, robust and crash resistant without the user having to learn anything new. They continuously improved the product up to Studio version 15. Unfortunately, in 2012 Avid sold Pinnacle to Corel who made some changes of their own starting with Studio 16. The new interface was totally different then any other version of Studio, and loyal customers really felt betrayed by this. Studio 16 also required much more in the way of system requirements, and rendering times seemed to take longer.

Installing Pinnacle Studio 17 took about 40 minutes, but it does load a large amount of effects and transitions, which take up some space on the hard drive about two and a half gigabytes. The first time Studio 17 is run it will try to add media from your hard drive unless you uncheck the Watched Folders boxes for Public Media and Current User Media. This is kind of a nuisance if you weren’t paying attention during the install and just let Studio do its thing. I doubt most users want every video and picture file on their hard drives to end up in Studios library. Make sure to check for updates once the program is installed. There is a 17.2 patch available at the time of this review.

Studio 17 does not seem much different than Studio 16, with the exception of faster rendering times. The box claims it is up to 10X faster than the previous version. The keywords are up to. My experience did not agree with the ten times claim, but at most two or three times faster. I guess with a super fast machine it might be possible to get faster results. Another added feature in Studio 17 is the ability for live screen capture, which is good for educational or instructional purposes, but most home users probably won’t have a need for this.

I still have not gotten used to Corels new user interface, even though I don’t think it has changed at all in Studio 17. I find it hard to navigate compared to the old Studio interface, slower, and just not very intuitive. There is still a lot to learn to figure this program out. Studio is just a ghost of what it once was, a simple, smart editing program that gave you great results. Im not finding that with Studio 17, and find it hard to recommend at this time.