Review by Gagewyn

The Pinnacle Studio line of video editing software is a perfect balance of allowing advanced editing but not being too complex. I first encountered this while looking for good software for my coworkers to use to edit short web videos. These are people, myself included, with regular office jobs who just need the ability to edit video one or two times a year and we keep one computer with graphics software for those occasional times when someone needs it. We already has access to Adobe Primere, but it is far too busy an interface for someone who does not have a big amount of time to invest at the very beginning in learning how to use it, In contrast, the Pinnacle Studio line of software has a good balance of having the tools to allow me to do lots of projects while still keeping the interface clean so that it is intuitive and easy to figure out how to do something. If you want to do serious editing but haven’t done much editing before, then this is a good product to get. Most of the time when I know in my head what I want to do, it is easy to figure out how to do it or to search online and find instructions on how to do it,nnPinnacle makes three editing programs: Studio (in the 60 dollar range), Plus (in the 100 dollar range), and Ultimate (in the 130 dollar range). The biggest difference is that Plus and Ultimate let you do screen capture as well as editing. That’s a nice feature. Good basic scree casting software is a must for me. Another difference that matters is that Ultimate has added features to clean up audio quality. Other differences don’t matter to me as a casual user. For example, Plain old Studio not Ultimate not Plus only lets you work with 6 tracks at once, while Plus is 24 tracks and Ultimate is unlimited. That limit doesn’t bother me because I’m just doing short web videos and usually just deleting bloopers or doing a little audio clean up. Pinnacle has a chart on their website comparing the software features. The most compelling reason to get Ultimate is that that way if you google for instructions on how to do something in Pinnacle Studio, then those will definitely apply to something your product will do.

Overall this is a really great piece of software if you want to do some serious video editing but that is not your full time job. I can do what I need to do to clean up short web videos, and the interface is intuitive so that it saves me time figuring out how to do what I plan to do. The ease of use is key, and I was actually more excited to get a home copy of this than I would have been for any other video editing software I can think of,