Review by Tomsde

I have had many versions of Pinnacle Studio over the years and haven’t liked it much since they jettisoned the original Studio and converted Avid Studio to take it’s place. It you are running the 64 bit version some of your old content won’t work with this version. Gone are the Red Giant add ons replaced by an inferior number of New Blue Effects. Support for 4K video editing has been added. Real performance improvements are yet to be seen, theoretically 64 bit should be faster, but I’ve not found 64 bit software versions to knock my socks off in performance improvement. We still have the same pokey media management module with it’s glacial updating process. Honestly if you’re happy with version 17 I don’t see a compelling reason for you to upgrade. The included training is not a DVD as included in past versions, but rather a 45 day access to online training which you’ll have to subscribe to. I remember when this version of the software came with extras such as a green screen–the upgrade price is absurd for the amount of new features and loss of others. There is no clear way to unlock or add your legacy purchased add-ons as in the past. If you like what you have and everything is working, unless you are going 4K I don’t recommend it.

The installation progress takes an extremely long time. Be prepared to spend and entire evening uninstalling your old version and installing the new version.