Review by Jerry Saperstein

Ive had a long time love/hate with Pinnacle. I started using it when it was an independent company and gave up on it when it was acquired by Avid, who (in my opinion) practically destroyed the application and provided simply awful customer support. Like many others, I abandoned Pinnacle. It was bought by Corel and I didn’t have high hopes for it.

Much to my surprise, Corel after years of flailing is making a concerted effort to rejuvenate their acquired product lines. PaintShop Pro which was on a downhill path is really a great program in its present iteration. I skipped sever iterations of Pinnacle Studio, but when offered the opportunity to evaluate Pinnacle Studio 19 Ultimate, I figured why not.

Overall I think Pinnacle Studio 19 Ultimate is vastly improved since my past outing with the product. But I will be sticking with Cyberlink Director.

The feature list is on the Amazon web page, but I suggest you also look at the Pinnacle Systems website as well. Pinnacle does not offer a trial download of Pinnacle Studio 19, but the manual is available. If you’re a Cyberlink Director or Adobe Premiere Elements user considering a switch, I recommend downloading and perusing the manual before purchase.

Ultimately it comes down to a users preferences. This is probably not a program for absolute beginners, but like Cyberlink Director and Adobe Premiere Elements, it is a good place to continue after using Windows MovieMaker.

It installs easily, interfaces are a bit cluttered which can be said of all its competitors as well and has some features like 4K that few people will use right now. The New Blue Effects package is nice.

In toto, Pinnacle Studio 19 Ultimate is a nice serviceable video editing suite. With all the choices in the market, though, I would advise careful consideration.

Jerry