Review by A Family Effort

My review is written based on my knowledge and experience with other programs like Sony Vegas, and Adobe Premiere. As such, I will be using it without the instructions (until I get stuck) in order to compare it to my experience with industry standard applications.

If you are familiar with other video editing tools, you will find that most elements are in traditional locations, such as the timeline, project assets and preview pane.

There are 3 main areas in this application – organize, edit and author.

Organize is the best place to take care of selecting the assets, rating your transitions, etc., that will be used in the project.

Edit is where you work on the timeline for the project – adding clips, titles, music and additional sound.

Author is for the final step in the creation of menus on a DVD.

PROSnThe ability to rate the project assets – including images, clips, transitions, sound effects rtc – and then sort by rating is brilliant. Pinnacle Studio plus 18 comes with a very wide array of additional components to add life to your project, and it is definitely nice to narrow down the assets to the set that you like the most.nThis comes with 17 music tracks from Tripple Scoop Music. Not only is this a bonus, it goes a long way toward helping discourage the illegal use of copyrighted music in the creation of a video.

CONSnThere is a surprising lack of menu items. There is File, Edit, Setup and E-Store.nAs of yet I haven’t found a way to edit the fade curve for transitions, etc. By default, it is a straight line increase or decrease fade.nThe option to create a song is a good addition; however, the preview length is definitely not long enough to give you a flavor for the song.nFor the home user wanting to create family videos or wedding videos, etc., there are no templates to begin a project with.

In closing, while this is definitely not as fully featured as Premiere or Sony Vegas – the more professional products – it is a really good piece of software at this price point for a home or small business.