Review by John D Hillmer

I usually use CyberLink PowerDirector 12 (64-bit), I also use Sony Movie Studio Platinum 13.0 (64-bit), so Im familiar with how these video programs work. Each one approaches the perspective of how they create DVDs or movies (files) and menus for their DVDs differently, with different terminology, so it can get frustrating learning the process, or methodology, that each one wants you to use.

I had used Pinnacle Studio 16 on my PC as well and recently removed it when I got and installed this full copy of Pinnacle Studio 18 to evaluate.

I have a pretty fast video processing desktop PC, quad core i7 processors with 12GB memory and a very fast video card with dedicated video memory on the video card. So, if things take a long time on my PC, they might take a very long time on other peoples PC (unless you most recently bought something close to about $2K or more loaded for video editing)nnFirst impressions of Pinnacle Studio 18 it took a long time to start up initializing transition engine, etc. There was an upgrade to the program that was detected as soon as it was running, and I applied that. Then when I ran the program again, it started up faster.

I DO NOT recommend that you have it monitor your PC for media files. When I used this option in the Studio 16 version of the program, it was constantly looking for new media files, pictures on my PC, music, video, etc., and that made doing anything in the program really slow as all of that searching was going on in the back ground. When Studio 18 started up, it offered me the option to monitor for media files, and I said, NO.

All of these programs let you include video and pictures on various tracks, sound, etc., and that is pretty intuitive if you have used these types of programs before. If not, there is a good learning curve, and you might be happier with Sony Movie Studio 13 Platinum Suite since it has a really nice built-in animated show me how help function.

Like Pinnacle Studio 16, I was able to make nice movies, the learning curve to make a DVD with a menu was a bit to get over, the number of options to make a DVD menu was limited (maybe it has more options than the easier to use CyberLink menu maker, but it is not as flexible as the somewhat more complicated DVD Architect Studio 5.0 that comes with the Sony Movie Studio 13 Suite).

I only make DVDs and Video files for YouTube (or Facebook, etc.), so I cant comment on 3D or Blu-ray, but all in all, Pinnacle Studio 18 has more options that version 16 did, no surprise there, but really, most of us won’t use most of those options.