Pinnacle Studio Version 8
Free
Trial Download of this software
review posted September 2003
A very competent product at this price bracket Pinnacle Studio 8 has won a
lot of awards for being one of the best among novice video editing software
packages. It is the latest version of the well known Pinnacle Studio
package.
Pinnacle Studio captures digital footage via any standard DV
(IEEE1394/Firewire card), and analogue footage via a supported analogue card. It
offers the facility to capture directly to MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 formats rather than
capturing in DV and then encoding your footage. (Capturing in the lower quality
MPEG formats saves enormous amounts of time if that's the format you want your
finished product in).
Again, to save time you could capture quickly in a low resolution preview
mode using SmartCapture. Put the clips on the storyboard or timeline, perform
some editing tasks - and when you are ready to create your final movie - Studio
will re-capture the footage in normal resolution. It'll take a while to do that
but it does save on using up large volumes of your hard disk space to capture DV
quality clips... much of which you may wish to edit out.
As in programs ranging from Windows Movie Maker to Adobe
Premiere Pro clips can be stored in separate scenes, with
previews, and dragged and dropped, cut or replaced with ease.
Output of your finished product to VCD, SVCD or DVD is
relatively easy and the included menu templates for
"standard" occasions should help matters along. Still,
do bear in mind that this is a low-end/budget package. You could
soon outgrow it but at this price point, and if you don't have
big "Jurassic Park" type aspirations, it will serve
you well even on lower specification PCs.
We like:
- Decent audio mixer
- Quick capture in MPEG format
- TitleDeko included
- Highly featured for this price point
- DVD creation highly integrated into the video production
process
Pinnacle Studio 8 Family of products
|
