Pinnacle continues to be a main contender in the home video market with Studio Plus 11. It does the job of 10 cheaper applications for a single low price. These aren't exactly revolutionary features but they extend Studio Plus outside of its meagre price tag. There's also support for iPod and Sony PSP, increasing the ways you can use Studio videos, outside as well as within, the home. Improved support of web video means you can add the results of an edit to a website or send them as an attachment with an email.
Once the video is complete, you can give it a full DVD menu front-end, including motion backgrounds, but there are other destinations possible. This is action completed simply by dragging the Scorefitter music track to the length needed. Version 11 rectifies that by introducing Scorefitter, a third-party add-on which cuts real music, to length.Ī good range of music files in a number of different styles are provided and these can be trimmed to fit. Soundtracks have been a weaker area of Studio in the past, with the ability to load music tracks, but little other than fades available to tailor them to the length of a scene or section. If the screen has a 16:9 aspect ratio, you can extend the timeline and display more thumbnails, to take full advantage of the extra desktop space a good bit of literal, lateral thinking. Pinnacle has decided to take advantage of a recent hardware innovation - widescreen monitors - by making the Studio screen expandable. You can work with whichever view feels most comfortable, though we suspect most people will choose the timeline. The storyboard can be exchanged, too, for a multi-channel timeline or a simple file list of video clips, in running order. The thumbnails can be overlaid with other panels, specific to the work your doing, so there's one for soundtracks and another for transitions, for example. Pinnacle Studio's main editing screen looks superficially similar to previous versions, with a preview panel on the right, thumbnails of video clips on the left and a storyboard at the bottom. Storing and burning HD video takes around 12.5GB per hour, so you'll need substantial hard drive storage, as well.
HD video demands a reasonably capable PC and a dual-core processor with 1GB of main memory (2GB for Vista) and a 128MB graphics card is recommended. Even without an HD or Blu-ray drive in your system, you can burn 20 minute HD videos to standard DVDs, in much the same way you could burn short, standard-definition videos to CDs, before the mass adoption of DVD writers.
While high-end software like Premiere Pro has had this feature for a while, this level of keyframe manipulation in a more mid-range application is impressive. You can also now select and move multiple keyframes simultaneously, maintaining the distance between them, which saves a lot of time compared to the fiddly job of moving each separately. You can also use them for time remapping of clips, to achieve smooth speeding up or down. You can use keyframes to adjust over time the positioning, scale, and rotation of video elements, and to alter transitions and effects. Pinnacle Studio 24 has significantly expanded the number of situations in which you can use them. Keyframes are vital to fine-tuning effects and adjustments applied to video clips. You can select and move multiple keyframes together (Image credit: Pinnacle Systems)