Pinnacle Studio Deluxe

Richard Price
25 June 2002

There must be a huge stockpile of analogue tape out there to say nothing of the millions of analogue camcorder owners, so it makes sense to have a video-editing solution that provides analogue editing capabilities.

Pinnacle Systems has come up with a solution that will appeal to users with older video cameras (who may be planning to buy a DV camcorder) as it supports both DV and analog video capture and output.

It will also be useful to users who have already crossed over to digital and are looking for something compatible with their collection of old analogue tapes.

Pinnacle Studio Deluxe has everything the video enthusiast needs to turn a home PC into a complete video capture and editing system.

The package includes a 32-bit PCI video capture card with Firewire ports plus a professional looking breakout box with S-Video and composite video and stereo audio inputs and outputs.

The breakout box makes it a lot easier to connect devices without fiddling behind the PC.

Installing the card involves opening up the PC --- it’s as difficult as popping a slice of bread into a toaster and the Quick Installation Guide provides a handy reference.

According to the box the minimum requirement is a 300 MHz or faster Pentium or Athlon. I had great difficulty installing the card into an old Pentium. The Firewire ports were not recognised and I suspect anyone with an older machine could run into similar problems.

I suggest backing up important data before installing anything.

I installed it on a Pentium II running Windows ME without any problems. Video editing pushes a computer processor to the limit. Anyone serious about video editing should be using a Pentium 4 or Athlon XP.

Video editing chews up disk space and users will need at least 4 GB for every 20 minutes of finished movie. The hard drive should also be capable of sustained throughput of at least 4MB/sec.

Other minimum requirements are 64 MB RAM, Windows 98 or higher, DirectX compatible sound and graphics card, a CD-ROM drive and 300MB free disk space for installation.

Included software consists of Pinnacle Studio 7, Pinnacle Express DVD and Hollywood FX Plus for some professional-style transition effects.

I found Studio 7 dead easy to use and was surprised at the professional looking results I managed to create in three easy steps — Capture, Edit and Make Movie.

Imported footage is automatically cut into scenes. These are displayed on-screen and can be dragged and dropped into any sequence.

Videos can then be enhanced by choosing from over 100 transitions and 300 TitleDeko titles, and by adding sound and special effects, narration, or customised soundtracks.

SmartCapture enables users to digitise video in a low-resolution file (300Mb/hour), edit it, and then recapture it at full DV resolution for the final output.

Studio 7 includes SmartSound for automatically generating a soundtrack. Select the clips to apply the music to, choose a style, song and type from the library and Studio 7 composes a background soundtrack to fit the length of the movie.

Once the video has been edited, Pinnacle Express allows users with a DVD burner to quickly and easily burn their movie to DVD complete with interactive menus.

Pinnacle Studio Deluxe is only available for Windows.

Price AU$849 inc GST
www.pinnaclesys.com

By Richard Price, Editor, EnergyME.com

For information on getting a product reviewed email richard@energyme.com