Trust us: Hollywood doesn’t have a whole bunch of magic effects that you don’t have to make its movies look great. There is no substitute for good shooting. It’s not that these filters are bad, so much as we are unhappy with the unrealistic expectation that most people will have based on marketing claims. Likewise, the audio noise reduction filter is basically only for constant, low-level noise. Other 'video cleaning' filters were nothing but empty promises.

Image stabilization is decent, but it degrades the image significantly. The automatic white balance (color correction) tool is completely awesome. We really only liked about half of the new features, with the other half being the equivalent of a 700x digital zoom on a camcorder. We also found that these animations really dragged and stuttered on our 1GHz test machine, the slowest we tested. This is definitely something you’ll have to get used to. Although each feature’s interface is well designed, panels swoosh in and out as various buttons are clicked.

There are so many filters and effects, that it can be a bit baffling as to exactly where features are hidden and the Toolbox metaphor doesn’t always work. The app has so many features, however, that the manual is only enough to get you started, which is fine.īeginner-level apps have so many features that they can rapidly get complex. That’s where Pinnacle’s 262 page printed manual comes in. There is nothing intuitive about editing video on a computer, no matter what the marketers tell you. That is not to say that the program is intuitive. click the yellow folder icon to set the capture location) to be useful. The 'Diskometer' and settings screens are simple and follow enough of Windows’ conventions (e.g. For example, by simply hooking up your camcorder and hitting the record button in Studio (which is intuitively placed on a virtual camcorder), the application will automatically capture video and break it up into scenes and put them in an album. Complete novices will have no trouble with fundamental tasks such as capture, storyboard editing and output to DVD, even if they aren’t quite sure what really is happening. Overall, Studio 9 has a wonderful user interface that, although more complex, is even better than iMovie. NOTE: This review is based on the 9.1.2 patch, which is a 48MB download. We ran the newest version through its paces on a half a dozen machines, old and new, to see how it performed. Unless something went tragically wrong during the last development cycle, Studio 9 should be the best one yet. Each new version has added new features and has become easier to use. One of our favorite applications for video editing on a Windows computer is Pinnacle Studio.

Pinnacle studio version 9 serial number