Pinnacle Studio Plus Version 12

List Price: $176.93 Discount Price: $89.99

Features:

• Take control of the latest HD video editing technologies, including Blu-ray and AVCHD
• Transform your videos and photos into amazing movies
• New theme-based video editing gives you creative power
• Share and archive your creations on DVD, YouTube, and more
• Burn your Hollywood-style movies on DVD and HD DVD format discs on standard DVD media

Customer Reviews:

Disappointed with AVCHD / BluRay capabilities [Posted on 2008-08-25]
I used this software back when it was at Versions 7 and 8, and switched to Ulead's VideoStudio because I found it to be less crash-prone. Now that I'd purcahsed an AVCHD videocamera and wanted to author BluRay discs in AVC format (which VideoStudio 11.5 cannot do), I thought I'd give Studio another try. First, understand that AVCHD editing requires a very powerful computer with this software. My Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHZ with 4GB RAM was barely up to the task, and even then Studio would frequently hang if I tried to move too quickly from one task to another. However, despite numerous tries, I could not get this software to successfully burn a BluRay of my finished project. I could get as far as encoding the final movie, which is the hard part, but the software seemed to have some kind of bug that resulted in an unuseable BluRay image every time I tried.

Normally, I would not go to the trouble of posting a review concerning an issue that I thought might be isolated or due to my particular hardware setup. But in this case, after spending hours on the Pinnacle Support forums, I think these problems aren't isolated and that there is a significant number of Studio 12 users who are having problems with BluRay burning and AVCHD editing. Moreover, I downloaded the trial version of Sony's Vegas Pro 8 and had no problems with it whatsoever - It ran slowly to be sure, but it was reliable and produced a perfect BluRay disc.

My advice is to check Pinnacle's support forums before purchasing and see if others are still having issues. I'm sure Pinnacle is working on it and will try to address problems with a future patch, but right now I found this software to be completely useless for my intended purpose.

best Windows app for HD video editing [Posted on 2008-09-07]
A few months ago I purchased my first HD digital camcorder (Sanyo Xacti HD1000). I soon set about trying to figure out which editing software application to use with all the AVCHD footage I created. I tried the software bundled w/ my camera (uLead 11) as well as trial versions of any of the other products I could get my hands on (Sony Vegas 8, Adobe Premiere Elements 7).

Adobe Premiere still doesn't handle AVC/H264 footage natively and I found the interfaces of uLead and Sony Vegas in particular hard to use. I also found Vegas more prone to hanging/crashing even on my relatively powerful machine (see below). So I decided to buy Pinnacle Studio 12 sight unseen (no downloadable trial) and have been very pleased ever since. Pinnacle is the consumer arm of Avid, the gold standard for digital editing in Hollywood, and it seems technology trickle down really works.

Pinnacle Studio handles AVCHD footage natively and lets you create and edit projects in any format ranging from low resolutions to 1920x1080 60i frame rate. You can output to files or discs including standard DVD, Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, and AVCHD disc (burned on DVD media, playable in most Blu-Ray players). The burning software is integrated in the package and not separate as w/ uLead and other apps.

Overall I find the Pinnacle Studio interface to be the easiest to use as well, this side of Apple iMovie. I'd never owned a camcorder before this and hadn't really edited video or created DVDs before and I was able to create a 30min DVD from 2hrs of footage that I shot that I'm very pleased with.

The only caveats I would include are 1) editing HD footage natively in Pinnacle Studio (or any app) requires powerful hardware. I ended up getting a new desktop to do video editing among other things and am running a quad-core 2.6Ghz Intel 9300 processor w/ 8GB of memory. There are settings you can vary within Studio 12 to suit your hardware, i.e. not doing full-screen previewing, memory cache sizes, etc. The second caveat is that unfortunately Avid/Pinnacle don't offer a trial version of the software for consumers to really see how good it is. So you have to take the word of reviewers like me.

Overall highly recommended. Best Windows app for HD video editing out there in my opinion, having tried all the rest.

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