Description:
A multifaceted yet user-friendly solution, Pinnacle Studio 7 Professional makes movie production both fun and rewarding. Whether you're just adding titles to your home movies or spicing them up with 3-D animated transitions and audio effects, this affordable video editing software is perfect for all your home editing projects. Although it may take days and perhaps weeks to become truly proficient--as indicated by the program's 300-page user's manual--Pinnacle Studio should have you tweaking your footage within minutes. Its intuitive and extremely polished interface, generous help section, slick tutorial, and massive online FAQ section are superb rookie aids. Unfortunately, you'll be far better off asking specific support questions via e-mail than through the company's telephone support lines, where hold times can be very long indeed. Pinnacle Studio has been designed to look both elegant and visually appealing. It is divided into three main areas--Capture, Edit, and Make Movie. To upload a video, merely click the Start Capture command in the Capture interface. Control your video device by clicking various buttons on the program's large camcorder icon, and formulate edits on a large filmstrip spread across the bottom of the Edit screen. Pinnacle has smartly hidden secondary functions in pop-up windows to keep the screen uncluttered and easy to navigate. The program offers several perks not found in other budget editors. When a video is uploaded, it automatically deciphers each new scene and creates a corresponding thumbnail image that may then be drag-and-dropped to any position on the filmstrip. Screen transitions can be drag-and-dropped, too, as can titles and sound effects such as music or voice-overs. If you want to deviate from the prefabricated special effects, Pinnacle Studio allows you to modify or create your own from scratch. For pinpoint edits, you'll want to access the timeline view, wherein you'll see an exacting second-by-second account of every video frame and every special effect you've added. Furthermore, the program helps conserve valuable hard drive space by converting your full DV-quality video to a more economical format for editing purposes, then reconverting it back to DV quality for the final product. Veteran moviemakers may find some of the program's special effects rather basic, but anyone new to video editing will undoubtedly have a blast turning their homegrown movies into dynamic works of art, saving them in any number of video formats, and perhaps even sharing them at the Pinnacle Web site. --Gordon Goble
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