reviews TESTED. REVIEWED. VERDICTIZED
86 MA XIMUMPC APRIL 2006
W
hen it was released, Pinnacle
Systems Studio 9 gained a reputa-
tion as a roach motel: Bugs went
in and they didn’t come out. The bad word
spread so fast and so furiously that the
company wadded up the product, tossed it
in a dumpster and started over again.
The result is Studio Plus 10. In a nut-
shell, the program features Studio 9’s
familiar and super-friendly interface bolted
to an engine based on Pinnacle’s profes-
sional Liquid Edition editor.
Unfortunately, somewhere along the
way, things didn’t gel. Despite putting reli-
ability and bugs at the top of the priority
list, Pinnacle’s new Studio is less than opti-
mal. OK, it was a buggy, horrible mess on
not one, but two different machines. That’s
really unfortunate, because Studio sports
some truly compelling features that make
it a far friendlier video editor than its direct
competitor: Adobe’s Premiere Elements
2.0 , which we reviewed in March.
Our first problem surfaced during the
install on a dual-Opteron machine. The
app took an inordinate amount of time to
install, giving us an error message during
the process, yet somehow the install com-
pleted anyway. We successfully captured
10 minutes of video from a DV cam, but
after a few minutes of editing, the programcrashed to the
desktop. Mind
you, that’s with
the latest update
for the program
installed. Indeed,
the program
crashed on us
enough times
that we gave up and moved to a second
machine. Our second PC was an Athlon 64
FX-60 with 2GB of RAM, an nForce4 X16
chipset, and SLI. The program successful-
ly installed the first two discs, but the third
gave us an error. Nice. We finally gave up
on the third bonus disc completely.
Pinnacle said the installation problem
is a “known issue” that will soon be fixed
with a new patch. The company also said
it’s working on a patch to specifically
address “issues” with AMD machines.
If you can successfully install Studio ,
you’ll find that it’s quite welcoming to
users of all stripes. If Premiere Elements
2.0 is like an old college buddy, Studio is
the little poodle that humps your leg when
you come to visit—it’s in your face and
friendly from the start.
Newbies will feel right at home with the
storyboard mode, which lets you perform
a quick edit rather than tangling with the
traditional timeline, although
the program does support
a timeline, if you prefer. And
for users who don’t want to
actually edit their own vid-
eos, the SmartMovie mode
will automatically turn your
footage into a music video. It
works in a pinch, but hardly
counts as an actual project.
It’s analogous to a “write my
sentence for me” button in
Word , or an auto-crop mode
for your images. Not every-
thing about Studio is intuitive,
however. We found DVD cre-
ation to be more straightfor-
ward with Elements 2.0.
We appreciate Studio’s
comparatively large assort-ment of transitions, but we find the
program’s pay-as-you-go scheme to be
quite annoying. The program dangles page
upon page of transitions in your face that
you can’t use unless you pay for them.
Fortunately, you can disable the “premium”
content ads, but it’s a drag to be reminded
that you need to pay more money for a
product you already purchased. The pro-
gram also includes more robust audio tools
than Premiere Elements 2.0.
Studio boasts the ability to edit high-
definition video, but we were unable
to capture any video with our pro-level
cam—a Sony HVR-Z1. It was probably an
issue of how we configured the camera;
after all, it’s pretty unlikely someone will
use an $80 program to edit video from a
$5,000 camera.
Pinnacle says the latest version of
Studio might be labeled 10, but it’s really
a totally new product. We believe it—this
definitely feels like a 1.0 app! While we
think Pinnacle is laying the foundation for
a potentially great new editing applica-
tion, it’s pretty freaking far from that right
now. That coupled with its Athlon stability
issues make it impossible for us to recom-
mend this program.
—GORDON MAH UNGPinnacle Systems
Studio Plus 10
Now with 10 percent more bugs and crashes, apparently
Studio 10’s storyboard review makes it a snap to add transitions
in your home video.Nothing makes us madder than to pay for a program,
which then tells us we need to pay more for more
functionality. $80, http://www.pinnaclesys.comPINNACLE SYSTEMS STUDIO PLUS 10STUDIO 54
New engine and friendly
interface.
STUDIO APARTMENT^3
Crashes and has installation
issues on Athlon 64 machines.