Entry level video editing tools are one of the big sellers in consumer based content creation applications, especially with the explosive popularity of digital video camcorders. Pinnacle Systems is known for its professional and broadcast level applications and was one of the first companies to bring its editing prowess to the masses. Its Pinnacle Studio Plus 9.3 is an entry level video editing tool that provides for a whole host of special effects and movie making. It is available as a standalone video editor and as part of the Pinnacle Studio MediaSuite. The tools that comprise the suite include Pinnacle Studio Plus 9, the main application for editing video; Corel Photobook, an image retouching and management tool, Steinberg Wavelab Lite; a digital audio editing tool, Pinnacle Instant Copy, a CD/ DVD copying software that enables you to burn copies of your movies; Pinnacle Instant DVD Recorder , which enables you to burn directly from a DV camera to a DVD with basic menus, Pinnacle Media Manager, a digital media organizing tool to help manage all of your digital media and burn files to CD or DVD , Pinnacle Instant Cinema, which offers the capability to watch DVDs , SVCDs, and VCDs on your PC, and Pinnacle Instant Disc, a tool that enables you to create data and audio CDs. Because the suite comprises a whole host of tools, we will first take a look at the main tool in the suite, Pinnacle Studio Plus 9.3, and then take a look at the other creative tools that comprise the suite at a later date, starting with Corel Photobook and Steinberg Wavelab Lite.

The interface of Pinnacle Studio Plus 9 is similar to other editing tools in its class. It is largely based around three tabs; Capture, Edit, and Make Movie. This is a proven style of interface and really helps to keep the editing task focused. For editing, you have two visual modes, Storyboard and Timeline, and one file-based mode, called Text view, which details the file name and movie duration and start and end times of the clips.

The first tab is the Capture tab. It is the first tab that you work with to get your video into the computer for editing. The interface features four main areas. the camcorder window looks like a camcorder and features all the buttons of a camcorder , including stop forward, reverse, play, pause, and eject. This is where you control your camcorder . To the right of the camcorder window is the status window of your hard drive. It shows how much hard disk space that you have to work with, including how much free space you have, how much is used, and how many hours of footage that your hard disk can store, based on the file format that you capture to. you can also change the file formats from here as well. Your file format choices include DV full quality capture, MPEG capture, and preview quality capture. You start capture from this window as well as adjust your capture settings. When you click the Settings button, the settings window pops open and details all the various settings that you can work with on your projects. These settings are tab based, with five tabs total, Capture Source, Capture Format, Edit, and CD Voice over and Surround.

The Capture Source tab enables you to change your capture device for video and audio, the TV Standard (NTSC, PAL), aspect ratio, and your current data rates at capture. there is also a section called Scene detection during video capture. here you have four choices from which to choose, Automatic based on shooting time and date, which is the default, automatic based on video content, which enables the software to detect the change in scenes and adjust accordingly, by duration, which is user selected, so if you want a new scene created every 30 seconds, you can select it and the software does the rest, and No auto scene detection, which enables you to choose when to create a new scene by pressing the space bar every time you want a new scene created.

The Capture Format tab is where you decide what format you want to capture video in. The presets include DV, MPEG , and preview format. Capturing in full DV quality uses the most amount of hard disk space, while capturing in MPEG and preview quality uses less disk space. You also determine the video and audio compression settings (including the video width, height, and framrate, as well as the audio compression format, channels and sample rate) in this tab as well. You can also use the provided slider as an alternative. this enables you to capture video and audio via quality or data rate.

The Edit tab is where you set your transition, titles, and stills duration as well as your volume fades. You can select AutoSave to automatically save your project at a specific interval, such as every 100 seconds or 90 seconds, choose where you want on the hard drive to save your auxiliary or additional files that you use, such as still image files or titles in addition to the video files that you work with, rendering options such as optimize for preview, no back ground rendering, or optimize for make tape. Another feature is the When adding a menu pulldown. When adding a menu, your options on the pulldown include Ask if chapters should be created, Don't create chapters, create chapters automatically, and create chapters and returns. There is a lot of terminology that might not be understandable to you, and if this is the case, I highly recommend that you refer to the user's guide to help you out, as it has a good glossary and index that explains a lot of the terms discussed, such as rendering.

Adding your own custom audio to your editing projects enables you to have a more custom final project than just relying on the audio that was captured in the video. Studio Plus 9 enables you to capture audio from a variety of sources that you can add to your video projects, including such audio as your current favorite tune, a narrative voiceover, even perhaps a phone conversation of grandma commenting on the grandchildren. the tools that enable you to perform these tasks are in the CD, Voice-over and Surround tab. This tab is where you adjust your input source for CD audio recording, as well as the channel specification and sample rates, and drive letter of the CD to which you will rip the audio files from. For CD audio recording, you can import audio files from the common jacks on the computer, including phone, line in, microphone , CD player, Wave out mix, and mono out. For Voice-over recording, your choices include Microphone , mono out, phone, line in, and CD player. You can also select Surround Sound Playback for 5.1 surround sound. You can also use the included SmartSound Music music file generator feature, which enables you to select from a prebuilt library of audio files in styles and genres such as Classical and World to Latin and New Age. You can preview the sounds and when you find one that you like, it will add it to the selected clip.

The Edit Tab follows the capture tab. This is where you edit the footage that goes into your project. For example, in the image below, all of the captured footage is found in the Album of the project. The album is where all the files that you might want to add to your Timeline resides. All of the footage that have little checkmarks in the upper right corner are also located in the Storyboard/Timeline. The clips that do not have the check mark are not on the Storyboard/Timeline.

To place a clip in the Storyboard/Timeline involves simply dragging that clip onto the Timeline. The player window located in the upper right corner of the Studio interface enables you to preview the clips in the library. There are two ways to look at the clips in the Album; Scene View and Comment view. Scene view shows the first clip in the video sequence, while comment view shows the first clip in the video sequence but also details the duration of each clip in the Album as well as the Scene number. if you wish to preview the clip before you add it to the Timeline, you can double click the clip or select it and press play in the player window. You'll also notice a toolbar with six tools in the will show all the videos in your project. The next one shows the different transitions that are available to you to add to your projects. The player window enables you to see what a particular transition does. Studio Plus 9 ships with 74 standard transitions and 52 Alpha Magic transitions. The More transitions pull down simply takes you to a page where you can purchase more transitions from the Pinnacle Systems website.

The next tool is the Titling Tool, where you can create intros and other types of titles for your project by simply dragging one of the prebuilt titles onto the clip that you wish the title to be placed. You can also create your own custom titles using the Create Title menu item under the toolbox. This enables you to create your own custom titles with your own words easily. you can choose from a variety of fonts that come with Studio Plus to easily do this. you can create full screen titles or title overlays that will play in front of a video clip.

Following the title tool is the Photo/ Frame grab tool. This enables you to bring photos into your projects as still image files. Show Audio files follows, which let's you add cool sound effects to clips by simply dragging the sound effect onto the clip in the Timeline. Studio 9 includes 13 categories of sound effects, including Animals, backgrounds, bells, Cartoons, Crowds, Electronic, Gunshots, Humans, Instruments, Miscellaneous, Squeaks, vehicles, and Water. If you have audio or other music files in your my Music folder, Studio 9 will list them as well and make them available to your projects. You can adjust the volume of any background audio captured from the DV camera as well as the volume of that of the audio track that you import. For example, say you have video captured that features a lot of wind noise because it was extremely windy where you were shooting. You can adjust that wind noise down and have the audio track that you inserted into the project the more dominant sound on the track, thus mitigating the wind noise.

The final tool in the set is Show Menus. This tool enables you to pick from a variety of prebuilt menus that you can use for your DVD . Studio plus ships with 29 standard menus with option to check out more. You can also tweak the prebuilt chapters to your liking or create your own menus as well. When you add a menu to a movie, Studio plus will prompt you, asking if you would like it to create chapters at the start of each video clip. If you do, you can specify at what duration, or chapter length you want the application to create a new chapter, or you can create chapters manually.

Some New Features
Studio Plus version 9 includes several new features that have helped to enhance the creative editing process. These include such features as Chroma Key and Picture-in-Picture effects, image stabilization, color correction, and noise reduction.

Chroma Key is a feature that enables you to add foreground objects into a video scene after the fact. That is, you can add someone to a video scene even though they weren't there when the original video scene was captured. For this, Pinnacle has included a Chroma key cloth, commonly called a green screen, that will enable you to experiment with the Chroma key tool.

Picture in Picture enables you to add a video into an existing video, like watching multiple TV channels with PIP-enabled TV sets. To perform a Picture in Picture, you simply drag the video you want as the background video to the Timeline and drag the video than you want in the PIP box onto the Overlay track. From there, you can add a border and adjust its width, transparency, and softness, and add a shadow and adjust the shadow's distance and transparency, and even change the color of the shadow and border.

The Stabilize effect takes an image that is shaky and attempts to remove the shakiness by removing the edges of the video image and magnifying the center video by 20 percent. With the Noise reduction filter, Studio attempts to discard noise that is picked up by the camcorder . In the sample above, I've set the noise filter on and checked the eliminate wind box. The video will show in its raw form and then with both stabilize and noise reduction applied. See for yourself how it worked out.

The Color Correction tool enables you to adjust a video clip's brightness, contrast, hue, and saturation. This tool is accessed via the add video effects drop down menu. When you apply the Color Correction tool to a video clip, a small color wheel appears in the Timeline to let you know that the clip has some sort of color correction applied to it. What is nice about this feature is that you can make adjustments to the video clip as it is playing to see how those adjustments affect the clip.

First Impressions
This is the first time that I've looked at Pinnacle Studio MediaSuite, and I am absolutely amazed at the breadth of tools available in this $129 package. On top of this is the fact that we haven't even looked at the other applications in the suite yet. The interface enables you to work in either Storyboard or Timeline mode, which is not uncommon in entry level video editing tools, but Pinnacle Systems has built in a lot of functionality that previously was relegated to high end, high dollar applications, tools such as Chroma key and Picture in Picture capabilities. The Stabilize effect was hit and miss for me, probably due to the lack of stabilization in the clip I used as a reference, but it is supposed to do its best to stabilize. The Noise reduction feature worked well as did the picture in Picture effect tool. There is a whole lot more that wasn't covered in this review, but I am hoping I covered most of the bases with regard to the interface and new tools. And, if you already have similar tools as what is offered in the Studio MediaSuite, you can buy just Studio Plus version 9 for $99. Stay tuned, the next tool in the suite we'll discuss is Corel Photobook, an imaging application that will help get your images ready for placement in your next video projects using Pinnacle's Studio Plus version 9. For more information, visit www.pinnaclesys.com