Pinnacle Studio 7

Richard Price
25 September 2001

Studio 7 from Pinnacle, is an intuitive software program for quickly creating professional looking videos in three easy steps. Capture, Edit and Make Movie.

With Studio 7, any wannabe director who can operate a mouse can use a home PC to turn amateur video footage into something decent.

Installing Pinnacle Studio 7 took longer than I expected, but considering the full installation takes up 450 MB it’s hardly surprising.

What I did find annoying was that after clicking the obligatory “Finish” button to reboot the system, Windows ran Scandisk. More annoying, without warning, the installation process started to install Acrobat 5 Reader even though the full version was already installed on the test machine.

Minimum requirements are a Pentium II, 64 MB RAM, Windows 98 or higher, DirectX compatible sound and graphics card, a CD-ROM drive and as much hard disk space as you can muster.

It’s not only the installation that chews up space. One second of DV video equals 3.6 MB of disk space so think in terms of four minutes per gigabyte.

If you already have a FireWire adaptor you may want to consider Maxtor’s 80GB External Drive or something similar.

Studio 7 is geared towards digital video, so it helps if there is already a FireWire port on your PC. If not, they are easy enough to install. I used an Adaptec FireWire card. Open up the PC, pop it into an empty slot and connect a DV camcorder to transfer footage across to the hard drive.

Studio 7 is dead easy to use. Imported footage is automatically cut into scenes. These are displayed on screen and can be dragged and dropped into any sequence.

There is a library of 200 transition effects which range from well-known standard fades, dissolves and wipes to an impressive array of 3D transitions and effects courtesy of Hollywood FX. While the Hollywood FX are quite dramatic they would have to be purchased separately to get rid of the Pinnacle logo they have been watermarked with.

Choose Preview anytime you want to see a rough-cut version of the movie. You can see the preview immediately because no rendering is done.

The manual is concise and easy to read. Depending on your level of expertise you may not need it. on-line help is always there if you get stuck.

Studio 7 handles music and effects tracks as easily as it does video.

The Movie Window contains three tracks on which audio can be placed. A background music track, a track for sound effects and voice-overs, and a video scene track for audio originally recorded with the video.

WAV files can be recorded from within Studio 7 for voice-overs or brought in from outside then placed, edited, mixed, panned, faded as desired.

Studio 7 includes SmartSound for automatically generating a soundtrack. Select the clips to apply the music to, choose a style, song and type from the library and Studio 7 composes a background soundtrack to fit the length of the movie.

Studio 7 also includes TitleDeko for creating quality titles and graphics. Text, shapes, colours, photos and graphics can be imported from other programs and inserted into the Studio 7 movie. Titles can also be saved separately for use in other movies.

When you are happy with your film, share it with the world. Save the video to a DV tape, or create digital movies for playback on a PC. Studio 7 can also save in formats such as AVI, MPEG1 & MPEG2, RealVideo8 and Windows Streaming Media.

Yes, there are cheaper programs around, but Pinnacle’s expertise with professional editing equipment shows in Studio 7.

Price AU$249
www.pinnaclesys.com

By Richard Price, Editor EnergyME.com

For information on getting a product reviewed email richard@energyme.com