Customer Review(s)
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Worked flawlessly for me
Comment: After downloading trial versions of Cyberlink, Corel and
Sony Vegas I decided to go with Pinnacle, in spite of the years of bad press they've recieved on previous versions. You can't download a trial version of Pinnacle Studio 12, but you can see video's on YouTube. I could tell from the videos, that even though this may not be as powerful as the other products, it would be very, very easy to use, and allow me to finally EDIT my family videos from 1984 to the present.
With so much history to catch up on, I really didn't care that I could only have two video tracks instead of 6 or more. I mainly wanted to drag & drop, edit out all the boring stuff, make a nice front end menu with a music soundtrack in addition to the actual video soundtrack, and do it pretty darn fast.
This absolutely met all of my expectations without one glitch.
I got the 'Plus' rather than the 'Ultimate' version. After watching the videos for the three additional features you get with Ultimate, I decided I wouldn't use them for just my family stuff. This has plenty of 'title' animations and video enhancement extras to add quick pizazz.
You can get lost in all the Web reviews and recommendations, especially since for every 'video editor software package' that is 'highly' recommended, you can easily find customers who hate it and had a bad experience. There's no way around that in this day of internet info overload, but don't let it immobilize you. This worked for me, but know that video editing, by nature, simply takes alot of computing power, and that alone, will hang up a good many folks who will then blame the software. (I have a intel quad core with 8GB of ram and 1.5TB of space, running Vista Home Premium 64) I'm sure that helps, but aside from the hardware, I really, really appreciated the simple and straightforward Pinnacle 12 interface. I read no instructions, but did occaisionally check the video tutorial here and there to move forward. Good luck
Customer Rating: 
Summary: much better now...
Comment: I purchased this as an upgrade to version 10 (which I have enjoyed for several years).
I should say that I have not used any of the big competators. I have heard alot of nay-saying about Pinnacle, and I would not recommend it for the tech-less. Studio seems to be a strong product for those with strong computers and people who enjoy a challenge. If occasional software crashing and custom configuration are not your thing - go with Adobe Premeire Elements (or even worse - go with a mac - ha ha).
At first I was wildly disappointed with version 12 as it worked really slowly. My computer has great specs, so I figured it was something wrong with the configuration - or worse - the software itself. After trying all Pinnacle's recommendations (even reconfiguring my nVidia 8800 and turning off my second monitor), I found that by working from video files that have been stored on a different drive than the one Studio runs on, it ran great. Maybe the problem comes from my main drive being a RAID system (data striping) which is fast but a little unusual. I don't know. But by putting my video on a different (albeit slower) drive (external), 12 runs smoothly now. I can't say if the program is really that much better than 10 - maybe some of the HD features will be worth it. I am still in the process of buying an HD camera.
As for the critics of BluRay support - I can't spea. As for AVCHD - you should know going in that you are a crazy "early adopter" and should expect problems with hardware and software alike. The reports on AVCHD are pretty grim across the board. Most techies seem to think AVCHD is still a ways off. I will be going with HDV (I hope) when I make the switch to HD.
I should note that using an external drive for video has lots of advantages anyway - so I can't complain about my adjustment, however depending on how you format the external drive you might have trouble with big files (greater than 4 GB). I'll leave that challenge up to you (ha ha). There is an elegant solution.
I did not opt for the Ulitmate version which is exactly the same as "Plus" except for the three after market features (which can be purchased as an upgrade from the Pinnacle site for 30 bucks). I may eventually go for this upgrade, but other than the sparkly transition, I don't see how they are worth the extra $.
You should get the free cartoon fx from BlueFX which can be downloaded from thier site. I have also purchased additional FX from BlueFX and love them. You can get them through Studio. Buying them directly from BlueFX is expensive and usually you are restricted to purchasing big collections for 100s.
good luck.
Customer Rating: Summary: best Windows app for HD video editing
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating: Summary: Disappointed with AVCHD / BluRay capabilities
Comment: 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.
