By Dr. Alan J. Pierce

Pinnacle Studio 11 Plus
pierceaj@optonline.net need to purchase the full package if you want to go beyond the basics. Instead of upgrading the software that came with your camera you might want to purchase Pinnacle Studio 11 Plus. This program is a very powerful software package that you can use to turn your old videos into digital productions specific requirements of your favorite online websites; such as YouTube. The video authoring process starts with you transferring your video from its source to your computer. If you are a novice they provide you with a Getting Started Guide that promises to let you make your first video in minutes and your first DVD in an hour. Step 1 in this guide is transferring your video from your camera. Step 2 shows you how to automatically create your movie with SmartMovie. Step 3 shows you how to burn your movie to a DVD. The last page of the quick guide helps you explore many of Pinnacle Studios more sophisticated features.
Manufacturers are now turning out new consumer digital video cameras at staggering speeds. These cameras use new video compression algorithms, some go as high as MPEG 4 H.264, to increase your shooting time and many are now using flash memory cards to store what you shoot. Some of the new cameras can be set to shoot in a hi-def video mode at 60fps with resolutions up to 1,920 x 1,080 which your hi-def TV will recognize as 1080i. Yes these cameras do come with the necessary software to convert your raw video to a viewable DVD. The included software is often a basic version of a full program package. Which means you will
and your new HDV camcorder movies into true 1080i high definition videos. You can output your video projects to just about any type of recording medium including VCR tape, VideoCD, Super VideoCD, DVD, HD DVD and AVCHD for Blue-ray players. You can also create movie file formats for AVI, Div-X, Ipod, all current MPEG formats (1 to 4), Real Media, Sony PSP, Windows Media Player, or format your video to match the
Dr. Alan J. Pierce is co-author of Introduction to Technology Glencoe McGraw-Hill 2005 and a TechDirections Magazine Columnist.Visit www.techtoday.us for past columns and resources.

Pinnacle Studio 11 Plus

John C Lee Pinnacle Studio 11 Plus is one of the three product lines of video editing and authoring software recently released by Pinnacle Systems. The Studio 11 family has solved much of the instability problems that had plagued its earlier versions. It has also built in a safeguard that enables you to continue working on the same project after rebooting from a program crash. Studio 11 Plus is an innovative program with many impressive features. It supports a host of standards and output formats from HD Video, Blue-Ray, SVCHD to VCD, SVCD, DVD, AVI, VCR, iPod, PSP, DivX and Web publishing (including Yahoo! Videos). Video/audio productions are carried out using a simple 3-step workflow mode - Capture, Edit and Make Movie. In Capture mode, you only need to select the capture source and the capture format (AV or MPEG for your movie output), and the program fills in all the necessary settings. The user interface for the Edit mode, where most of a projects work is performed, has a modern design adapted to viewing on todays widescreen monitors. It consists of three panels with an expandable preview Player on the top right corner; an Album panel on the top left; and the Movie Window with Storyboard, Timeline or Text views at the bottom half of the display. The Album serves as a library where all the imported media clips and built-in templates are stored. These include video clips captured from digital and analog devices, TV, still images, transitions, effects, text and menu templates; and audio clips from ripped CD music tracks, Voice-overs (narrations) and the Scorefitter Music Generator. All of these media clips can be readily accessed in the Album by clicking their corresponding tool icons and previewed on the Player. The Scorefitter is a built-in collection of 40 high-fidelity background music tracks. The duration of the tracks can be easily adjusted to match the lengths of the video or slideshow sessions. Selected media clips are then added into the appropriate Timeline tracks or the Storyboard of the Movie Window, where you can edit and create your movie from the raw materials in the Album. There are seven tracks on the Timeline, which include only one overlay track. Ulead VideoStudio 11 Plus has 6, and the Premiere Elements 3.0 has 99 overlay tracks. Although you do not need more than one overlay in most of the productions, it would be desirable to add one or two more overlay tracks, so that you can make multi-shots composite videos or slideshows. A powerful tool available in the Edit mode allows you to split or combine video clips on both the Album and the Timeline. The tool is especially useful in making menus or in combining video clips to cut down the large number of clips usually captured with the Scene Detection option. Making menus for disc authoring is quick and easy in Studio 11 Plus. You can either select a template from the menu Album or make your own using the Text/Menu Editor, and drag the menu clip into the Timeline video track. The menu clips contain buttons or thumbnails (static or motion) that can be easily linked to the chapters or submenus. You can manually set the chapters or let the program insert the chapter mark at the beginning of each video clip. Here the Split/Combine Clips feature comes handy, because you can use it to precisely group the video clips to form chapters Another noteworthy feature is Background Rendering. While you are working on transitions, effects, menus or titles, rendering proceeds in the background. This not only reduces the final project rendering time, but also delivers smooth and uninterrupted previewing on the Player. Studio 11 Plus also contains a sub-program that can record movies directly from the camcorder tape to DVD media without taking up any room on the hard drive. Due to the high costs of HD media and recorders, Studio 11 Plus provides an option to burn native HDV or AVCHD footage on standard DVD media that can be played on the latest HD players. The output to a movie is carried out in the Output Browser of the Make Movie mode. Four output style options - Disc, File, Tape, and Web, cover all the output standards and formats shown in the second paragraph of this review. In each of the options, you only have to specify the output style and quality, and the program fills in the necessary preset compression level, file size or disc usage commensurate with the output style and the quality you select. Hence, it means fewer dialog boxes to work with and minimum users interactive inputs. You can also choose the custom option to make adjustments to these preset values. The Studio 11 Plus package comes with an Installation DVD, a Bonus DVD and a 300-page printed User Guide. The User Guide is a comprehensive and lucid document that covers all the topics in great detail. The Bonus DVD is a moneymaking scheme concocted by Pinnacle Systems. It installs thousands of premium content of transitions, titles, DVD menus, video and sound effects using up almost 4GB of hard drive space. All premium contents are watermarked. You have to purchase packs of the premium contents online and be given the activate keys to remove the watermarks before you can use them. The only drawbacks that I found with the Studio 11 Plus is its wasteful use of hard drive space and messy file management. The main program files including the installed premium contents used more than 6.4 GB hard drive space

in my computer. The project data files are scattered over 60+ folders and sub-folders (as far as I can find) in the Documents & Settings, Shared Documents and other directories. When a project is completed and not saved, the program prompts you to delete all the large GB-size auxiliary files created during rendering. I believe many small files such as configuration, log and temp files specifically created for the projects are still left behind. For users like me, who like to keep their hard drives neat and uncluttered, it is bothersome to see so many unneeded files and folders scattered all over the hard drive. In conclusion, I can state that the Studio 11 Plus is an excellent video editing and authoring program with many powerful features, that are easy to learn and to use. I would recommend it to beginners as well as advanced users. I think that it deserves a higher rating than its competitor software Ulead VideoStudio 11 Plus. The only suggestion I have is for Pinnacle Systems to make improvements on hard drive usage and file management in future versions. Minimum System Requirements: Windows XP with SP2 or Vista (32 bit Vista recommended) Intel Pentium or AMD Athlon 1.8 GHz or higher (2.4 GHz recommended) Intel Premium HT or AMD Athlon 2.4 GHz or 1.6 GHz Dual core required for Windows Vista; Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz required for AVCHD editing 512 MB RAM (1 GB recommended) 1 GB required for HD and/or Vista (2 GB recommended); 1.5 GB required for AVCHD (2 GB required on Vista) 128 MB required on Vista (256 MB ATI Radeon 9600+ or NVIDIA GeForce 6 or higher recommended) 256 MB required for HD and AVCHD editing (ATI Radeon 9600+ or NVIDIA GeForce 6 or higher recommended) DirectX 9 or higher compatible sound card 1 GB of disk space to install software and 3+ GB to install bonus content DVD-ROM drive to install software
Pinnacle Systems website is http://www.pinnaclesys.com. Technical support can be obtained from Pinnacle Systems in several ways: (1) Visit our Knowledge Base - free 24/7; (2) Submit a technical question using Live Chat - free Open Monday-Sunday; (3) Submit a technical question by email free and (4) Visit our Discussion Forums free 24/ The lowest price of the Pinnacle Studio 11 Plus that I can find is $76.49 with free shipping from Amazon.com.