Pinnacle Studio 7 Professional

by Pinnacle Systems

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 10 x 9 x 3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00005ML79
• Date first available at Amazon.com: October 5, 2001
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (39 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,341 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
  • #2 in Software > Video & Music > Digital Video > Compositing & Effects
  • #26 in Software > Video & Music > Digital Video > Video Editing
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Amazon.com Review

A multifaceted yet user-friendly solution, Pinnacle Studio 7 Professional makes movie production both fun and rewarding. Whether you're just adding titles to your home movies or spicing them up with 3-D animated transitions and audio effects, this affordable video editing software is perfect for all your home editing projects.

Although it may take days and perhaps weeks to become truly proficient--as indicated by the program's 300-page user's manual--Pinnacle Studio should have you tweaking your footage within minutes. Its intuitive and extremely polished interface, generous help section, slick tutorial, and massive online FAQ section are superb rookie aids. Unfortunately, you'll be far better off asking specific support questions via e-mail than through the company's telephone support lines, where hold times can be very long indeed.

Pinnacle Studio has been designed to look both elegant and visually appealing. It is divided into three main areas--Capture, Edit, and Make Movie. To upload a video, merely click the Start Capture command in the Capture interface. Control your video device by clicking various buttons on the program's large camcorder icon, and formulate edits on a large filmstrip spread across the bottom of the Edit screen. Pinnacle has smartly hidden secondary functions in pop-up windows to keep the screen uncluttered and easy to navigate.

The program offers several perks not found in other budget editors. When a video is uploaded, it automatically deciphers each new scene and creates a corresponding thumbnail image that may then be drag-and-dropped to any position on the filmstrip. Screen transitions can be drag-and-dropped, too, as can titles and sound effects such as music or voice-overs. If you want to deviate from the prefabricated special effects, Pinnacle Studio allows you to modify or create your own from scratch. For pinpoint edits, you'll want to access the timeline view, wherein you'll see an exacting second-by-second account of every video frame and every special effect you've added. Furthermore, the program helps conserve valuable hard drive space by converting your full DV-quality video to a more economical format for editing purposes, then reconverting it back to DV quality for the final product.

Veteran moviemakers may find some of the program's special effects rather basic, but anyone new to video editing will undoubtedly have a blast turning their homegrown movies into dynamic works of art, saving them in any number of video formats, and perhaps even sharing them at the Pinnacle Web site. --Gordon Goble

Amazon.com Product Description

With a little creativity and Pinnacle Studio video editing software, home movies can be turned into masterpieces. Pinnacle Studio combines a simple drag-and-drop interface with professional features like SmartCapture automatic scene detection, fast or slow motion, advanced color correction, contrast and brightness control, and more.

Enhance home movies with more than 100 stunning scene transitions including Pinnacle Studio's HollywoodFX 3-D effects. These new 3-D, animated transitions, such as page turns, spinning balls, or breaking glass, allow users to move the story along in ways never imagined. Let SmartSound create custom audio effects and musical scores for movies, helping to set the mood and tone of a film. Also import MP3 files or rip WAV files directly from CD to instantly score a movie, in time and in sync.

Then use TitleDeko to design amazing title effects to make it look even more professional. Enhance the story or simply highlight people, places, and events. Features include more than 300 title styles, including metallic, stretched, condensed, and neon effects, as well as roll and crawl effects for added impact.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not compatible with all hardware configurations, November 30, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Pinnacle Studio 7 Professional (CD-ROM)

The software has great potential, but doesn't work on my system or that of many others.

In my case, Studio 7 allows me to import video, edit it, add transitions and music, then won't let me render it. In other words, I can't create a final product, so it's useless.

If you check out the support board on the Pinnacle website, you'll see that many others are having similar or equally severe problems. I would not purchase this product unless you knew in advance that it would work on your system.

35 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good Video Editing Functions - low quality encoders, September 20, 2001

By 

Hermel (Germany) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pinnacle Studio 7 Professional (CD-ROM)

I use this product to edit digital home videos. It has good functions to work with scenes, add sounds, music etc. and controls my Canon camera without problems.
What I do not like is the quality of the encoders. Rendering movies to mpeg2 (and burning it to SVCD later) shows artifacts and lower quality than you get with other freeware encoders. Here Pinnacle has to improve. Beside that it is a good product - installation and operation went well for me without crashes so far.
Be sure to get enough memory and diskspace though - I now run with 384 MB and 100 GB - and disable all other processes on your system not to lose frames when capturing or writing back to your camera.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very Easy to use, October 15, 2001

By 

K. R. Davis "krdavis" (Ashburn, VA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Pinnacle Studio 7 Professional (CD-ROM)

I installed the included firewire card in no time. The software is incredibly easy to use. The output has been awesome. I bought it because it was PC Mag's Editor's Choice (9/01). I use the streaming function quite often to post the latest video up on my site for the family to view. I use it with Sony's DCR-PC9 Digital Video Camera and they work flawlessly. The only negative for me is that I wish it allowed burning DVD's or Video CD's - automatically anyway - It looks like I need to buy Pinnacle Express ... to do that.