Pinnacle Studio Ultimate, now in its 26th version, is a video editing application that's steadily become speedier and more powerful with each iteration. Pinnacle is aimed at near-professional enthusiasts, featuring excellent editing features and effects such as stop-motion video, multicam editing, and motion tracking. The company behind the software, Alludo (formerly Corel, which continues to use Corel in some brand names), also makes the consumer-grade VideoStudio. Thankfully, Pinnacle lacks the steep learning curve associated with pro video editing software, though in terms of performance and usability, it still lags behind our Editors' Choice winners, CyberLink PowerDirector and Corel VideoStudio.
How Much Does Pinnacle Studio Cost?
Pinnacle Studio is available at two levels with the entry-level Pinnacle Studio listing for $59.99, and Ultimate (reviewed here) for $129.99. An Ultimate Bundle option adds loads of content and effects, plus membership in Pinnacle's Studio Backlot online community, which provides training, support, and stock content. Prices are for perpetual licenses, with no recurring subscription fee. Upgraders from previous versions of Ultimate save $40 off the full price.
If you need to edit 360-degree or 4K content, you need to spring for Ultimate, which also adds color grading, video masking, and high-end effects from NewBlue, along with unlimited video tracks. It's the only level that includes some of the new features detailed here. New since our last update of this review is a free 15-day trial version of Pinnacle Studio. Competitors, including Adobe Premiere Elements and CyberLink PowerDirector, also offer free trials.
The prices are in-line with the competition. For example, you pay close to the same amount ($139.99) for CyberLink PowerDirector Ultimate, $99 for the less-pro-level Adobe Premiere Elements, and $99.99 for Corel VideoStudio Ultimate. Pro-level competitors cost more, with DaVinci Resolve at $295, Final Cut Pro at $299, and Premiere Pro at $239.88 (annual subscription).
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Can My PC Run Pinnacle Studio?
Windows 10 (64-bit) or Windows 11 is required to run Pinnacle Studio, and you need an Intel Core i3 or AMD A4 3.0 GHz or higher, an Intel Core i7 4th generation or later or AMD Athlon A10 or higher for UHD, multicam, or 360 video. The software requires at least 4GB RAM, with 8GB recommended. Note that there's no macOS version.
To get going you first download a small installer stub app, which then downloads the massive full program. It's more than 2GB and takes up 3.5GB on disk after installation, so you want a fast internet connection and plenty of space on your hard drive. Of course, if you're editing 4K video, you need a big disk anyway. The installer also installs separate MultiCam Capture Lite, MyDVD, and several content packs—which can add several GB more—if you choose the full installation.
Pinnacle Studio Importing and Interface
When you first run the program, you're invited to the program's User Experience Improvement Program, which sends anonymous usage data back to the company; turning it off is straightforward if you don't want it. Next, a dialog tells you that the Import feature lets you record and open media files.
Import takes up the full program window, which makes it easy to pick the types of importing you need, whether it's from DVD, computer folders, stop-motion, snapshot, or multicam. The software can import 4K content, and you can star-rate and keyword-tag content at import, which helps you find it later. The search bar also helps you find content you haven't marked in this way, searching instead for words in the filename.
One option on the Import mode is MultiCam Capture, which opens an external app that lets you record your screen along with any webcams you have connected or built into your PC. You can use function keys to start and stop recording, and the tool produces separate, synced clips that you can add to your project bin. It lets you adjust lighting and sound sources, and in my testing, it worked flawlessly.
Pinnacle's editing interface is pleasing and flexible. It sports flat, 2D icons, and a black and gray color scheme. The program uses the concept of Project Bins, in which you stash all the content for a given movie project—clips, photos, and sound files, but not effects and transitions. This approach is common for pro-level apps such as Adobe Premiere Pro, and it's a feature that Alludo's other line, VideoStudio, does not include.
The whole program window is topped by four mode-switching buttons: a Home icon, Import, Edit, and Export. The first is simply a Welcome screen offering tutorials (including the excellent Studio Backlot videos), info on new program features, and additional assets and programs for sale. One thing I miss on this page is quick access to projects you're working on, something most competitors include on their welcome screens.
Edit mode uses the standard three-pane editor interface, with source content occupying the top-left quadrant of the screen, the preview window at the top right, and the timeline across the bottom half. If you're used to having preview on the left, a handy switcher button lets you move it there without any fuss. The Ultimate level allows an unlimited number of tracks, as mentioned earlier. The Plus level limits you to 24 tracks, and Standard to six. You can change the relative size of the panels, add a source-video preview, and switch the movie preview to full screen.
Interface panels can be pulled off and you can change their positions, as you can in some other editors, such as Magix Movie Edit Pro. The preview window includes detailed controls, such as jog and shuttle, frame advance, and rewind. You can also switch the preview between source and timeline. You expand and contract the timeline (either the main one or the one in the preview window) with a clever mouse-drag action, but I wish there were a mouse wheel option for resizing the timeline.
Searching and sorting are available for any content, which is more than I can say for some video editing programs, such as Studio's sister application, VideoStudio. Hiding and showing items by content type—video, audio, photo, and project—is simplicity itself. There's an enormous and customizable assortment of keyboard shortcuts. A helpful Project Notes panel, to help you keep track of work progress (Vegas Pro's similar feature goes a step further by attaching notes to particular timecodes). You can also choose which buttons you want to display on the timeline toolbar, including Split, Add Marker, Trim Mode, Multi-Cam Editor, and Audio Ducking.
The interface makes no specific concession to touch input, which I find useful for scrubbing, changing value sliders, and tapping control buttons. That said, scrubbing the timeline by finger did work acceptably. The software now fully supports high-resolution monitors. Rather than integrated help, you get an online PDF (it's still better than Adobe's unimpressive web help, which shows info for other products and from non-staff users). In general, however, Pinnacle's interface is more accessible than those of some competing video editors.
Basic Video Editing and Transitions in Pinnacle Studio
Pinnacle uses a magnetic timeline, so any clip you drag and drop into it snaps to any existing clips, and you can turn off that behavior if you prefer. Dropping one clip inside another splits the original one, and a razor icon offers clip splitting, as well. One thing missing is a button to drop a selected clip into the timeline at the current insertion point—most editors have it.
The Trim Mode button (or just double-clicking a join point) opens a second preview window so you can see the first and second clips' states at the trim point. It's supposed to help with effecting slip and slide trims, but I find it less intuitive than the trimming windows of CyberLink PowerDirector and VideoStudio, among other apps.
Three- and four-point editing offers more in- and out-point precision. You switch into this editing mode from the same button on the right side that switches among Smart Editing, Insert, Replace, and Overwrite modes. With the three-point option, you specify in and out points on the timeline, and an in or out point in the source clip. This way, when you insert the clip onto the timeline it will fit to your specification.
Two insertion buttons appear on the source window: Keep Speed and Fit to Duration. The second of these stretches the source clip to fit the target area in the timeline. The four-point option lets you specify in and out points on both the source and the timeline. If your source selection is longer than the spot on the timeline you've marked, you see a dialog asking whether you want to align the source clip with the beginning or end of the timeline points, and whether to trim the source or overwrite the timeline.
If you choose the Fit to Duration button, your source clip is sped up or slowed down to fit the marked area in the timeline exactly. I see how these could be useful options and less haphazard than simply dragging the source onto the timeline. In particular, the time stretching to fit a marked area saves you time.
Dog-eared corners of adjacent clips let you adjust transition lengths between them. You can also enable dynamic-length transitions, or just stick with transitions of set lengths. Cross-fades are accessible right on the timeline via the transition dog ears, but the place from which you get your fancier transitions is somewhat hidden, compared with how other video editors present it. They're also not as simple to add to timeline clips, with no automatic duration option. Sometimes I dragged a transition between clips in my testing and the app didn't add anything. There is, however, a very full selection of transitions, grouped as 2D-3D, Artistic, Alpha Magic, and more.
The Seamless Transition tool implements an effect that's all the rage among amateur videographers. As Davonte Douglas explains in this tutorial, you don't even need software to make seamless transitions, but software can in fact make them even smoother and more impressive. The seamless transitions in Pinnacle Studio work like any other transitions: You just drag them from the source panel down between clips. You get choices for downward, left-to-right, and upward motion between clips, along with variations for rotation during the transition. You can fine-tune the motion by placing similar areas in selection boxes.
The Morph transition lets you draw guides in the first and second videos to affect the transition. It's not quite as impressive as Final Cut Pro's Flow transition, which blends jump cuts—for example, you might seamlessly cut a few words or even a sentence out of a single clip of an interview. The Pinnacle Morph transition is pretty much a crossfade that lets you add blurry motion between clips.
With the Wide-Angle Lens Correction feature, you simply double-click on a source clip and then choose that option from the top menu. There are six GoPro presets, but you can also manually adjust the geometry, making sure lines that should be straight are indeed rectilinear—an issue with GoPro's wide-angle lenses.
Masks With Motion Tracking in Pinnacle Studio
A Mask button right above the source panel accesses two kinds of masks: Shape masks and Panel masks. The first sort can only create one 2D effect, but Panel masks can be manipulated with 3D motion effects. You can create masks starting from a square, circle, pen, brush, text, or Magic Wand selection. The last option is tricky to get an effective mask with; it took me several tries to get one that worked. You can apply a mask per clip, rather than just per track.
By default, each time you click on the image with the Magic Wand tool enabled, it selects everything of the same color, regardless of whether it's contiguous—but now there's a Contiguous check box, which addresses that problem. You can hold down Control while selecting to add to the selection, and an Eraser tool lets you further refine the selection. Even with all these options, it's hard to select a subject that's not a single color.
Much more useful is the Paintbrush tool, with its very helpful Smart Edge option. It's best for selecting objects that aren’t all one color, such as people in colorful clothing or a vehicle. The Face option identifies where a face is and places an oval matte over it. It's useful for obscuring identities with the Mosaic option—best of all, it offers a tracking option. In my testing, it did a good job following and resizing along with face movements. The other mask types require you to edit keyframes to change their position and size.
But there are lots more functions to use with Masks: Opacity is one, which includes a feathering adjustment. You can also choose Fill, Blur, Turbulence, Cartoon, Detail Enhance, Oil Painting, Pencil Sketch, Fractal Clouds, Noise Reduction, and more. Alternatively, you can apply any of these functions to the Matte, or the unselected background. Filter options include High Pass, Low Pass, Dichroic, and Color. That last option lets you choose a color filter from a color picker.
With the program's smart object tracking, you select to create a shape mask as described above, and then tap the motion tracking button (a series of circles in an arc). This type of tracking adjusts the mask for certain objects, such as cars. I had trouble getting it to work with a skateboarder, however, and the tracking button is often grayed out because it hasn't identified a "known object." When you do get the tracking option, the process of creating the mask track is very slow—each frame took about a second on my test PC (see the Performance section below for its specs). Another problem (unless you just want to mask cars) is that cars in my frame were added to the mask even though I'd never selected any. The tool needs work, but I did get the tool to track a moving person's head and shoulders while keeping the background black and white.
Text masks are a fun option, also available in CyberLink PowerDirector. You get loads of font options, as well as adjustments for alignment, rotation, and positioning. Panel masks, as mentioned, can be manipulated in 3D using keyframes. They differ from regular masks in that you can only have one panel associated with a track, and you choose an Asset—that is, a clip or image—for the mask.
Standard Motion Tracking in Pinnacle Studio
You can get to Pinnacle Studio's standard Motion Tracking tool by right-clicking on a track, by tapping the Motion Tracking button above the timeline, or by double-clicking on the clip in the timeline to open the Effects window. First, you mask the object you want to track; unlike the mask tracking mentioned above, this tool only lets you use a rectangle or oval for tracking. It took a few tries to get it to follow my masked biker, but the tracking worked about as well as it does with other similar tools. You can retrack if the followed object is lost. As with mask tracking, it's a slow process, taking a little under a second per frame on my test system.
The tool lets you apply Mosaic and Blur to the tracked object, which you can use to obscure faces, license plates, branded items, or naughty bits. But I didn't see an option to track with text, shapes, or even videos as some competitors can.
360-Degree VR Video in Pinnacle Studio
Like CyberLink PowerDirector, Pinnacle Studio lets you work with 360-degree video. You can either do some basic editing while maintaining the 360-degree aspect or convert the 360 to standard 2D view. I tested footage from the latter. Confusingly, you have to add the 360 clip to the timeline first and then right-click on it and choose Add as 360 or 360-to-Standard. Several of my sample 360 clips didn't play at all in the app, even though I could view them in Windows Movie Player.
When editing 360-degree content, you see two windows with two tabs, a 360-degree source and a preview window with the 2D result. You can pan around the scene either in the source window with a crosshairs control or just click and drag the mouse pointer around in the preview window to change the viewing angle.
The program did a good job of straightening out my 4K 360-degree test content in double-fish-eye format. If you want the content to remain in 360 degrees, you're limited to basic trimming, fade transitions, and titles. After adding titles, you also have to choose Add as 360 if you want that mode retained. I had trouble moving a title, which landed in the center of the video and didn't display in 360 Preview mode. Stabilization isn't an option for 360-degree video, though it's still available from the menus. Luckily, Pinnacle offers to let you continue editing the last project you were working on upon restarting.
You can create tiny planet and rabbit hole effects (above, left and right, respectively) with your 360-degree content. These are fun effects, and you can even animate things like the zoom, rotation, and even transition from a tiny planet to a rabbit hole or vice versa. Version 23 added a freeze-frame for 360-degree footage. I confirmed it works by right-clicking at the insertion point and choosing Time Freeze and then entering the desired number of seconds in a dialog box.
Multicam Editing in Pinnacle Studio
Like its stablemate Corel VideoStudio, Pinnacle Studio lets you simultaneously edit multiple clips of the same event shot at different angles. The base version allows two camera angles, Plus makes it four, and Ultimate gives you six. The tool did a good job of aligning my clips using their audio tracks, but you can also align using time codes and markers. As with all these tools, you switch among angles by tapping a clip's box in a grid. There are also boxes for switching the output track to clear and to black, which is great if you want to add B-roll later.
When you hit OK, a new clip shows up in your project, not in the timeline. I like that you can right-click and choose Edit Movie to fine-tune angle shifts in a timeline or even reopen it in the multicam switcher window. Some multicam tools, such as that in VideoStudio, simply create a new clip that's not adjustable after the fact. Note that I couldn't use an HEVC clip in this tool; I had to convert it before use.
Stop-Motion in Pinnacle Studio
Stop-motion is one of the most appealing types of animation, in my book. Just think back to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer or more recently to Chicken Run and Wallace and Gromit. The Pinnacle tool lets you control a connected camera to take shots automatically at time intervals you specify, and it can even show ghost images of your last shot so you know how to position the next one.
You can then send the captures to the timeline and adjust duration and apply any other editing. The tool now includes DSLR support, and circular guides that tell you how far to move an object to have it cross the screen in a specified period of between 0.3 and 10 seconds. Note that you need to allow Pinnacle access to your camera in Windows' privacy settings for it to work.
Advanced Effects in Pinnacle Studio
Pinnacle claims to offer more than 2,000 effects. That's more than anyone really needs, and many are duplicates with transitions or, worse, just goofy overlays. Pinnacle would do better to trim out the fat and combine the duplicates to make effects easier to find and use.
Keyframing. For those who want the ultimate control, Pinnacle lets video editors time every kind of effect and adjustment with keyframes. That includes position, size, rotation, opacity, borders, corrections, filter effects, pan/zoom, transitions, and time remapping. Keyframing lets you evenly increase or decrease an effect over time. Once you've got a video project set up the way you want, you can save it as a template from the File menu. You specify which clips should become placeholders, which you can fill in subsequent projects with different clips. You can also select multiple keyframes as a group and modify them together or duplicate them.
Nested Clips. Nested Clips is a useful capability, especially for intros and outros, which you use over and over again. You nest by selecting several clips on your timeline, right-clicking, and choosing Group > Save Group as Project. It collapses all the selected clips into one, letting you edit it as a unit.
Color Grading. The Standard and Plus editions add some basic color adjustments, but Ultimate offers pro-level color grading. Choose the top-left panel's Editor button, choose Color, and you see four numbered options: Basic, Tone Curve, HSL Tuning, and Color Wheel. Basic offers White Balance, Tone (which includes exposure, contrast, and other lighting options), and Basic Settings (vibrance, saturation, clarity, and haze correction).
The Auto Tone and Auto White Balance options on this panel worked well for my sample clips. You can even apply the very pro-level LUTs (lookup tables) for color mapping. Pinnacle now includes 34 LUTs, letting you make your movie look like Pandora, Moonlight, or one of many black-and-white effects. You can also get LUTs from high-end video camera companies if you shoot with those. I was able to test it with a LUT in .CUBE file type, and it correctly applied a horror movie look to the clip.
The Tone Curve tool, like Photoshop's, lets you change lighting for effects, correction, or contrast adjustments. HSL (hue, saturation, lighting) lets you change the color intensity and brightness separately for eight colors. One issue I had in testing this tool was that I couldn't see the effect until moving the play head. That's not a big deal, but it isn't ideal.
The Color interface also can display a video scope in four modes: waveform, vector, histogram, and RGB parade. Professional editors are familiar with these views of color information, though they're of less use to amateurs. You can show vectorscopes for a selected range of colors, for example, skin tones. To make it happen, you use a brush to mark the areas of your image for which you want to see the scope.
Pinnacle Studio lets you copy and paste color settings. There's no menu choice for it, but hitting Ctrl-C while the color adjustment panel was active did let me copy the settings to another clip.
The Color Wheels view lets you adjust saturation and hue separately for each of three tonal ranges: Highlights, Midtones, and Shadows, as well as applying an overall color shift. It's pro-level stuff like what you find in Adobe Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro, but not in Corel VideoStudio or Adobe Premiere Elements. I appreciate that double-clicking the control points resets them to the center. You can use these tools to either fine-tune the colors or to get some crazy effects, as in the screenshot above.
Filters. Many of these are standard, old-school Photoshop filters, but there are many impressive effects among them, such as Dream Glow and Old Film. Many included third-party effects, such as NewBlue's Drop Shadow, Shredder, and Photon Blast, are of professional quality. With the Ultimate edition, you get several NewBlue plug-in effects. The latest of these to make its way into the program is NewBlue Video Essentials 5, which lets you apply selective focus, selective color, and selective tint. Other NewBlue packs include several geometry-altering effects, along with good auto-contrast, gradient-tint, diffusion, and rolling-shutter effects.
Why should digital photos be the only type of content you can turn into art and enhance with artsy effects? The Paint tool in Pinnacle gives you impressive Paint effects: Stylization, Pencil Sketch, Oil Painting, Detail Enhance, and Cartoon. You're not actually painting on the image, but the effects make it look painted or drawn. I particularly like the Stylization effect, which looks like graphic novel art. The Cartoon effect uses more of a black ink outline around the object in the video. But these effects aren't as sophisticated as PowerDirector's AI Styles, which you're your video the look of specific artists, such as Van Gogh.
Pinnacle Studio includes strong tools for 3D editing. Picture-in-picture is also well supported, and Pinnacle now has templates like those in PowerDirector, and what Premiere Elements calls "video collages." Pinnacle Studio includes a dozen of what it calls Split Screen templates. You can drag these onto the timeline and then open a sub-editor to add clips to the PiP layout. The Split Screen Template Creator lets you draw shapes to create your very own reusable PiP layout. You can use keyframes to animate these templates.
Transparency. A special tool of its own, the transparency effect is accessible from a button above the timeline. It provides an easy way to adjust each track's transparency level, in percentages. It's a useful tool for creating an evocative effect, especially for showing the passing of time. But I find PowerDirector's masking tool with automated animations more fun.
Blend Modes. Related to transparency is the Blend Mode feature. When you place an overlay clip, you can now choose from 16 Photoshop-like blend modes, such as Color Burn, Hard Light, Dissolve, and Multiply. These let you produce artistic, unique effects based on the clips you're overlaying.
Chroma-Keying. Chroma-keying worked well with my green-screen test footage, nearly perfectly removing the somewhat imperfect green background.
Stabilization. The Stabilize tool lets you adjust borders and zoom, and you can have it work in the background, as it is time-consuming. My shaky footage came out somewhat smoothed. As with all similar tools, however, it's no substitute for in-camera stabilization or, better still, a tripod.
Titles. Text is a strength for Pinnacle, and it gets even stronger with recent updates. The program offers cool things like 3D title editing such as you find in Final Cut Pro X. Titles can be positioned on three axes and you can choose the light source and angle. You also get a choice of material types for your title, such as metal or plastic.
Keyframes can animate your titles, and the tool for it is impressive because it works down to individual words and letters. You can also use different font sizes, colors, and motion for different words and letters within a single title. Rotation is possible per individual letter and on different axes.
Both Magix Movie Edit Pro and PowerDirector have added other nifty title tricks in recent versions, including video mask title effects, though the last lacks 3D title editing. Even without the 3D options, Pinnacle offers a good choice of animated text options, all of which you can edit on-screen in WYSIWYG fashion.
Screen Cam. Pinnacle Studio's screen-cam capability is something you can also find in Corel VideoStudio. The tool comes as a separate application called Live Screen Capturing. Pinnacle Studio's implementation worked perfectly in my tests.
Pinnacle Studio Audio
Sound for your digital movies is another strong point of Pinnacle Studio. Right from the timeline, you can display level controls; toolbar buttons take you quickly to a selection of background music and to voiceover recording options. You can even raise and lower clip volume by dragging a clip's audio line up and down, as you can in Final Cut Pro. The program supports 5.1 surround positioning including controls for Angle, Spread, and Center—all keyframeable to create panning effects.
The Scorefitter options stretch background music of various styles to fit your movie. Just drag its timeline entry to fit, and after processing some rendering, presto: instant background music! The source panel's Sound Effects tab offers a wealth of sound clips, from birdsong to strong wind to all manner of vehicles. There are also audio cleaning tools like the Speech De-esser (to remove sibilance) and a noise reducer.
Audio ducking automatically lowers background music during speech. The tool worked well in a test video, with more control than its VideoStudio counterpart. I found it easy to set the threshold for it to kick in and the amount of reduction in volume of the background music.
The audio noise removal tool is customizable and powerful. You select an area of the waveform that contains only noise, and the program creates a profile based on it, allowing targeted removal. You can then adjust the reduction, sensitivity, and smoothing. It indeed works better than generic noise removal tools I've used. Another fun tool is Pitch Scaling, which lets you raise or lower the pitch of music without affecting the speed. For example, you could make a high soprano sound like a deep bass or like a chipmunk without changing the clip length.
Testing Pinnacle Studio's Performance
Pinnacle feels snappy when working with the timeline, especially on my new test system (specs below). During testing, I didn't run into any program stalls as I have in the past, because stability has improved.
To test render speed, each program joins seven clips of various resolutions ranging from 720p all the way up to 8K, and applies cross-dissolve transitions between them. I then note the time it takes to render the project to 1080p30 using the H.264 codec and 192Kbps audio. The output movie is just over five minutes in length. For this test, I use a Windows 11 PC with a 3.60GHz Intel Core i7-12700K, 16GB RAM, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, and a 512GB Samsung PM9A1 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD.
Pinnacle Studio's time is 101 seconds (1 minute and 41 seconds), putting it at the slower end of the reasonably well-performing applications. Wondershare Filmora is fastest at just 30 seconds and ACDSee Luxea is slowest at 294 seconds (4 minutes and 54 seconds).
Sharing and Output With Pinnacle Studio
The program includes a full disc-authoring module with support for Blu-ray discs, along with DVD and AVCHD formats. To go this route, you click the Disc Menu Content button, which looks like a disc. A good selection of menu styles is at your disposal; you add chapter markers to taste and preview with on-screen disc controls. Next, you choose the Export to MyDVD option, which appears when you click the Export mode-switching button.
As for the more modern output method—sharing online—Pinnacle's Export dialog's Cloud selection offers direct uploading to Facebook, Vimeo, YouTube, and Box. When I tried the first, I was thankfully able to set the privacy level before uploading, and I had a choice of video quality, from 360p to 1080p.
Like Adobe Premiere Elements, Pinnacle can now create animated GIFs from your short movies. The choice is a little bit hidden, as it's not included in the Format dropdown options. You have to change the Extension and then choose GIF. And the only way to see options like Loop Play and frame rate is to click the pencil button. To be fair, the option is no more obvious in Premiere Elements; it requires you to switch to Custom, then choose an Advanced Settings panel.
You can also simply export to disk in a wide range of file formats, including AVCHD; DivX; MKV; MPEG-1, 2, and 4; QuickTime; and WMV. Presets let you target your output format to popular viewing devices such as the iPhone and Xbox. The program lets you export to H.265 HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) format, which is important for data-hungry 4K and even 8K content since it doubles compression while maintaining image quality.
You can also batch process multiple projects—a more-or-less pro-level capability, and even Premiere Pro requires the separate Adobe Media Encoder for it. It's made possible by a simple Add to Queue option and tab in the Export page, which anyone who is producing a lot of video projects will surely appreciate.
Is Pinnacle Studio Right for You?
Pinnacle Studio is an excellent video editing tool. The latest version doesn't add new editing tools, but instead focuses on performance and stability. The software impresses with its many powerful video editing capabilities and friendly interface. It's truly a near-professional-level product, with options like keyframing, tracking, and multicam. Usability and performance continue to improve, though they are still somewhat behind our Editors' Choice winners for video editing, CyberLink PowerDirector and Corel VideoStudio. We also like DaVinci Resolve, which offers a capable free version and faster exports. Professional video editors, meanwhile, should stick with our Editors' Choice winner for pros, Adobe Premier Pro.
Pinnacle Studio Ultimate is a full-featured, near-pro-level video editing application without a steep learning curve. Performance upgrades and new mask motion tracking, titling, and audio tools make it more appealing than ever.
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