Test Bench: Pinnacle Edition DV editing software

D. Eric Franks
November 2002

» Next Image Previous Image «

In consumer circles, Pinnacle Systems has been known primarily as a hardware company. Through a symbiotic relationship with Adobe, Pinnacle hardware has included Premiere in OEM deals for years. Additionally, Pinnacle's TitleDeko was packaged with Premiere. All of that will change with the release of Pinnacle Edition DV, a direct competitor to Adobe Premiere. Derived from Fast Studio DV3 (Pinnacle acquired Fast not long ago), Edition should be considered by anyone ready to upgrade from a novice-level editing application or anyone prepared to chuck an old editor, for whatever reason.

Bad news first: Edition uses a completely non-standard user interface. There are no menus or standard toolbars. We try not to be unreasonable about following standards, but we already know how to close and minimize Windows applications. We had to learn how to do these two basic functions with Edition. Not that it was hard, just different. Edition, more or less, took over Windows, imposing its own color scheme (gray) on the entire system as long as it was running. The interface metaphor is a Windows-style Taskbar and Start Menu that, in the words of the manual, "take priority over the Windows version." You may or may not like this.

The good news: the user interface is extremely well designed. We especially liked the Keyboard Properties dialog, which allowed us to drag-and-drop commands onto a visual representation of our keyboard to create shortcut keys. This may make switching from a competitor's product much more attractive. Effects and transition dialogs were clear and easy to use. Better still, we could maximize them to fill the screen, which made modifications and complex keyframe animations much easier. Although most editing applications could benefit from a multi-monitor setup, Edition was particularly comfortable when we stretched it over two screens via a Matrox G550 display card.

Overall, most of the radical design changes have valid purposes. As one example, since there is no File menu, there is no File >> Save command, but saving your project is not necessary in Edition. Instead, your project is always and continuously saved, complete with an undo history.

It took a while to learn how to capture video in Edition. We couldn't just click the Record button and grab some video from our camcorder. There is a reason for this: Edition has very sophisticated media management tools that function correctly only if the application has the correct information for its database. Now that huge hard disks are commonplace, video projects often contain hundreds of individual media files, and media management has quickly become critical. Once we understood how the capture worked, we appreciated the Batch Capture features and were impressed with the implementation of scene detection, which let us break up video files by time code and insert break markers into a single large file.

Edition DV comes with a proprietary Pinnacle IEEE 1394 card (based on a TI chipset). Pinnacle suggests that the card "should work alongside other 1394 hardware," but in our tests, Edition did not work well with others, specifically a Canopus DVStorm card. While we had device control, video would not display in any of the Edition preview windows (even in the editor) and we could not capture video. The card did work well when installed next to a Pinnacle Pro-ONE card.

• Digg This!
• del.icio.us
• Technorati
• StumbleUpon
• Reddit