Video editing for consumers is a tricky business, since the software needs to be easy to use for beginners, and yet have enough depth to allow enthusiasts to grow and experiment. There are simple tools to quickly trim clips and upload online, but if you want to make interesting and creative productions then you need something better - a more complete interface with a traditional timeline to assemble and layer video and audio, apply interesting transitions and effects, and enhance with titles and animation.

For example, Avid has updated its venerable Pinnacle Studio HD product line to version 15, with expanded HD format support, performance optimizations, and bundled professional-quality content. The base Studio HD starts at $60; Studio HD Ultimate at $100 adds Dolby Digital 5.1 encoding, Blu-ray authoring, keyframable effects and Motion Titler; and the Studio HD Ultimate Collection for $130 adds more Red Giant plug-ins plus a green screen for creating chroma-key effects.

That's an impressive collection of capabilities and technology, and should be enough to keep enthusiasts happy for quite a while, especially because it's a big step up to professional editing tools starting around $800. Yet consumer tools can cramp your style as you're being creative, especially with a fixed number of tracks and limited support for managing a growing collection of clips and assets.

So Avid has introduced a new product, Avid Studio, which builds on the familiar and friendly look of Pinnacle Studio, but breaks through typical consumer limits to help organize your assets, correct and edit your clips, assemble layers on the unlimited timeline, and enhance with an extensive package of content and plug-ins, yet is still a consumer/enthusiast product at $170, or as a $100 upgrade from Pinnacle Studio.

A New Studio

While the new Avid Studio shares the name and the overall feel, this is not just Pinnacle Studio Plus Plus Plus. Yes, the functionality is a superset of Pinnacle Studio (albeit not with the same exact features), and the collection of additional content and plug-ins is an extension of those with Pinnacle Studio (and provides more control over options). But Avid Studio is a new product, with a more sophisticated approach to the editing process.

In particular, Avid Studio provides an extensive media library to help organize, tag, and manage your media assets, a universal importer to select clips to import into the library, and media editors to prepare your clips before assembling on the timeline. This design supports a more controlled and methodical approach to an editing workflow. In particular, the media editors allow you to pre-edit clips, so you can separate the functions of preparing and correcting clips from the creative orchestration of your multi-layer production on the timeline.

Avid Studio also demonstrates an impressive attention to detail throughout the application to assist your editing process. For example, the library supports multiple tabs (like a Web browser), so you can easily save and switch between different editing assets views. The Importer not only has nice features for renaming imported files with sequence numbers and dates, but can optionally import as a copy or a link and even ignore duplicates with different names, and it provides stop-motion and frame-grab options. Studio also supports watch folders, to automatically import media files you add to specified disk folders.

Getting Started

Avid has provided extensive resources for helping you get started with Studio and then dive in deeper. The help file is also available as a 300-page PDF user manual, and is augmented by a guided tour that steps through the editing workflow. Avid also provides video tutorials from Class on Demand, available online or on DVD.

The Studio interface is nicely accessible, with not-so-tiny tabs and buttons, and a reasonable number (but not overwhelming array) of single-click tools. Most options are immediately accessible in visible window panels, instead of being buried deep in nested context menus. You then can hover over buttons to see the pop-up tool tip, typically including both the name and an additional sentence of explanation. However, these interface elements can sometimes get in the way of each other when you are trying to perform a precise edit.