Premiere Elements or Pinnacle Studio « Videomaker Community Forums

ElfQrin
Member

I will be purchasing an editing program in the next few weeks. I am looking at Studio Titanium or Plus and Adobe Premiere Elements. Does anyone have any comments or insite on these programs. I have used Studio before and it is really unstable, but is Premiere too? Which program offers more effects, titles, advaned features. One thing that bugs me about Studio is how you have to "Upgrade" and pay more money to get something that you like. The included stuff with the program is just average.

I am no where near a pro, I just enjoy editing, and shooting video! My family just came back from Chicago and I shot a video there and it looks really nice..well in my standards. I even have like "B-Roll" stuff on there, but anyway enough about me.

Something that is selling me on Studio Titanium is how there is an audio cleaning thing to reduce noise and hiss, and also a cool program to make shadows, flares, etc. Another feature is how it has something called Smart Sound where it will make background music to fit the clip.

Thanks!

Posted 4 years ago #
Fitzhufilms
Member

I have both programs and have used both for about a year. By FAR, I use Elements more that Pinnacle. Elements has just about everything you will need at a begginer level. Also, IMHO it is much easier to use than Pinnacle. The only advantage I see Pinnacle has over Elements is the DVD authoring portion but, that is very minor. Elements does an adequate job there as well. Pinnacle also renders a little faster when burning to DVD but, that is a convenience and not really a quality factor. Most transitions, effects, tweaks, adjustments, etc. that I have needed I have been able to accomplish in Elements.
As far as instability goes I have had some issued with Elements but, nothing severe. Also Elements has audio transitons, noise reduction etc. I believe Pinnacle has the smart soudn you were talking about but I have never used it so I cannot comment one way or the other.
Anyway, I would recoment Elements for the money. Like you mentioned, you may be able to get a lot more with Pinnacle but, you will pay for it. Good Luck.

Posted 4 years ago #
Microchip
Member

I can only comment on Elements since it's the only one I know. It is great for someone who hasn't the foggiest idea about editing, like I used to be. That's the program I started with (still using it actually and am going to get Elements 3.0). Maybe 3.0 may have all the titles and other things you'd like. I'm using 1.0 and together with a background in graphics I know how to get an effect that I want.

For assistance, do the tutorial that comes with the program. Do it several times and get familiar with the basics and as you progress you could always drop a line here in the forum for assistance (like I did) and you'll get the answers and more. It also has advanced effects that you can tweak piece by piece for both video and audio. Practice makes perfect too, but Elements is extremely user-friendly (although I'm not saying that others are not, I'm just talking from my experience) and I don't have much problems, if any, with it.

:)

Posted 4 years ago #
cprybicki
Member

Elements is a great program for beginners and it'll prepare you for more professional programs in the future...like Adobe Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro since all three of these programs have a similar format.

Elements is very stable. All programs have a little trouble once in awhile including Elements but it's troubles are limited. It may shut down if you have around 5-7 hours of footage loaded into a project and you are using serious affects on multiple layers in a timeline thats 90 minutes long, but it will save the work you've done before it shuts down. This problem is rare and is just a slight nuisance at best...if it does happen.

I wouldn't get too excited about smart sound. Features like these are just in there to sell the product and are never as good as you think. You will almost always want to make some changes to what the "smart" program did. I found it better to just do it the way you want the first time. It's fairly easy to just listen to the music and look at peeks in the audio waveform and edit accordingly.

Elements has everything you need and there is tons of help for it on user forums like this one. You can even go to premiere pro forums and get the answer you're looking for. As you progress there will be things that you want to do but the program won't allow it. This is common to all editing software as there is no one universal magic program and even professional systems have to integrate multiple platforms. However, you can always download things called plugins from other companies that are specific to the program you use that will allow you to accomplish your goal. Some plugins are free...some are more expensive than the editing program itself. I would suggest downloading the trials to see which one you like better.

https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/tdrc/index.cfm?loc=en%5Fus&product=premiere%5Felements

http://www.pinnaclesys.com/PublicSite/us/Products/Consumer+Products/Home+Video/Studio+Family/Studio+Plus+version+10_5+Titanium+Edition+Documents/Trial+Download/Studio+Plus+Trial+10_5+10_5TE.htm

Best Regards,

Corey

Posted 4 years ago #
brandon0409
Member

Here is my 2 cents.

Pinnacle sucks. I would discourage anyone from ever wasting their money on that POS software. I am not the only one. Nearly everyone I know (friends and family) that has used it, has the same trouble I have. Most notable, it crashes constantly. If you do a search for Pinnacle studios, you will find that almost no one would recommend Pinnacle.

I litterally had to save - shut down the software - and restart it every 5 minutes. And at least once per hour, I had to restart my computer. If I did not, it would crash and I would lose everything, saved or not.

I would recommend Adobe over nearly any other program. But SOny makes a good consumer software as well.

Adobe supports it software with patches etc. Pinnacle is very slow on this. One patch per year and that patch usually makes the problems worse.

The biggest waste of money I ever spent!

But that's just my 2 cents.

Posted 4 years ago #
moglepro
Member

I'm afraid I'm gonna have to go with Brandon on this one. I would not recommend Pinnacle either. I've had many problems with Studio 10, 10.5, and 10.7. I haven't tried out 10.8 quite yet.

I am planning on getting the Adobe Master Suite which includes Premiere CS3. I'm really excited.

Posted 4 years ago #