Pinnacle Systems MP10
(A Cube MVP customer)
05/04/99 PC Magazine
COPYRIGHT 1999 Ziff-Davis Publishing Company
An inexpensive combination of a video editor and an external MPEG -1 encoder, Pinnacle Systems' MP10 ($270 street) is a great solution for MPEG -1 publishers. But those creating tape-based video projects or publishing digitally in AVI, RealVideo, or ASF formats should choose another tool (Pinnacle's own Studio DC10plus, for example).
Installing the parallel port encoder is generally a simple task, though it may involve a trip to the system BIOS to change your parallel port to ECP mode. All capturing and editing by this product is done in MPEG - 1 format, so you don't need a capture card in addition to the encoder. Pinnacle's editor, Studio, is a well-organized, full-screen program with three tabs--Capture, Edit, and Make Movie--that direct work flow; no project templates are included, however.
You capture in MPEG -1 format using a small preview window to adjust the color and brightness of the incoming video. Studio automatically scans the capture file for scene changes and creates separate files for each scene, a great feature when capturing long, multiscene videos but a hindrance for capturing short, targeted segments, as we did on our tests.
The Studio Editor can either be a storyboard or a timeline, both with tracks for video, titles, voiceover, and background music. Simple controls found in Studio's toolbox include a frame-accurate trimming window, a narration recorder, tools for ripping music tracks from CD- ROMs, and SmartSound, technology licensed from Sonic Desktop for creating custom background tracks. Studio also provides a mixer to adjust the volumes of the different tracks, but audio fade tools are primitive.
Studio offers 100 primarily two-dimensional transitions, which dither diagonal edges to create a ragged but artistic look. Studio's feature- rich titling tool, TitleDeko, has a library of looks combining text face, edge, shadow, and background characteristics. You can also create rectangular and elliptical backgrounds, and precisely place title text with kerning, skewing, and rotation tools. You can fade titles in and out, and you can overlay graphics on the video, although we found the function awkwardly implemented and poorly documented.
Timeline operation is very efficient, with all effects rendered near real time. This enables almost instant, full-movie preview. When you're ready to render, you can output in AVI format or in MPEG -1 format for digital distribution or writing back to tape, but Studio doesn't output in either Real or ASF formats.
MPEG -1 output options are simple, but Studio supports only 352-by-240 output, which is slightly wider than the correct 320-by-240 resolution. MPEG -1 audio/video quality was quite good. That said, visual artifacts become apparent when writing video back out to tape, so tape-based producers should choose either an M-JPEG or DV-based solution. Producing AVI files is complicated, and though compressed video output quality was high, Studio produced obvious slurring when down-sampling audio from CD-ROM quality to 11-kHz, 16-bit mono.
Though not without faults, Studio is a sophisticated tool that's simple enough for beginners, but best suited for MPEG -1 publishers.
ADD SOME TUNES: Pinnacle Studio's SmartSound feature lets you create background music for your projects.
Pinnacle Systems MP10
Street price: $270
Requires: 32MB RAM, 30MB hard disk space, Windows 95 or 98. Pinnacle Systems Inc.,Mountain View, CA; 888-484-3366
www.pinnaclesys.com
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