Edition Teases What Could Be

Pinnacles Edition is a sweet, nonlinear video editing product plagued by inconsistent performance.

On the plus side, Edition is loaded with features, including semi-integrated DVD editing and publishing and just about everything a corporate video producer would ever want. It has unbeatable performance and support for multiprocessor systems and is a bargain, to boot, at $699. If only it werent plagued by erratic performance, it would beat its main competition—Adobe Premiere—hands down.

Alas, Pinnacle is pushing the limit on Windows technology with Edition, and that tends to lead to instability. In addition, the product alters the interface of Windows slightly, which usually doesnt bode well for many users.

I ran into several glitches with two different systems—one based on a 1GHz Pentium III with 512MB of RAM and the other with a dual-processor AMD Polywell screamer with 1GB of RAM (both running Windows XP).

With the Pentium system, Edition often did not recognize the camera device. This is especially interesting because Pinnacles other products, including the low-end Studio, worked just fine in this regard. With the AMD-based system, Edition was more stable, but it occasionally froze, forcing me to quit the application.

Still, for users who want to spend some upfront time debugging this beast, Edition is an extremely powerful tool, and it comes bundled with more features than Adobe Premiere.

Premieres performance is more reliable; in tests it was slower on rendering, and it lacks the panache of Edition.

Pinnacles product has a long learning curve for those familiar with Avid and Premiere, but after 20 minutes of intensive experimentation, Edition became easier to use. If only …