Pinnacle StudioVersion 17

Including Pinnacle Studio Plus and Pinnacle Studio UltimateYour Life in Movies

For a simple outline of the digital movie-making process, you dont have to look any further than the central tab group of Pinnacle Studios main window. The same steps apply to any type of production, from an unpretentious slideshow with dissolves between each frame to a 3D extravaganza containing hundreds of carefully- arranged clips and effects.The Importer Import, on the left, is a preparatory step. It involves procedures like capturing video from your analog or DV camcorder, bringing in photos from a digital camera, and copying media files to your local hard drive from a network location. The Pinnacle Studio Importer provides tools for these tasks, along with a Snapshot feature for grabbing frames from video files, and a Stop motion tool for building up video frame-by-frame. See Chapter 10: The Importer for details.File menu import commands: Choosing Import from the file menu has the same effect as clicking the Import tab: it opens the Importer. The menu provides three other import-related choices as well. Each of these opens a Windows file dialog to permit import of files from a hard drive or other local storage. Import previous Pinnacle Studio Projects lets you load movie projects created with earlier versions of Studio. Import Studio for iPad App Projects lets you bring in projects exported from Studios companion app for the iPad. Quick Import lets you directly select ordinary media files photo, video, audio and project for import.

The Exporter At the other end of the movie-making process is Export. By the time you get to this stage, the hard part of the task is behind you. The creative energy that went into making your movie has paid off in a production that now lacks only one ingredient an audience. The Pinnacle Studio Exporter helps you over that last hurdle with tools for taking your movie to its viewers, whoever and wherever they might be. Create a digital movie file in the format of your choice, burn a DVD, or upload directly to destinations in the Cloud like YouTube and Vimeo, or to your personal Cloud-based storage area in Box.The central tabs The three central tabs, Library, Movie and Disc, are where most of your work in Pinnacle Studio takes place. The first of these opens the main view of the Library, where you can curate your media collections. The other tabs open the two project editors, one for digital movies, and the other for disc projects, which are digital movies enhanced with interactivity in the form of DVD menus.The Library is a cataloguing and management tool for all the file- based resources or assets that you can draw on when authoring. Almost all of the materials of your movie video footage, music and audio files, and many specialized resources such as transitions and effects originate as assets in the Library. Many Library assets are supplied with Pinnacle Studio, and are available for royalty-free use. These include professionally-designed titles, DVD menus, and Montages in both 2D and stereoscopic 3D. The Library uses watchfolders for keeping up automatically with the changing population of media files on your system. On the watchfolders page of the Pinnacle Studio Setup control panel, enter the names of your media directories, especially those that you update frequently. Thereafter the Library will scan those directories regularly for changes, and update itself as needed. See Watchfolders on page 298 for details.Main view: When you click the Library tab, the Library takes over the main window. This main view gives you spacious access to a number of cataloguing and search tools, including those for categorizing assets by means of ratings and tags, and those for creating user-defined asset collections. Compact view: The compact view of the Library squeezes virtually the whole functionality of the main view into a panel embedded within certain other windows, such as the Movie Editor and the Disc Editor. The primary purpose of the compact view is to allow assets to be brought into a movie or disc project from the Library by drag-and-drop.Player: The tools available from within the Library include the Player, a viewer that works for all media types handled by the application. When used from the main view of the Library, the Player opens in a separate window. When the compact Library is used, an embedded version of the Player appears in the same window. See The Player on page 8 for further information.The usual way: If you want to exert detailed control over the way media assets are used in your production, you will usually start building your movie or disc project from scratch in one of the two project editors. These are described below. The easiest way: For ultra-quick results, the Library offers another way. Clicking the SmartSlide or SmartMovie tools at the bottom of the Library main view opens an extra tray of controls. With either of these you select some visual media assets to serve as the basis of the project, choose music for a soundtrack, and make a handful of other customizations. Then the software takes over, automatically generating a full-scale Pinnacle Studio project containing the media and options requested. You can export the project immediately, or edit it further by hand as you choose. For details, please see SmartSlide on page 44 and SmartMovie.Corrections from the Library: The editors for the standard media types of video, photo and audio are particularly important. When invoked from the Library (by double-clicking an asset), each of these editors provides a suite of correction tools appropriate to its media type. These tools can be applied directly to Library assets in order to remove camera shake from video, trim unwanted material from a photo, or suppress audio hiss, to give just a few examples.When a correction is applied to a Library asset, the media file is not modified. Instead the correction parameters are saved in the Library database. They can be altered at any time, or removed, as your needs dictate. The corrections you make in the Library are brought with the asset when you add it to your timeline as a clip.Transitions and Effects: When they are invoked from a projects timeline, the media editors also offer a wide-range of enhancements for all three media types in the transition in, transition out, and effects groups.Transitions let you punctuate the passage of one clip to the next with anything from a barely perceptible dissolve to an audience- awakening flare. Effects range from the practical (Brightness and contrast) to the theatrical (Fractal fire). They can be animated with keyframed parameters to any degree of complexity, providing innumerable ways to add creative interest to your productions. Some effects are particularly designed for 3D material, and it is even possible to give a 3D appearance to 2D footage (using the S3D depth control). Pan-and-zoom: The Photo Editor provides one more tool, pan-and- zoom, of its own. Like the effects just discussed, pan-and-zoom can be animated with keyframes to create any desired combination of simulated pan and zoom camera moves within the boundaries of a single photo.The Correction tools, and the media editors in general, are the subject of Chapter 4: Media editing: Corrections. The effects, and the pan-and-zoom tool, are described in Chapter 5: Media editing: Effects.In conclusion this is my paper work and I hope help you.