Pinnacle Studio has some really cool options for capturing video. Unlike most affordable video-editing software, Studio supports online and offline editing.
Studio facilitates offline editing using the Preview-quality capture mode. When capturing video with Studio, you can choose one of three basic quality settings:
- DV full-quality capture: Choose this option if you plan to export your movie back to videotape — and you have a generous amount of harddisk space to use.
- MPEG full-quality capture: Choose this option if you plan to output your video to a VCD, S-VCD, DVD, or the Internet. MPEG capture can be customized further using some sub-options described in the next section.
- Preview-quality capture: Choose this option if you want to capture a lot of video to your hard disk but storage space is a concern. With this option, Studio captures video at a lower quality, which results in a smaller file size. Later, when you’re done editing, Studio recaptures — at full DV quality — only the portions you want for your final movie; all your edits are automatically applied to the full-quality video. If you’re not quite satisfied with the quality of the preview you get, you can customize Preview-quality capture with sub-options described later.
Click the folder icon to review the scratch disk folder and change it if you wish. For example, you may have a second hard disk that you wish to use for video storage. The default location for your scratch disk is
My Documents\Pinnacle Studio\Captured Video
This folder is created automatically when you install Studio on your computer. You can also specify a variety of other capture settings. Click the Settings button in the lower-right corner of the screen to open the Pinnacle Studio Setup Options dialog box. Click the Capture Source tab to bring it to the Front.
This dialog box contains a lot of options and settings, but only two of them are really important for right now. First of all, I strongly recommend that you remove the check mark next to Capture Preview. When this option is enabled, Studio shows a preview of the video on-screen as you capture it. This preview uses up valuable memory and processor power that is better devoted to the actual video-capture process. You will still be able to view the video on the LCD display or viewfinder of your camcorder, so the on-screen preview is redundant anyway.
Second, review the scene detection settings. Studio can automatically detect when one scene ends and another begins and automatically turn each scene into a separate video clip. This comes in handy during editing, but if you don’t like the feature, you can click the No Auto Scene Detection — Press Space Bar to Create Scene radio button.
After you have changed these settings, click the Capture Format tab to bring it to the front. If you are using the DV capture preset, you won’t be able to customize any of the settings on this tab. But if you are using the MPEG or Preview preset, you will be able to adjust some options as described in the next two sections.
