Pinnacle Studio 8

Suggested Retail: $100 (Windows only; ships with certain Gateway desktop and laptop PCs) pinnaclesys.com

Pinnacle Studio 8 is one of those programs that the uninitiated should steer clear of. It's probably the most powerful of the four mentioned here, but it requires a high-level of skill and knowledge to make work. If that doesn't scare you off and you're ready to drive manually, so to speak, you may come to appreciate Pinnacle Studio 8. The movie-editing window is similar to others, only with separate timelines for overlaid text, sound effects and background music. When you double click on an element, you can change its characteristics — a video clip can be slowed or sped up, tweaked for color and given a blur or mosaic effect; you can re-size a text title and then change its color. The effects themselves aren't hardly as neat as Roxio's, but the level of control you have over them is many times greater. In the end, the creative types will have a blast with the power and flexibility of the application.

To burn a DVD, you click Make Movie at the top of the screen and then let it "render" your video into the proper state for DVD playback. This is not a quick step — once you've clicked, you're free to do something else for a while. The good news is, it doesn't tie up your computer while it's doing it. Studio 8 is an immense improvement over Studio 7 in terms of title-page templates. There are now a number of animated title pages, most of which are stylish and suitably generic (not all Christmas and Baby's First Steps).

Bottom Line: If you're not patient and artistically inclined, you may very well hate this program. If you are a driven do-it-yourselfer, dive in.