Pinnacle Studio 12 ready to ship on June 10

Pinnacle has emailed existing owners of its Studio range of video editing products with a pre-order offer to upgrade to Pinnacle Studio 12, to be shipped on June 10th, 2008 if rumours are correct. A glimpse at Pinnacle's homepage indicates that the product is available for purchase. By all accounts, the latest addition to the long-running family of beginner-friendly video editing products comes with some "exclusive" new features.

These include Montage - a new feature designed to enable users to "enjoy multi-track power without the complexity". It consists of a massive number of pre-built templates designed by professionals products and artists and which automatically generates all the necessary titles, effects and animations. It's a bit like the way Apple's iWeb works, but with a few more embellishments. It also enables users to mix a whole range of media - everything from Photos, Video, Music, etc. - to produce what Pinnacle describes as a "Hollywood-like Movie". Hmm.

Other features include Boris Graffiti (title & graphic animation), Magic Bullet Looks (Pro film styles) and proDAD VitaScene (lighting, glows & more). It appears that Pinnacle has given the Studio 12 interface a new look to accomodate the new features, too.

If you're intending to make the most of your High Definition camcorder clips (and perhaps burn completed projects to Blu-ray disc) you'll be interested to learn that Studio 12 now provides for the complete HD workflow; Pinnacle Studio Plus works natively with HDV and AVCHD footage. According to Pinnacle, native HD support means you’ll get the same quality from your original source all the way to final output – without transcoding and in real-time. It's also possible to combine projects that mix standard and high definition video and photos for a final result in full HD resolution.

Just as important is the ability to burn your movies onto DVD and HD DVD format discs using standard DVD media, in addition to being able to natively author Blu-ray format discs with full motion menus. We're told that Studio 12 enable users to make AVCHD format discs on standard DVDs to play on Blu-ray players.

That's as much as we know at the moment. We'll publish a full news story on this and bring you a first impressions review as soon as we're able.