Recently in Pinnacle Studio Category

"My camcorder needs to connect to a FireWire port on my computer in order to capture video, but my computer doesn't have one. It's a laptop, so I can't install one of those PCI cards. What are my options?"

Whether your computer is a laptop or not, there are ways you can get the functionality of a FireWire port without needing to install anything in your computer. One easy way is to get a USB hardware solution that passes FireWire connections. Laptop owners have more options because there are numerous PCMCIA and PC Express cards available with FireWire ports built in.

Steve writes, "I have recently purchased a Sony HDR-SR8E with USB2 input/output. I have just purchased Pinnacle Studio v11 Plus (Ultimate). I cannot get Pinnacle to see the camcorder as a capture device, nor will it import the m2ts files generated by the camcorder. Any advice on how to resolve this so that I can maintain the 1080i (AVCHD) output would be appreciated."

It seems that some of the AVCHD files are more compatible than others with various video editing applications. After struggling with this new format for months, most of the kinks are worked out, but there are still steps you can take to get better results. One method I've found to be almost fool-proof is to take the Sony software that ships with these camcorders out of the mix completely.

The new hard disk based camcorders don't need fancy software in order to work with the files on the disk. You can simply mount the video camera as a hard drive using a USB cable. Browse to the camera in Windows Explorer under My Computer and find the files with .MTS extension on the camera.

After locating the correct directory, copy the .MTS files to your hard drive. Then go back to Pinnacle Studio (or any other video editing app that supports AVCHD) and import the .MTS files.

One additional step may be required for everything to work smoothly - depending on what mode you used for recording audio in your video, you may have multichannel surround sound audio in your file, which doesn't work well with some applications. To get around this, install freeware app AC3Filter, which down-mixes the multichannel audio to stereo.

The AVCHD format used in some of the Sony hard drive and DVD camcorders, as well as in a few Panasonic camcorders, has been my video editing albatross. I bought the Sony HDR-SR1 back in January only to discover nothing existed to edit the files. About a week after buying the camera, I figured out a hack for editing AVCHD files using VirtualDub and a codec that ships with PowerDVD Ultra, but that solution was both inelegant and prone to numerous headaches. Many months later, software vendors are finally catching up with support for the AVCHD format. Nero 7 Ultra Edition ENHANCED imports the AVCHD .mt2s files into Nero Vison for editing, although I still find that to be a clunky editor. Of the solutions I've tested, Pinnacle Studio is currently the front runner for AVCHD editing because it handles the files like a champ while also supporting all the nifty features for full fledged editing.

"I'm trying to blur a friend's face out of a video I made. How can I do this using Windows Movie Maker on my computer?"

While there is a video blurring feature in Windows Movie Maker, it does not allow you to blur only a small portion of the screen. You either blur the entire video or you blur nothing. If you want to blur a face in your video, you'll need to use a different video editing tool. The easiest consumer tool I've found for blurring a portion of a video is Pinnacle Studio, which includes a Blur effect in the Studio Plus RTFX collection.