Pinnacle liquid edition 5.5

[nicco]

What about? Does anybody use it? Any impression? Any comparsion with Premiere pro?
Thanks...

[communist]

Isnt Pinnacle Liquid the former FAST Silver (...) which was a hardware / software solution?

[Arky]

Hi, sorry I've been absent for quite a while over the Christmas period.

Liquid Edition is my NLE of choice. I say this because of it's EXTRAORDINARY power and flexibility, to say nothing of the superb image quality. It's also a very efficient NLE because FAST (yes, you are correct, Communist) originally designed it to do everything AVID can, but with a more streamlined interface, whereby, instead of going to the top of the screen all the time, to access menu functions, you simply right-click in the relevant area of the NLE interface (e.g the timeline or the effects editors) and a context-sensitive drop-down menu offers you all available functions/operations. This can seem an intimidating way to work, at first, because it is so unorthodox, but once you become accustomed to it, your editing speed accelerates way past that possible with other editing systems such as Premiere or AVID.

Ironically, I rarely use the DVD-authoring side of the program (I prefer to X-send my auto-rendered timeline to Cinemacraft Basic, or fuse it where necessary, to complete the process manually). Then I use a standalone DVD authoring program. This doesn't mean I consider the integrated DVD authoring to be no good (in fact it has many appealing features, especially for speedily creating reasonable titles), it's just that I prefer to author with greater navigational complexity than than the setup presently caters for, and I am accustomed to authoring with a standalone DVD-authoring program anyway. Added to this fact, I feel that I make up for 'going the long way round' because CCE Basic is several times faster than the current Pinnacle MPEG encoding engine. Also (until version 6.0, which will be released some time during 2004, but no specific relase date yet), Liquid does not yet offer AC3 encoding, so my approach allows me to undertake AC3 encoding outside the program, for external DVD authoring.

It is for the thoroughbred Non-Linear Editing alone which I bought Edition, and this is what it is worth it's weight in gold for.

If you have any questions about L.E.5.5, I'd be happy to help out.

In the meantime, though, you may find the following very informative:

w*w.dvc.uk.com/downloads/edition.pdf

Regards,


Arky ;o)



N.B. @ Communist - Fast Purple was a Semi-Pro turnkey solution, and Silver was a hardware-accelerated broadcast turnkey solution, designed to shake AVID's grip on the serious Pro market. It succeeded, even though AVID snobishly insist this is not the case! Then Pinnacle bought Fast, and rebranded it Liquid. CNN and MTV Europe, for example, now use Liquid broadcast solutions (there is a whole lineup, differing in hardware and video-format support, but they all use the same fundamental core NLE software). Edition 4.1 was Pinnacle's software-ONLY version of the FAST NLE, at a hugely-reduced price. In recently upgrading Edition 5.1 to Liquid Edition 5.5, Pinnacle finally re-integrated the Dynamic Timewarp:

mms://wvs1.pinnaclesys.com/PBN/liquid%20edition/highband/LE%20dynamic%20time%20warp%20256k.wmv

and CX secondary colour correction:

mms://wvs1.pinnaclesys.com/PBN/liquid%20edition/highband/LE%20color%20correction%201%20256k.wmv

mms://wvs1.pinnaclesys.com/PBN/liquid%20edition/highband/LE%20color%20correction%202%20256k.wmv

mms://wvs1.pinnaclesys.com/PBN/liquid%20edition/highband/LE%20color%20correction%203%20256k.wmv

(you must have Windows Media Player version 9 installed or these URLs won't work!)

features which had previously been available only in Liquid Purple and above. This now means that I have, IMHO, quite literally the most powerful NLE I can lay my hands on, this side of $2000-3000, and, arguably, even further than that. I'm not advertising - I'm simply stating what I believe to be a fact. If you check out this page:

w*w.pinnaclesys.com/PBN

and don't choose any categories at all - just press the 'proceed' button, you will find loads of informative videos, and even a couple relating to the original FAST program.

[communist]

Hehe - a local TV channel has one FAST Silver setup. Its a TV channel for the people - you can get cameras and other tech. stuff for some days, create your own little movies / documentries etc., cut it there and also broadcast it from there.
I never got the time to look at it but its one of the things they offer - until then I'm stuck with simple D9/DV player and D9 recorder setup.

On a sidenote: I never got myself to like AVID programs and I never really understood them :p