Final Cut Pro X can be purchased for $299.99 from the app store. Pinnacle Studio, on the other hand, can be purchased for $12.99, and in my opinion it is just as good. On top of that, it’s easily accessible being right at your fingertips.

The other day my professor mentioned that most people will not purchase an app if it exceeds $1.99. Shocking, right? I probably wouldn’t either, but I think Pinnacle Studio is a good find for the extra few dollars especially for those of you interested in composing short videos. I have no idea exactly how much footage Pinnacle can handle, but it was able to handle my 45-60 second assignment without crashing. That definitely was a nice change from the previous app we used called Voddio.

For my short video assignment, I filmed all of my clips using FiLMIC Pro. I then trimmed my clips to my desired lengths and saved them to my camera roll. I want to note that FiLMIC can be stubborn when trying to trim clips. Despite that, one really cool thing about FilMIC Pro is that it is nonlinear, meaning that you can edit clips without destroying them. Once I trimmed my clips and saved them to my camera roll I imported them to Pinnacle Studio, and that’s where the real fun (editing) began.

Pinnacle Studio allows for three separate audio tracks and a video track. I really like how easy it was to move clips around and to detach audio. For example, if I wanted the audio from my interview I simply would drag the clip to the audio track. If I wanted the video to go along with it, I would drag the clip to the video line. I was also able to add supers, or lower thirds, to give my subject a title. Overall, the app was very easy to navigate and easy to learn.

So is it better than Final Cut? Final Cut is a great resource to use, but for the purposes of creating simple journalistic stories, Pinnacle is something I wouldn’t mind using outside of this class and maybe for future MUTV packages. One reason being, I can edit it from the comfort of my home on my iPad as opposed to driving to campus to use Final Cut, which is only located on the studio computers.

Want a fun challenge? Try spotting the five-shot sequence in my assignment!