The effects provided for use with video also work with photos, and vice versa. Many Pinnacle Studio-supplied effects are described here. For third-party plug-in effects, please consult the manufacturers’ documentation.

Blur: Adding Blur to your video produces a result similar to shooting out of focus. The Blur effect allows you to add separate intensities of horizontal and vertical blurring over the whole frame or any rectangular region within it. You can easily blur out only a selected portion of the image, such as a person’s face, an effect familiar from TV news coverage.

Emboss: This specialized effect simulates the look of an embossed or bas-relief sculpture. The strength of the effect is controlled by the Amount slider.

Old film: Old movies have a number of traits that are usually considered undesirable: grainy images caused by early photographic development processes, spots and streaks from dust and lint adhering to the film, and intermittent vertical lines where the film has been scratched during projection. The effect lets you simulate these ‘blemishes’ to give your footage an antique look.

Soften: The Soften effect applies a gentle blurring to your video. This can be helpful for anything from adding a romantic haze to minimizing wrinkles. A slider controls the strength of the effect.

Bevel crystal: This effect simulates viewing the video through a pane of irregular polygons arranged into a mosaic. Sliders let you control the average dimensions of the polygonal ‘tiles’ in the image and the width of the dark edging between neighboring tiles from zero (no edging) to the maximum value.

2D Editor: Use this effect to enlarge the image and set which portion of it will be displayed, or to shrink the image and optionally add a border and shadow.

Earthquake: The Pinnacle Studio Earthquake effect jiggles the video frame to simulate a seismic event, whose severity you control with sliders for speed and intensity.

Lens flare: This effect simulates the flaring seen when direct bright light overexposes an area of a film or video image. You can set the orientation, size and glow-type of the main light.

Magnify: This effect lets you apply a virtual magnifying lens to a selected portion of the video frame. You can position the lens in three dimensions, moving it horizontally and vertically within the frame, and nearer to or further from the image.

Motion blur: This effect simulates the blurring that results when a camera is moved rapidly during exposure. Both the angle and the amount of blurring can be set.

Water drop: This effect simulates the impact of a drop falling onto the surface of water, producing expanding, concentric ripples.

Water wave: This effect adds distortion to simulate a series of ocean waves passing across the video frame as the clip progresses. Parameters allow you to adjust the number, spacing, direction and depth of the waves.

Black and white: This effect subtracts some or all of the color information from the source video, with results ranging from partly desaturated (the ‘Faded’ preset) to fully monochrome (‘Black and white’). The Amount slider controls the strength of the effect.

Color correction: The four sliders in the parameters panel for this effect control the coloration of the current clip in terms of:

Color map: This effect colorizes an image using a pair of blend ramps, or color maps. Stylize your footage with bold color treatments, add duotone and tritone style colorization, or create striking editorial transitions. The effect can be used for anything from fine control of monochrome images to psychedelic color transformations.

Invert: Despite its name, the Invert effect doesn’t turn the display upside-down. Rather than the image itself, it is the color values in the image that are inverted: each pixel is redrawn in its complementary light intensity and/or color, producing a readily recognizable but recolored image.

This effect uses the YCrCb color model, which has one channel for luminance (brightness information) and two channels for chrominance (color information). The YCrCb model is often used in digital video applications.

Lighting: The Lighting tool enables correction and enhancement of existing video that was shot with poor or insufficient lighting. It is particularly suitable for fixing backlit outdoor sequences in which the subject’s features are in shadow.

Posterize: This Pinnacle Studio effect lets you control the number of colors used to render each frame of the clip, all the way from the full original palette down to two colors (black and white) as you drag the Amount slider from left to right. Regions of similar color are coalesced into larger flat areas as the palette shrinks.

RGB color balance: RGB Color Balance serves a dual role in Pinnacle Studio. On the one hand, you can use it to correct video that suffers from unwanted coloration. On the other hand, it allows you to apply a color bias to achieve a particular effect. For example, a night scene can often be heightened by adding blue and slightly reducing overall brightness. You can even make video shot in daylight look like a night scene.

Sepia: This Pinnacle Studio effect imparts the appearance of antique photography to the clip by rendering it in sepia tones rather than full color. The strength of the effect is controlled by the Amount slider.

White balance: Most video cameras have a ‘white balance’ option for automatically adjusting their color response to ambient lighting conditions. If this option is switched off or not fully effective, the coloration of the video image will suffer.

The White balance effect corrects the problem by allowing you to specify which color should be taken as ‘white’ in this image. The adjustment needed to make that reference color white is then applied to every pixel of the image. If the reference white is well chosen, this can make the coloration seem more natural.

Some video and photo effects have features designed for 3D media. For instance, some of the provided effects offer a stereoscopic mode that is activated by a check box in the effect parameters. Meanwhile, the effects in the Stereoscopic group itself let you modify the 3D properties of your material. The group includes:

The S3D Depth Control: This effect allows you to adjust the parallax of stereoscopic footage. By default, the effect is presented in Standard mode, in which a single Depth slider lets you control the amount of divergence between the left and right frames, whether to correct or match source material, or as a special effect.

The advanced mode offers separate Shift and Zoom control groups, each containing a Horizontal and a Vertical slider. The Shift sliders let you control the divergence between the left and right frames, while the Zoom sliders control their magnification. Both properties can be controlled independently in the horizontal and vertical dimensions, but by default the Zoom aspect ratio is locked. Click the lock icon to adjust the horizontal and vertical zoom independently.

S3D Eye Selector: The Eye Selector effect is presented in two variations; one for left eye, and the other for right; it is used for uniting left and right eye video streams on a 3D timeline.

A pair of clips at the same timeline index, one for left eye and the other for right eye, can be combined to produce stereoscopic output by applying the eye selector effect to the upper clip.

The effect can also be employed to extract either the left or right stream from a 3D clip by setting the Source to Left Eye or Right Eye, and direct it to either eye using the Mapping dropdown.