Studio 9+ or something better?

[Crocodile]

The missus has managed to video her grand-daughter's birthday party with the back-light compensation activated .

I only have Pinnacle Studio 7 SE & the exposure/colour editing features are disabled. Just had a quick look at the Pinnacle site & it looks like an upgrade to version 9 Plus is going to cost me £40. Is there a cheap/free download that will allow exposure correction on the captured footage? If not, is the Pinnacle upgrade a good move or would my hard earned be better spent elsewhere?

[Crocodile]

No-one got an opinion on this?

[melliott1963]

Have you tried MS Movie Maker 2.1

This allows you to apply effects, including adjusting brightness / colour, and, best of all, is a free download from Microsoft's web site.

As a disillusioned ex Pinnacle Studio user, I'd recommend looking at other products, most of which seem to be far more stable than Studio. It's a shame really, because, stability problems aside, the ease of use and features are excellent.

[Crocodile]

Thanks Melliot, it looks like it might be ideal except that it only appears to be available to download as a component of XP SP2 - and I'm not feeling lucky! Do you know of a location where it can be downloaded as standalone?

[melliott1963]

Sorry, I didn't realise 2.1 was part of SP2. Version 2,0 was always a stand alone download. If I can find anywhere that's hosting 2.0, I'll let you know.

Have you tried going to the windows update site? Maybe it will let you download Movie Maker without downloading SP2?

I can understand your concerns about SP2, although personally, I loaded it with no problems whatsoever. My PC had a clean install of XP, not an upgrade, so I don't know if this helped.

*** EDIT ***

Found it! Try here:-
http://www.download.com/3000-2194-10...art=msnbc-cnet

[Crocodile]

Thanks for that. I've downloaded, installed & tried reducing the brightness of the footage captured by Studio but I can only achieve a darker, washed-out image! It looks like you can only adjust contrast during the capture process so I'm going to have to re-capture the footage in Movie Maker & see what it can do.

I really appreciate your help .

Found a useful site here with lots of Freeware tools & help including editing S/W here. Not exactly user friendly but it IS free.