Liquid Edition 5.5: pinnacle launches a fluid NLE.

You tend to expect a great deal from a company that has won nine Emmy Awards. With Liquid Edition 5.5, Pinnacle Systems delivers. The company put a great deal of thought into this editing system, and it shows--from its power and flexibility to its highly detailed manuals. There's not only a lot that's new, but also a lot to like about Liquid Edition.

For starters, Liquid Edition is customizable and designed to enable video editors to work the way they want. While many NLEs allow for the customization of keyboard shortcuts, Liquid Edition takes it a bit further, with the ability to personalize the interface and editing style.

When you first launch Liquid Edition, you'll be presented with the default setup, already configured for your resolution. Because editors have their own styles, it permits them to customize their working interface. If any buttons that you don't use frequently are on the toolbar, you can simply drag and drop them back into the Function Library and, by the same token, reverse the process to add buttons used more regularly. It's no more difficult than right-clicking the toolbar and selecting customize. Additionally, users can choose between single track or A/B styles and overwrite or film-style editing.

In professional studios, you frequently find multiple people working together on a single project, and even the same workstation. Here, Liquid Edition really shines. Users can save their individual work space customizations or profile. As a result, they can sit at a shared workstation and immediately begin working in their own style, regardless of who most recently worked in Liquid Edition.

Version 5.5 offers seamless interoperability with other products and support for networked drives. By supporting networked drives, multiple users can share resources as well as play back from and render to the same drives. And with the X-Send feature, users are able to share resources with Pinnacle's Commotion Pro, Macromedia's Flash, and Adobe's After Effects.

Liquid Edition is all about working better, faster, and smarter--and it shows. Its Instant Save feature constantly saves your progress in the background. A history palette function (similar to that found in imaging programs) makes reverting to an earlier point a simple matter. With features such as real-time compositing, support for up to 10 streams with real-time effects and background processing, automatic scene detection, and ...