PINNACLE ANNOUNCES PENTIUM(R) 4 OPTIMIZATIONS FOR PINNACLE SOFTWARE.

Pinnacle Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: PCLE) will release optimized versions of its video editing and authoring products for use with the Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 processor. With the performance-boosting upgrades to Pinnacle's user-friendly video editing, and DVD movie-making software, consumers and video enthusiasts will be able to gain the maximum benefit from Intel's latest processors.

Pinnacle Studio, an easy-to-use video editing tool for consumer video hobbyists, is the first in the series of Pentium 4 processor optimized products to be released. The processor-enhanced code will be a standard feature in Pinnacle Studio products and is available as an upgrade to existing Pinnacle Studio (version 7) customers. Pinnacle Systems will also be offering Pentium 4 upgrades to its Pinnacle Express, and Pinnacle Impression products later this year.

"The Pentium 4 processor was designed to handle demanding video editing, 3-D graphics, and multimedia mixing applications," said David L. Brown, Director, Platform Enabling Group of Intel Corporation. "But it takes optimized software like Pinnacle Studio to deliver the full value of its unprecedented power and time-saving performance. With Pinnacle's processor-enhanced code, the time that can be saved actually increases as the size of the video gets larger."

"All of our current family of video editing products can be used with the Pentium 4 processor, but we are committed to providing our customers with the maximum performance that is available to them," explained Bill Loesch, vice president of engineering and product management of Pinnacle System's Personal Web Video Division. "With the enhanced performance of Intel's new Pentium 4 processor, we can offer faster video encoding at quality levels that once required dedicated hardware."

Pinnacle Studio lets users capture video into their PC from a variety of sources including 1394/FireWire ports, Webcams and TV Tuner/video capture cards. Videos can be enhanced by choosing from over 100 transitions and 300 TitleDeko titles, and by adding sound and special effects, narration, and customized musical soundtracks. With Pinnacle Studio, users can go beyond basic editing and create 3D transitions, fast/slow motion, split audio and video tracks, image processing and color correction, and roll/crawl effects for Hollywood-like scrolling credits. Once the video is completed, users can save their video to a DV tape, or create digital movies for Internet, PC and CD.

Pinnacle Express integrates video capture, automatic menu creation, CD and DVD burning in one easy-to-use package. With Express, video can be imported directly from a DV or Digital8 camcorder using a PC's FireWire interface or by dragging-and-dropping video files from the computer's hard disk into the application. Finished videos can be output on low-cost CD-R and CD-RW discs in the VideoCD or Super VideoCD format or on DVD-R discs in the DVD format.