Review: Pinnacle Liquid Edition Pro 6

by HEXUS Staff on 11 February 2005, 00:00

Tags: Pinnacle, Avid Technology

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Sound

Edition's sound-editing tools have improved significantly as a result of Pinnacle's acquisition of Steinberg, the audio software developer.

The audio interface still has a mixer panel and router, but there's now support for 5.1 surround-sound mixing. Each audio track has its own surround-sound panner in the mixer - but this isn’t seen unless the user enables Logical Output Bus display under the Settings tab.

Each panner is a square grid, representing the listener's environment. A circle in the grid identifies the perceived position of audio on the selected track, and can be dragged into the required position. Guides at the right and bottom allow adjustments to be restricted to horizontal or vertical planes. Audio panning can be keyframed and adjusted over time or moved in real time during playback.

Support for 5.1 surround sound panning has been added to Edition's audio mixer


Audio filters were in short supply previous versions of Edition – a major downside - but the situation is much improved in V6. There's an equaliser, a reverb tool and a leveller, plus an additional surround-panner which can be applied to individual clips rather than tracks.

There's also a karaoke filter that attempts to remove vocals from music by taking out sound information that’s the same on left and right channels. And, Edition 6 supports VST plug-ins, so the supplied collection of audio effects can readily be expanded. All effects are keyframable and can be monitored in real time.