Ah, the ubiquitous video camera. Be it a pricey hard drive camcorder, point-and-shoot digital camera, or just an overworked Blackberry or iPhone, almost nothing of consequence transpires in our wired world without some yahoo making a movie out of it. If you’re a serious yahoo with a flair for style, however, you’ll be happy to learn that Avid Technology recently released the newest chapter in its long-running Pinnacle Studio video editing series.

Available in three flavors (Pinnacle Studio HD, Pinnacle Studio Ultimate, and Pinnacle Studio Ultimate Collection retail for $49.99, $99.99, and $129.99 respectively), this user-friendly, drag-and-drop movie-making program packs a healthy set of features for hobbyist cinematographers. It’ll never compete with Adobe’s high-end $800 Premiere Pro (Avid has it’s own mega-priced Xpress Pro line for professionals) but it can certainly meet the needs of family filmmakers and vacation videophiles.

One of the program’s biggest selling points is its classically simple interface. From the overhauled Import screen—where you can pull in video from a variety of digital cameras, camcorders, Blu-ray discs, DVDs, and camera phones, as well as thumb drives and memory cards—to the new, uncluttered editing screen, Studio 14 boasts one of the shallowest learning curves on the market. Drag-and-drop videos, photos, and music files into the storyboard or timeline editing screens and then enhance your work with hundreds of title overlays, scene transitions, and audio-visual special effects. (There’s also a new stop-motion capture feature that allows you to create animated films by stitching together individual frames grabbed from a live video source). Even first-time video directors should be able to turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse with this many cool tools. Stylish and noir or shameless and brash—make it up as you go.

Export options are similarly varied. Whether you’re constructing a treasured wedding video or just showcasing your pet’s unique facility to lick its own genitals, Studio 14 lets you save your finished video to the hard drive, burn it to DVD (Studio Ultimate and Studio Ultimate Collection also support Blu-ray authoring with Dolby 5.1 encoding), or upload any part of it to YouTube. Output alternatives include standard video, flash video, and 3GP as well as iPod, Xbox, PlayStation, and Wii-compatible file formats.

The basic Studio HD program ships with a decent enough collection of video-enhancing tools like animated scene transitions (fades, wipes, dissolves, etc.), a handy new picture-stabilization feature to fix shaky camera shots, expanded titling effects, color correction screens, picture-in-picture, and Chroma-key editing. The Ultimate packages sweeten the pot even further with a new Motion-title tool that animates text and graphics with pre-created, fully customizable motion dynamics. The Ultimate Collection suite also include third-party special effects plug-ins—including fire, shimmer, and lens flare—some of which could give the Harry Potter films a run for their money. We especially liked the Red Giant ToonIt plug-in that applies a stylized cartoon effect to your video subjects. A spiffy new Montage collection—where you can animate your pictures into a virtual photo album or an unexpectedly slick slide show—is another high point.

Movie-making programs are traditionally big resource hogs, but one of Studio 14’s major plusses is its support for NVIDIA’s CUDA computing architecture (which directs the GPU to do most of the heavy lifting when applying complex video effects or rendering lengthy clips). As long as you have a supported NVIDIA video card, Pinnacle Studio will breeze through the heretofore jerky video rendering process. A few days of hands-on testing demonstrated the benefits of this feature. System crashes were all but nonexistent (not always the case with earlier Studio chapters) and the butter-smooth video playback entices users to incorporate rich and complex special effects in their movie projects that might have scared them away in years past.

Whatever videos you have on your digital camera or smart phone right now—Mexican vacation or tail-chasing canine—Pinnacle Studio HD 14 can make a star out of everyone involved… including the film’s editor, director, and producer. This program simplifies the moviemaking process so effectively, in fact, that there’s really no good reason to keep this stuff in the vault any longer.