Five Ways to Produce a Picture in Picture in Pinnacle Studio Ultimate

Original article: https://www.sheldonbrown.com/avid-pip.html on sheldonbrown.com

Reproduced with the permission of John Allen and Harriet Fell — all rights reserved. The version on sheldonbrown.com is authoritative.
Mirrored: 2026-10-09 · Last update of the original: see original

Five Ways to Produce a Picture in Picture!

This page is a companion to my page reviewing Pinnacle Studio Ultimate and its predecessor, Avid Studio Ultimate video editing software. I examined Pinnacle Studio 16 Ultimate, but the new version 17 appears not to have changed the effects available in the Effects Editor.

These applications have five different modules which produce picture-in-picture effects, all under the 2D-3D heading in the Effects Editor. The five modules have many features in common, but also important differences. Some are easier to use, and others provide a wealth of options. It is important to know about all of these modules in order not to be caught up with one of them which lacks a desired feature. Another may have it. Be careful in choosing which module you will use. There is no way to convert among these modules.

There is an additional Multi-Shape PIP module, which can produce a polygonal or star-shaped PiP, but it is different enough that I'm not covering it here.

(Message to marketeers: "Ultimate" means the last, greatest, most spectacular, ever, but a new, even more Ultimate version of Pinnacle Studio comes out about once a year...)

A lower-cost version, Pinnacle Studio Plus appears to have the same picture in picture effects, while the entry-level plain Pinnacle Studio lacks the ability to use keyframes to change an effect over time.

Avid Studio (no longer sold) is very similar to Pinnacle Studio 16. Pinnacle Studio 15 and earlier are a very different product.

The Five Modules

The table below lists the parameters of each of each of the five modules. Some parameters have different ranges and work in opposite directions in different modules. I suspect that this results from the need to achieve compatibility when converting data from different legacy applications.

Some general comments about each of the modules:

2D Editor Advanced isn't as advanced as its name suggests. It has the fewest features of any of these modules except Studio PiP.
2D Editor CPU offers many ways to control borders and a wide range for positioning and resizing. There is also a long list of "quality" settings, essentially affecting the appearance of focus or defocus.
3D Editor CPU is the most versatile of all of these modules, including almost all capabilities of all the others, and some additional ones as well. It can get complicated, especially if you use the Camera function. Rotating around a horizontal axis allows an intuitive transition between a rear-view-mirror view and a looking-to-the-rear view, very useful in my traffic videos. Repositioning the axis away from the center enables "flipping pages" or "swinging gates" effects.
3D Editor GPU, while less versatile than 3D Editor CPU, shares with it the ability to rotate an image around a horizontal or vertical axis, or a point (or in-between axes, by using more than one at the same time), but can't move an axis off-center..
Studio PiP is the least capable of these modules. Its parameters are like those of the PinP function in Pinnacle Studio 15 and earlier. Particularly unfortunate is that the height and width parameters cannot be linked to one another, even though it is usual to resize an image by the same amount in both height and width.

Some parameters of these modules are available as other independent modules; for example, Pan and Zoom and Rotate, both available under the Camera heading in the Effects Editor.

Pinnacle Studio allows cascading of effects, but generally it is best to use only a single module to perform as many functions as possible, especially when changing the shape, rotation or size of an image -- requiring resampling the image, and with each resampling, there is a loss of image quality. To what extent Pinnacle Studio minimizes the number of resamplings, I don't know. Determining this would require either detailed research, or a knowledge of the inner workings of the software.

So that comparable parameters are seen side by side in the table below, they are not always listed in the same order as in the Effects Editor, Also, parameters may not occur at the same outline level in different modules.

The pairs of numbers in parentheses in the table give the maximum and minimum values of parameters. For linear changes, most are percentages, and for rotations, most are degrees. When there is a row of three numbers, the middle one indicates a default value.

2D Editor Advanced	2D Editor CPU	3D Editor CPU	3D Editor GPU	Studio PiP
Position (±200) Horizontal Vertical	Position (±400) Position X Position Y	Position Position X (±400) Position Y (±200) Position Z (Zoom, ±400 but image disappears at -99 which is greatly enlarged)	Position Horizontal (±200) Vertical (±200) Z Position (Zoom, (±1000) Image disappears at -500 (half-size) in Avid Studio.	Position (±100) Horizontal Vertical
Size (linkable) (0 200) Horizontal Vertical	Size (linkable, 0 400) Width Height	Size (linkable, 0 400) Width Height	Size (linkable, 0 200) Horizontal Vertical	*Size (not* linkable, 0 200)** Width Height
		Shear (±360) Shear X (skew) Shear Y (tilt) Shear Zx (mirror-like) Shear Zy (flip-like)
Rotation (±720)	Rotation (±360) Flip Horizontal Flip Vertical	Mirror Flip Horizontal Flip Vertical	Rotation (±720) X (flip) Y (mirror) Z (spin)
		Rotation Rotation X (±360, flip) Rotation Y(±360, mirror) Rotation Z (±360, spin) Pivot X (±400, changes axis) Pivot Y (±400, changes axis) Pivot Z (±400, moves axis ahead of and behind image plane Backside image Flip Horizontal Flip Vertical solid Color
		Camera (perspective effects, like swings and tilts of a view camera, complicated interactions!) Rotation X (-360 360, look right/left) Rotation Y (-360 360, look up/down) Rotation Z (-360 360, spin) Pivot X (±400, moves vertical axis right-left) Pivot Y (±400, moves horizontal axis up/down) Pivot Z (±400, Moves axis of rotation ahead of or behind image plane Position X (±400 right-left) Position Y (±400, up is negative) Position Z (Zoom, -400 100 400 but image disappears at 0, which is greatly enlarged) Field of view (1 50.4 135 -- like 35mm camera lens focal lengths -- zoom)
Border Width (0 100) Color (any) Softness (0 100)	Inner Border Width (0 100) Height (0 100) Softness (0 100) Transparency (0 100) Color (any) Blend Type None Gradient Inside-Out	Inner Border Width (0 100) Height (0 100) Softness (0 100) Transparency (0 100) Color (any) Blend None Inside-Out Gradient	Border Width (0 100) Color (any) Softness (0 100)	Border Width (0 100) Height (0 100) Color (any) Softness (0 100) Transparency (0 100)
Border Width (0 100) Color (any) Softness (0 100)	Outer Border Width (0 100) Height (0 100) Round Style Softness (0 100) Transparency (0 100) Color (any) Blend Type None Gradient Inside-Out Color Gradient (to any) Direction (±180)	Outer Border Width (0 100) Height (0 100) Round Style Softness (0 100) Transparency (0 100) Color (any) Blend None Inside-Out Gradient	Border Width (0 100) Color (any) Softness (0 100)
Transparency Transparency (0 100) Edge softness (0 100)	Transparency Transparency (0 100) Edge softness (0 100)	Transparency Transparency (0 100) Edge softness (0 100)	Transparency Transparency (0 100) Edge softness (0 100)	Video Transparency (0 100)
Shadow Offset (0 100) Direction (0 360) Transparency (0 100)	Shadow X Offset (±50) Y Offset (±50) Softness (0 100) Transparency (0 100)	Shadow X Offset (±50) Y Offset (±50) Softness (0 100) Transparency (0 100) Color (any)	Shadow Offset (0 100) Direction (0 360) Softness (0 100)) Transparency (0 100)	Shadow Horizontal Offset (±50) Vertical Offset (±50) Color (any) Transparency (0 100) Softness (0 100)
Cropping (0 100) Left % Top % Right % Bottom %	Cropping (0 100) Top Bottom Left Right	Cropping (0 100) Top Bottom Left Right	Cropping (0 100) Left % Top % Right % Bottom %	Cropping (0 100) Top Bottom Left Right Corner Curve
Corner Curve (0 100)	Cropping (0 100) Top Bottom Left Right	Cropping (0 100) Top Bottom Left Right	Corner Curve (0 100)
	Quality Custom quality (on/off) Quality level Preview Best 2D Filter Box Triangle Hermite Cubic Quadratic B-Spline Fast cubic B-Spline Cubic B-spline Cubic Spline 3-lobed Lanczos 4-lobed Lanczos 5-lobed Lanczos 6-lobed Lanczos Gaussian Sinc 8x8 Sinc 16x16 Sinc 32x32 Moms3 2D Precision 1 bit filter 2 bit filter 3 bit filter 4 bit filter 5 bit filter 6 bit filter Lowpass Filter Horizontal (0-100) Vertical (0-100)	Quality Custom quality (on/off) Quality level Preview Best 2D Filter Box Triangle Hermite Cubic Quadratic B-Spline Fast cubic B-Spline Cubic B-spline Cubic Spline 3-lobed Lanczos 4-lobed Lanczos 5-lobed Lanczos 6-lobed Lanczos Gaussian Sinc 8x8 Sinc 16x16 Sinc 32x32 Moms3 2D Precision 1 bit filter 2 bit filter 3 bit filter 4 bit filter 5 bit filter 6 bit filter 3D Filter Anisotropic 0 Anisotropic 1