CyberLink PowerDirector 10

When you're creating a movie, whether you're James Cameron or Joe Schmoe, the last thing you want to do is wait. Sure, you want powerful, easy-to-use video editing tools, but you also want to see the effects of your edits and enhancements as soon as possible. This is where CyberLink PowerDirector continues to hold an edge over other consumer video-editing software. It blows through previewing and rendering digital movies where others stall and stutter. But PowerDirector offers more than speed alone: its interface is among the easiest to use, and its raft of special effects and adjustments at least equals and in many cases exceeds those of its peers, including Adobe Premiere Elements 10 ($99.99, 3.5 stars) and Sony Vegas Movie Studio ($94.95, 3 stars).

Install
CyberLink is a Windows-only app, running on any flavor of that operating system from XP SP2 to Windows 7. Its installer file is 562MB, so don't expect it to appear instantaneously as you would with a browser, especially if you're downloading it. You'll also need a good deal of free disk space?up to 60GB if you're planning to burn Blu-ray HD discs. You'll probably want to sign up for a DirectorZone account, too, which gives you access to user-contributed effects and another place to post your videos besides YouTube. Some of PowerDirector's graphics hardware acceleration may require a driver supplementary installation for your graphics card, as my ATI Radeon HD 4290 did. And finally, you'll probably want to download more disc themes, effects, and titles in two Content Packs to get all the program has to offer.

Interface
New for PowerDirector 10 is a welcome screen that offers buttons for the full video editor, the easy editor, and the slideshow creator. This also lets you choose whether you want your project to have a 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio or standard-def 4:3. Unlike Adobe Premiere Elements' welcome screen, this one doesn't cause much of a delay to your getting to the program, and also unlike Adobe's consumer video editor, you can bypass it completely via a check box.

The actual editor interface uses three panels, with the top divided in half between source and effect content and a preview window and the bottom taking up the timeline or storyboard. You can resize each panel relative to the other, but you can't drag them out to a separate window ad you can with Corel VideoStudio. The storyboard view in PowerDirector is one of the program's few weak points: It's just thumbnails, with no ability to add transitions or other effects. It does let you insert clips, but if you try to add a transition, the view will be switched to timeline. I'd almost recommend CyberLink to ditch the storyboard until it's more useful. Some other video editors, such as Sony Vegas Movie Studio, dispense with it.

Import
CyberLink's Capture mode makes it simple to get video content from just about any device that can create video, each clearly represented by icons?DV camcorder, HDV camcorder (including AVCHD), digital or analog TV, attached webcam, microphone, or external device. Another option is to grab content from Flickr. But you don't even need to use this mode if your clips are in a file folder or on an attached storage device?just click the folder icon in Edit mode. When you import HD video, a dialog asks if you want the program to create shadow copies, or lower resolution versions to speed up the editing process. This is a good technique that can make video editing less painful, and, in my testing, the video preview it produced wasn't as degraded as that in Adobe Premiere Elements.

Another strength of PowerDirector is the wide range file types it can import. Not only all the standard video formats, but even camera raw files (which the program converts to JPG) and the latest 3D formats (including MVC and Dual-Stream AVI) are supported.

One of the few areas where Premiere Elements beats PowerDirector is in the former's ability to apply tags?includign auto-generated tags?to video for things like faces, blurriness, or shakiness. PowerDirector does offer a comment field for clips you import, but it's not as simple or useful as Premiere's tagging.

Basic Video Editing
PowerDirector makes it easy to fix the lighting, color, and stabilize your video, from the Fix/Enhance button above your timeline. The trim tool allows precise control (down to the individual frame) with two sliders, and the multi-trim tool lets you mark several In and Out points on your clip?something I'm surprised and chagrined to report that isn't available in most competitors. But if you're not fussy, you can just delete a selected part of a clip right in the timeline.

Splitting video and deleting sections are a pleasure, with PowerDirector's unique and intuitive selection cursor. Sony Vegas Movie Maker doesn't offer the excellent control of PowerDirector's double sliders or its scene detection. Fix/Enhance also includes video denoise, audio denoise, and enhancements to punch up color and sharpness. You can independently adjust the brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, sharpness, and white balance. And for each of these adjustments, you can set keyframes to designate when it should be turned on and off. Premiere Elements makes you choose separate effects for each of these, rather than offering PowerDirector's unified Fix/Enhance options.

Instant Video Editing
One of the new welcome dialog's choices is Easy Editor, which opens the Magic Movie Wizard. This is a template-based editor that makes your job easier. Only four themes were available by default, but you can download more from DirectorZone, CyberLink's online resource. After choosing a style, you can add a background music from your computer, and change the video length to match. Other apps include more in the way of canned music to add to their instant projects. A nice capability is a slider that lets you adjust the balance between the video and background sound. After this, you get a preview, with transitions and effects added. The results were a bit hokey for me, but some will find them fun. After you've previewed the Magic Movie, the final step is to produce it by outputting to a file or burning to disc. Alternatively, you can open it in the advanced editor for fine-tuning.

A couple more Magic tools may be of interest: Magic Fix and Magic Cut. The first stabilizes and enhances audio and image quality, while the latter finds the most interesting parts of a clip and cuts out the rest. This last lets you match a clip to a music track's length, and even lets you set criteria like favoring sections with zooming and panning or with people speaking or moving objects. It worked as advertised in my testing, and offers a handy way to ditch boring stretches in your video clips.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/3YqYMyzhXQA/0,2817,2372982,00.asp

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