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I have been using Power Director for years, through all its incarnations. I looked forward to Power Director Ultimate 12 for its promised speed and versatility. I use it to create home videos and my video reviews – mostly video reviews.

Years ago, Power Director frustrated me with stalling and crashing. It also took forever and a day to render anything. I have seen great improvements in that area, and now it’s wonderful. Whereas Power Director 10 would occasionally crash when I added voiceover, I’ve had no such problems with version 12 working on Windows 7. No crashing, no nothing. It’s smooth sailing all the way.

The GUI is similar to previous versions, so I’m quite familiar. If you haven’t used it before, there is a learning curve, but I remember taking to it very quickly. I like having all the different tracks to layer my effects. It’s simple and intuitive. The video stabilization works so much better now. I couldn’t believe how well it performed. Rendering is super fast. I can crank a video out with hardly a wait.

The only thing I miss is the old Magic Movie Wizard. Back in version 6, I could choose all the photos and videos in my library, choose the length of my piece and the music, then let the wizard work. It really was magic. Photos and videos were randomly selected and pieced into a masterpiece which I could then alter. The latest versions of Power Director took that all away and now puts every bit of film clip and photos that we choose into the video in the exact order that they are in the library. No random selection, no mixing them up for the magic. I liked how it was in version 6. If they could undo any improvements to Power Director, that would be it.

There are so many features now, it would be impossible to review them all. I do like the speed and the ease of manipulating the videos. I like how it’s easy to align the clips with the effects and the sound and subtitles. I like how quick it is to undo something I don’t like. We’ve always been given lots of choices in what format we want to produce the video. We still have that and sometimes I use it to simply convert a video into another format.

So far, so good. Version 12 is a winner.

____________________________nnUPDATE 2/24/14: I finally got the chance to use the multi-cam feature. I filmed scenes using two camcorders at once (we can use up to four). Then, I synced them and switched back and forth between close-ups and wide shots. This was for a music video for my daughter’s scout group. I couldn’t believe the results. I couldn’t believe I did it! It was so professional. What a wonderful piece of software.