Review by Truth Teller

Having just done some projects with Corel Video Studio Pro X6 and my GoPro cam, I was very happy to try out the latest PowerDirector (I previously had Power Director 9).

In a pure head to head feel between Video Studio Pro X6, here are my impressions:n - PowerDirector has faster renderingn - Power Director has more featuresn - Power Director multiple track editing seems more powerfuln - Power director is little more difficult to usennI was able to create a very nice video of my daughter’s dance recital with multiple overlays, transitions, and audio tracks very quickly. The crossfade transition works really nicely and very naturally. It also gives me a wide range of rendering options (I tried about 8 of them) and was happy with the results. I do wish the rendering options provided better contextual help to guide me in choosing the best one.

While editing, the preview is very crisp and smooth with no jitter or artifacting. For reference, I was using a i7-4770 as of this writing. I didn’t find the storyboard view very useful.

I tried out a number of the fixes that it can apply at rendering time. They do add time to the rendering, but I was generally pleased with the results. The lighting and color adjustments worked very nicely. The image stabilization option works fairly well, but somehow I felt that it also lost enough sharpness that I ended up removing the fix and re-rendering. The basic thing it seems to do is zoom in the picture a little (cutting off a little bit on each edge) and then hiding the recorded movement by moving the hidden frame around. It definitely stabilized, but you do lose a little fidelity due to at least in part the digital zoom applied.

On the ease of use front (why I knock it a star), I did get a little frustrated with adjusting the audio and keeping it synced up properly. I kept finding that as I inserted tracks that the audio would get off sync and I’d have to fiddle with it to get it back synced up.