Review by Wayne

There are several good video editing programs out there and I must confess that Cyberlink hasn’t been my favorite in the past. All the major ones have been growing in leaps and bounds over the years, and much of what companies have been adding hasn’t been all that helpful. Adding another hundred transition effects doesn’t do much for me because there are a few dozen at most that I’ll use in real life, and even at that I’ll use only a handful on any given project.

This time around, I found enough improvements that I expect to use this regularly. On the surface, PowerDirector had more than a superficial similarity with programs such as Corel VideoStudio and Pinnacle Studio. Those two have been around for a long time, and all three were based around the three basic steps of capturing, editing and producing your video. The other two are now both Corel products, and the Pinnacle one recently got a face lift, while the other two have retained more of their look and feel. Nevertheless, PowerDirector has added some features that made editing far more powerful and easy, especially for more complex tasks such as multiple camera work. Even if you’ve never thought of doing that, perhaps you’ve recorded something with your video camera and you know a couple of people who made videos with their phones or cameras at the same time. Maybe somebody walked in front of your shot, while they captured the same event from the side. This software will let you sync up those videos by analyzing the sound so the timing is correct. It will show you a window with several videos at once, so if you are watching the same action from four angles, you can change which one goes on the final output simply by clicking on one of them, and then clicking on another at any moment.

PowerDirector already added what I consider the best subtitle tool among similar editing products, and that continues to be true. It even works well with foreign languages and fonts, so if you want Korean or Vietnamese subtitles for example, it won’t give you any problem. These days, any of the common products will have more than enough capability to let you do more than you’ll need with titles, transitions and authoring. PowerDirector has had several iterations to work out issues with stereoscopic 3D, and the product handles it well. I haven’t found any that do a great job of adding 3D special effects that will work in layers though.

My biggest objection to PowerDirector in the past was that the screen kept getting busier, they were big on pop-ups for upselling, and some of the items flashing on the screen made me feel as if I were in Times Square. This time around, the product looks much cleaner to me.

I didn’t go into much detail about basic editing, since all those tasks have been there for years. I’ve seen my wishlist items go from wanting widescreen to wanting HD to wanting 3D to wanting to edit many videos at once, and those features have been there for some time. I was running out of items to hope for that would be worthy of getting a new version, but this one made enough fundamental changes rather than adding thousands more effects that I don’t need.

All along, home video editing software has been a great way to get those clips together and come up with something much better. This will handle everything from letting you capture video from those old DV or Digital 8 tapes to working with video from the latest 4K video from your super new phone. I can’t think of a video output format that I’d want to use that they don’t support, and it will be hard for them to come up with something next year that will beat this. Whether your video editing needs are complex or whether you simply want to drag clips together in a desired order and trim parts you don’t want, this software can make things easy.

The one criticism I have is that video editing software has been among the last types of software to continue to come with a paper manual, and that has come to an end even among competing products. It’s not easy to have a manual on the screen when you’d like to have the editing software take up the full screen, so the learning curve might be impacted.