Review by Tomsde

I was a little apprehensive about trying PowerDirector 10 Ultra because in the past I’d downloaded a demo to edit my AVCHD video footage and the program crash and gaged on it. To be fair, though, it was in the early days of hidef video editing and all the bugs had not been worked out yet; I also have a more powerful system now. I was pleasantly surprised when I dug into the program, I’ve been a Pinnacle Studio and Sony Vegas user for years. Without having to read extensively in the manual I was able to create a short high definition video complete with effects. I’m not overly fond of the surrogate AVCHD files the program creates, but it does have the definite advantage over Pinnacle Studio (which has to render each high definition clip as you place them on the timeline)–they are good enough to give you a rough idea of what your project will look like when created. The editor has enough advanced features to keep the intermediate and novice editor busy for a while, and it has many good output options and disk making capabilities. The video rendered relatively quickly and I was quite satisfied with the output in the .mt2 format especially for upload to Vimeo and YouTube.

I did have some trouble with Smart Sound, however, I was unable to use the free music I had for it in my library. This may have been because I had Roxio Creator 2012 on my computer as well and could not reinstall Smart Sound with the program without possibly effecting Roxio. You can buy Smart Sound music to use in your projects, but it is very expensive–were I doing videos comercially for a profit I could justify the costs, but the average hobbiest is better offer trying to find some other sources of royalty free music.

The reaason I’ve given the product 4 stars instead of 5 is because I was generally dissatisfied with the automated movie output. I never use automated movie features in other products because I am a control freak and want to control my projects from beginning to end. I did try the automated movie output for the purpose of this review and did not like the way it showed video clips as separate files and did not transition them together, I found the themes cheesy, and the slideshow created with still images displayed the images too long. If you are a fan of automated movies, I’d reccomend Pinnacle Studio over this program–it has nicer themes and splices video clips together with interesting transitions. If I had dug deeper, I might have been able to wield more control, but found that the Magic Movie dialogue to be less than intuitive–so my suggestion is that if this feature is important to you download the demo and try it first.

Like most recent consumer level video editors Power Director 10 Ultra gives you the ability to create 3D movies that can be viewed on any computer or TV with red/cyan glasses. Since I don’t have a camera that shoots 3D footage I can’t comment on how well it handles the new 3D camera output formats. It also comes with a nice pair of 3D glasses. Since 3D is not important to me currently I did not experiment with creating a 3D film, but if it is important to you, again I reccomend downloading the demo of the program before buying.

All in all this is a good video editor when compared to others I’ve used. If you’re just starting out with video creation I don’t think you could do better than this program. I reccomend it over Adobe Premier Elements, and it offers more controls and flexibility than Pinnacle Studio, but is not as difficult to learn to use as Sony Vegas Movie Studio.

Check out the video I created here, it exceeds Amazon.com size limitations and if I compress and reduce it, it won’t give you a good idea of the high definition quality:nn[…]