Review by Joseph Boone

My time with PowerDirector was spent editing video that was created using screen capture software while playing games for the purpose of uploading finished videos to YouTube. My needs are very specific to that purpose and I made no effort to see how strong the software was for such things as burning discs or importing various formats from video cameras.

First, let’s start with the positives. One thing I have to credit this software with is that it does encode faster than my current solution. For starters, it is 64 bit software so if your operating system is also 64 bits and you have a healthy amount of RAM then it will put it to work. I also believe (although can’t test) that the program is efficient in its approach to encoding because it really does seem to move along at a good clip even compared to other 64 bit software I’ve tried.

Another plus is that if you want to record voice-over audio the process is intuitive and easy. This is fairly common in similar packages but I’ve seen much worse implementations. I’d also say that for very simple tasks, the interface is fairly intuitive (considering it’s a program with many, many features and that complexity will always come with a learning curve).

Things I didn’t like? For starters, it copies any video file that I want to edit to another location. I understand that it does this to allow for non-destructive editing but I vastly prefer my current software’s solution of tracking the changes in very small files of its own making and then applying them during the encoding process. PowerDirector forces me to significantly increase the space on my hard drive devoted to video and I frequently have too much in the pipeline to want to do that.

Another issue I had was the method for cutting out pieces of the video. I routinely edit files that already include speech. When I pull out a sentence, or even just a long pause between speaking, I want to check not just the clip I’m pulling out, but the start of the clip after the cut so I can make sure the transition is smooth. As best I can tell, this is impossible until after I’ve made the cut. There were actually a lot of little things like this that made the process of doing small edits spread out over a 30 minute video a real pain. For example, it would often bounce back to the beginning of the project after I did virtually anything at all which would force me to find my place again.

Perhaps my biggest gripe is that for some strange reason the program would intermittently struggle to render text. Whether it was text capture in the game video or titles that PowerDirector itself put in, it would sometimes render it very jagged as if the video was low resolution… yet the other video elements were fine. I never could determine the cause, it was too sporadic to determine a root cause but this was a total deal-breaker for me. I’m simply not willing to risk that at random points in a video, the quality will be bad.

This is a tough product to rate because I feel like a lot of my problems with PowerDirector are more a case of it not fitting my personal needs rather than being poorly designed software. The text issue is bad, but I don’t want to hammer it too hard for one thing. Ultimately, I hope people won’t use my star rating, but rather look at the things that caused me problems and ask yourself if they matter for your purposes. In the end, the increased time and aggravation that editing in PowerDirector outweighed the faster encode times (which matter less to me since I can walk away and come back later). But your mileage could definitely vary depending on the use you’d like to put it to.