Review by A Family Effort

This gets 4 stars because of my particular exposure to much more expensive products, but if this was my first editing program, it would get 5 stars.

I have experience with a few products, including Sony Vegas and Adobe Premiere, so this review is done with those products in mind.

Once installed, the first task I tried was to create a photo slideshow using one of the styles provided in the quick editor. Initially, I was impressed by the software’s ability to work with Raw files, however, this doesn’t use the exits stored in the .xmp data made in Adobe Bridge. This means they are straight out of camera without any edits, so it’s better to work with processed jpgs. Personally speaking, this is quite sad, because it processes the jpgs out of the raw at an incredible speed.

Once you have selected the right style for your video, it will process your images into the template with accompanying music.

When that is finished you can preview it, and if you like how everything is arranged, you can go straight from there to produce the video, and from there to upload or share.

If your video needs refinement, you can open the video in the template editor. This allows you to change titles, etc. if they were a part of the template you selected.

Once the template driven video has been created, it will either output this to a final file or you can edit in advanced editing mode. Here you will have the initial creation as a clip, from where you can add elements before or after the clip to fully flesh out your video.

ProsnVery feature rich for the pricenAbsolutely superb for entry level usersnVery similar layout to most video editing tools, so most features are where you might expect themnThe ability to create final products using the templates is better than similar offerings from other video editing software.nOutput options include seamless uploading to your YouTube or similar accounts, once the video has been rendered.nComes with audio editornnConsnWhen using the templates in the easy editor or the slideshow creator, it would be much better to be able to see an example of that template before importing your images into it to preview - maybe a mouse-over effect in the style thumbnail area.nOnce a clip has been created through the quick editor, and brought into the main timeline for advanced editing, I do not see a way to make further edits to that clip – like rearranging the order of stills in a slide show, reducing the audio level of the bundled sound with that style, etc.nSince so many of the tools in this software look so similar to programs like Premiere, etc. it would be wonderful to have similar functionality like layer opacity easily accessible for editing. It may be possible to edit the opacity of a video layer in Power Director 13, but I can’t find it, and that was after checking the help file.

It just crashed on me while I was moving the marker along the timeline, so I lost what I was working on….

When your edits are final and you want to produce the video, you can choose from standard 2D, 3D, Device or Online, but to the novice user, it is not obvious which type is best suited to email a video to a friend.

Summary - great for home user who is looking for something better than the simple products that only let you choose from templates. Because this has templates and advanced options, you can get more creative as your skill and inspiration increase. Most likely there are way more features and options than the average user will use, but that increases its appeal to a broader audience.