Video editing software is something most people will turn to if they’ve ever been subjected to hours upon hours of Aunt Betty’s Disneyland vacation footage. While her video’s thoroughness can’t be argued, it certainly could have easily been condensed into a more compact presentation. What we really want to see are the highlights and lowlights, no matter how embarrassing.
Enter PowerDirector 7 Deluxe, with an effective, easy to use interface and a boatload of useful effects, transitions, and “magic” tools to clean up your videos and steady some of your shaky camera work. You can’t get any better than PowerDirector 7 Deluxe, which is why it’s the “TopTenREVIEWS Gold Award” winner.
If you're looking for software that lets you author Blu-ray discs, you'll need PowerDirector 7 Ultra, the ultimate solution to all your video editing and publishing needs. Before you make a decision, check out our reviews of Corel VideoStudio X2 Standard and Sony Vegas Studio 9 Platinum.
Capturing video in PowerDirector 7 is easy whether from a high end HDV camcorder, or an old SD camcorder like the JVC GR-AXM18U that we got on the cheap for thirty dollars. We combined that with a Dazzle DVC-80 analog to USB capture device and PowerDirector brought in our video at 1:1 speed. That means our 14 minute video was captured by PowerDirector in 14 minutes. A 1:1 capture ratio is standard except when capturing from Flash Drive Camcorders, Hard Drive Camcorders, and DVD camcorders, which go as fast as your USB 2.0 or Firewire interface can go.
Playback was a little bit jumpy within PowerDirector, but not so bad that we couldn’t edit video. The systems we tested PowerDirector 7 with had dual core Intel processors, 2GB of RAM, plenty of hard drive space, and either NVIDIA Quadro or Intel graphics video cards. Overall, PowerDirector ran smoothly and didn’t slow us down more than a couple times.
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CyberLink maintains a convenient table of compatible HDV/DV Camcorders and Video Capture Cards, so make sure yours are supported before you buy. It must be noted that while the PowerDirector 7 Deluxe box advertises its certification for Windows Vista, the CyberLink website notes that the supported camcorders only work with PowerDirector in Windows XP. It could be a simple issue of their site not being updated to that effect, but it’s something that may give a consumer pause.
When editing video, you need the ability to split and trim clips, change the playback speed, stabilize shaky video, correct lighting and colors, zoom in and out, change the aspect ratio, and add text and audio tracks to your clips. Most of these functions are found in the best video editing software, so the differentiating factors are how easy a program makes it for you and how well the program does the job.
PowerDirector’s interface is easy enough to use, but there are a few screens where all the available options make it feel like information overload, and there were a few strange occurrences where the program hung for long periods of time for no apparent reason. This was seen on different computers, and we had issues dealing with PowerDirector Support. More on that later.
Paring down a video can be time consuming and tedious, especially for longer clips. PowerDirector 7 Deluxe gives you two options: manually trim and split your video, or use the Magic Cut tool.
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Manually trimming in PowerDirector 7 is easy: select a clip and click the Trim button. Select the ‘Mark In’ point and the ‘Mark Out’ point on your clip’s timeline, and press OK. Anything outside of these two points will be trimmed from your clip. It’s a simple and effective way of removing parts from the beginning or end of your video.
You can also use the Multi Trim function to remove multiple sections from a video. So instead of setting one mark in/out point, you set multiple points for PowerDirector to remove. PowerDirector’s Multi Trim function also includes Scene Detection, which automatically detects the beginning and end of scenes within your video and divides them accordingly. Nothing is cut from the video, but everything is divvied up into nice neat increments so you can add your own effects and transitions later.
Or you can let PowerDirector’s Magic Cut do the work. Magic Cut will automatically condense a video to your specified time duration and will even automatically apply transitions between scenes. It’s easy: select your clip, click the Magic Cut button, choose how long you want the clip to be (e.g., the original clip is 15 minutes long, and you tell Magic Cut to make it 12), whether or not you want transitions automatically inserted, and which ones to use. We found Magic Cut did a good job of condensing our 14-minute clip into a solid 12 minute time frame. So it’s great for quick editing, but if you want more precise control, get used to trimming and adjusting the timeline manually.
Once your video segment is divvied up into nice little clips, you can use the timeline or storyboard to order and reorder the clips to your heart’s content. Just click a clip and drag it to the desired spot.
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That takes care of basic cutting and reordering, but what if you want to enhance your video clips? Sometimes parts of the environment are too dark or the colors don’t translate well to the tape. Thankfully, PowerDirector 7 has Magic Clean. It’s not the same “magic cleaning" done in movies where you have CIA suits in a situation room telling a computer geek to zero in on a license plate from space; but you can adjust brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, sharpness, and white balance with simple sliders, and you see the results in realtime. We liked this feature, as it cleaned up our wakeboarding and tubing footage nicely.
Magic Fix is PowerDirector’s tool for fixing shaky video. Our wakeboarding and tubing clips were shakier than anything short of an 8.1 earthquake, but Magic Fix did a decent job of steadying some of the less drastic movement.
PowerDirector 7 can export to a variety of formats, write back to a DV or HDV tape and even upload to YouTube.
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When exporting to a file, your choices are DV-AVI, AVI, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 (for iPods and PSPs), and AVC MPEG-4. If you’re going to stream your video, you can export to WMV, RealVideo, and QuickTime (MOV) formats. We created files with both of these methods and didn’t encounter any problems.
PowerDirector 7 Deluxe has a good library of effects and transitions, and it’s very easy to add either to your videos. The library is 72 effects deep, with everything from old movie filters to ripple effects. We added the Spotlight, Old Movie, and Text Sepia effects to parts of our video and were pleased with the results.
There’s also a Picture-in-Picture track and 67 canned PiP objects like a top hat, a stop sign, a bouquet of roses, and more. Given our video was of our review team on a wakeboarding partay (because that’s how we roll); we wanted a PiP pirate who would pop up whenever our illustrious captain shared his vast nautical knowledge. Enter DirectorZone, PowerDirector’s online community where other PowerDirector users share their custom made DVD Menus, Title Templates, Motion Objects, Frames, and Static (PiP) Objects. It’s free, and as of writing this review (September 2008), DirectorZone has:
• 511 DVD Menu Templates
• 555 Title Templates
• 450 Motion Objects
• 1,173 Frames
• 538 Static (PiP) Objects
That’s a lot of free extras at no added charge.
Transitions help your scenes smoothly segue from one to another. Whether you use the Lucasfilm wipe, the fade in/out that was the staple of 50’s movies, or the Soap Opera blur, they’re an essential part of movie making. With PowerDirector 7, you can have the scenes automatically detected and transitions inserted for you with Magic Cut. Magic Cut worked surprisingly well when applied to our 14 minute clip, but we felt it could use a little more fine tuning. So we trimmed our video into separate scenes and manually inserted a few of the 142 transitions – most of it was drag and drop work – and it didn’t take much more time than Magic Cut did to complete the job.
Finally PowerDirector comes with 9 Motion Objects (animations), 13 Frames, and 70 title Templates.
Creating discs in PowerDirector 7 involves choosing a menu template (or downloading one from DirectorZone), editing the menu and music, and burning your movie to a disc. You can burn to a dual-layer DVD, a Video CD (VCD), or a Super Video CD (SVCD). PowerDirector comes with 20 menu templates, and if you need more all you need to do is check out DirectorZone. We had a few problems we could’ve done without when editing templates, whether already installed or downloaded from DirectorZone. Other than that, we successfully burned to DVDs and CDs.
If you need to burn to a Blu-ray disc, you need to upgrade to both PowerDirector 7 Ultra and a Blu-ray burner. PowerDirector 7 Deluxe does NOT burn to Blu-ray Discs.
PowerDirector 7 Deluxe has quite a few sample audio files, but they’re just snippets of the complete versions. With PowerDirector, you either purchase audio tracks from SmartSound.com or import your own. Audio file types accepted include mp3, wav, and wma files, and once imported, it’s easy to drag and drop them onto either the voice or music timeline. Adjusting volume levels at any point in the music or voice track is easy with the Audio Mixing Room. You just select the audio clip, press play, and move the volume slider up or down to match your needs. Cross fade between audio tracks is done similarly to Multi Trimming video files. Instead of mark-in and mark-out buttons, you press either the fade-in or fade-out button at the desired point in the track and PowerDirector does the rest.
The photo library in PowerDirector 7 Deluxe is sparse, so it’s up to you to import your own JPG, GIF, BMP, TIF, or PNG files. You can import entire folders as easily as individual files, and they’re available as PiP objects or for creating your own custom menus. Like anything in PowerDirector, you can also specify the size, placement, and duration of photos as PiP objects, by right-clicking the object in the timeline.
Sometimes, you need to do more than resize your photos, and you may not want to open another program to do so. CyberLink includes PhotoNow! With PowerDirector, and there are a few basic photo tweaks available. They’re not only convenient, they’re easy: most adjustments are accomplished with the click of a button, and there are sliders to change brush size and stroke length when applying effects. You can also edit PiP objects directly in the preview window, which is conveniently placed in the upper right hand corner of PowerDirector.
We ran into some minor snags while using PowerDirector and made use of CyberLink’s email support. While response times were within a few hours, the responses themselves were of the canned and neither relevant nor informative variety. We also searched CyberLink’s knowledge base and forums for answers and came up short. One minor annoyance for us was after we updated PowerDirector to the latest version. Every time we launched the program from that point on, a small box popped up thanking us for upgrading, and telling us we didn’t need to do anything more.
Even though we weren’t entirely pleased with CyberLink’s support, we liked PowerDirector’s features and found it fairly easy to use. Having some prior knowledge of video editing is helpful, but not necessary, when using PowerDirector as, CyberLink has done a good job of guiding users through a complicated process.
For the ultimate in video editing and publishing, try Cyberlink's PowerDirector 7 Ultra, which lets you publish to Blu-ray and AVCHD discs.
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