Specifications

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REVIEW
PowerDirector
from CyberLink
By Terry Currier
First off, I don’t claim to know a lot about editing
video. I have just started learning and doing these things.
Maybe that is the point I want to make. I don’t know many
who can open up a video editing program (sight unseen)
and instantly figure out how to use it. Magazines or other
ratings are done by people who do it professionally. So
this review is for the non-professional.
If you’ve never worked with video before, I should
point out a few things. When you start out, don’t be
intimidated by it—it does take time to learn. I think there
is nothing wrong with starting out simple with something
like Pinnacle Studio, CyberLink’s PowerProducer, or
PowerDirector, a low-price product which is not so high
end with features as to frustrate a new user.
One of the things you need to know before doing video
editing is that it takes a lot of disk space. When I say a lot,
I mean about 20-30Gb of free space. And that is just for
one hour’s worth of work. Once you then get into the
project, you need another 10-20Gb for the processing of
the video. My import of 1.5 hour was saved into AVI
format and took up 25Gb.
Another thing to know is that while the DVDs you buy
will say “record up to two hours” on it, you can really only
do one. For best quality (DVD quality) video, the products
will only fit one hour on them.
With PowerDirector, there were some things I was
disappointed in. While I could view video from my VCR
through the Dazzle unit I bought, it would not capture it.
Pressing the record button merely brought up a dialog box
saying an error has occurred and could not be recorded. So
to get it in my system, I used the Pinnacle Studio (version
8.10) to capture the video, and then import it into
PowerDirector. They do say that you can capture from TV,
PC cameras (web cams), TV tuners, or other video capture
cards. Their PowerProducer product has the ability to
capture from a VCR, but they left it out of PowerDirector.
You can import AVI or MPEG files. You can also record
directly to a DVD disc if you want. One of the best things
in PowerDirector 3.0 is the speed for importing video from
the camera. It scans the video and brings it in at six times
normal speed. After capturing video, you can have it detect
scenes within. Once in, you are able to preview the video
at speeds up to 16 times normal. I imported some video of
my daughter’s high school drill team and band. Believe
me, after listening to the same marching song many times,
I was using that fast forward a lot.
You can capture to MPEG-1, MPEG-2, or AVI format.
Remember, AVI is the best but it takes up a lot of space.
When you have the video in, you can add in effects such as
blur or ripple. There are 24 different effects for you to
work with. For scene transitions, there are 122 different
and clever effects from Blizzard to X-Ray. All of these are
very easy to put in with simple drag and drop wherever
you want them.
There are 57 animated title pages for you to use. They
do look good and have great effects. But they really are
labeling for the scenes not true title pages. What
CyberLink does is just put in the title to show on the
screen. I could not separate the title from the video. Look
at the picture above for an example of a title page from
Studio (left) and one from PowerDirector (right.)
The interface of PowerDirector is easy to figure out.
Bring the video into the library. You can bring in several
videos and pictures for whatever project you work on.
Then just drag and drop the video or pictures at the points
you want them. The workspace is divided up so well that
most will be able to figure out how to do things.
You can work with the video in either StoryBoard mode
or TimeLine mode. StoryBoard mode, if you have a
number of scenes or videos, makes it easy to view them