An Amateur’s Evaluation of Cyberlink’s PowerDirector 8
I recently purchased PD 8 and edited my first movie with it from clips filmed while diving Cozumel in March. After spending many frustrating hours editing, I uploaded the production to YouTube here:
YouTube - DIVING COZUMEL, MARCH 2010, PART 1 in HD
YouTube - DIVING COZUMEL, MARCH 2010, PART 2 in HD
I am posting my experience with this software to A.) Spare anyone looking for video editing software from buying a product that may not work well for them, and B.) Seek feedback from anyone who may have had similar problems and found solutions.
System requirements for PD8:
Operating System
· Microsoft Windows 7, Vista or XP (Windows XP Service Pack 2 is required for HDV capture)
Screen Resolution
· 1024 x 768, 16-bit color or above
CPU Processor
PowerDirector 8 is optimized for CPUs with MMX/SSE/SSE2/3DNow!/3DNow! Extension/HyperThreading technology.
· AVI Capture/Production: Pentium 2 450 MHz or Athlon 64 2800+
· VCD Quality (MPEG-1) Profiles: Pentium 3 600 MHz or AMD Athlon 64 3200+
· DVD Quality (MPEG-2) profiles: Pentium 4 2.2 GHz or AMD Athlon 64 4000+
· High Quality MPEG-4 and WMV, QuickTime, RealVideo Profiles: Pentium 4 2.4 GHz or AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600+
· AVCHD and MPEG-2 HD Profiles: Pentium Core 2 Duo E6400 or AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+
Memory
· 512 MB required (2 GB DDR2 above recommended for editing HD videos)
Hard Disk Space
· 5 GB required minimum (note: 400 MB is for Magic Music Library)
· 10 GB (20 GB recommended) for DVD production
· 60 GB (100 GB recommended) for Blu-ray Disc/AVCHD production
My system:
XP Professional
1920 X 1200, 32-bit
Pentium Core 2 Duo E6700
4GB RAM
160 GB hard disk free space
As you can see, my system is not the latest and greatest, but still better than the recommended requirements.
In general, PowerDirector 8 is fairly easy to learn, and has a lot of nice features. This was my first attempt to edit video, so I have no prior experience, nor any other software to compare to.
This software is VERY buggy. The most annoying problem was constant freeze-ups and a pop-up window saying “PowerDirector has experienced problems and must shut down…”. I am not exaggerating to say the program froze and shut down over 100 times making this 20-minute movie. Many times the shut-down window would pop up when trying to reload the app, and the computer would have to be re-booted to get it to load. I contacted CyberLink (it took them over a week to respond), and they told me to update my drivers, which I did with little results. I got into the habit of saving after every little change I made, but the maddening thing was that it would lose clips I had edited and saved weeks before. It lost clips at random, never the same one twice, at least 15 times. Sometimes it would lose four or five clips in one freeze-up. Sometimes it would freeze trying to perform a particular task, and would keep freezing each time I came back to it. I would have to remove that clip from the timeline and add it back in before it would work. I rendered the final movie several different ways, and a couple of times it would go thru an hour of rendering and then freeze, losing what had been rendered. I’d go back to render it again, and it would work, but then when I played the movie there would be blank spots where it lost clips.
One feature I really wanted in editing software is what PD8 calls their Stabilizer. It takes some of the camera shake out of the videos. I have a Canon SD960IS compact point and shoot, and I shoot plenty of shaky video, especially while trying to film in Cozumel’s current. The Stabilizer works fairly well controlling shake. It slightly crops the viewed area, then follows the shake within the original window to minimize motion. What I didn’t like is that sometimes it cropped more than I wanted it to, and it sacrificed some resolution. I didn’t think it cropped enough to make a difference, but I’m really disappointed in the loss of clarity. I uploaded an unedited clip of an Eagle Ray here:
YouTube - Eagle Ray
That clip appears near the beginning of Part 2 of the movie. If you watch each in HD at full screen, you can easily see the shake control, but some of the time part of the ray is cropped out, and the finished movie is fuzzy compared to the unedited clip.
I found you can’t use the Stabilizer and transitions between clips at the same time. If the clips are Stabilized, the fade transition must work from the unstabilized video, and the picture would jump each time a transition started and ended. I tried putting the movie together without the Stabilizer and then rendering it. Then I took the rendered file back into editing and applied the Stabilizer to the whole thing. That worked fine except my movie includes a number of stills, and the Stabilizer really ruined the resolution of those, even more so than it did the video clips. I ended up rendering each clip individually with the Stabilizer, and then brought all those files back and created a new timeline with them. Since the new clips were already Stabilized, I had no trouble with transitions.
Obviously, I spent a lot of time experimenting, trying to figure out what produced the best results, doing the same thing over several times. To be fair to CyberLink, the 100+ freeze-ups occurred during many hours of tinkering that hopefully won’t be necessary next time.
Another disappointment is the quality of the upload to YouTube. There are many tiny momentary freezes that make the movie skip or jump, and the motion is not smooth. It doesn’t do that when I watch it at home. There is a button in the rendering window that automatically renders and uploads to YouTube, and the problem is in PD8. I rendered Parts 1 & 2 to a folder on my hard drive, and then uploaded them from my account in YouTube. The motion is smooth in those videos, but for some reason it didn’t upload either part in HD. This is my first experience with YouTube, so maybe I’m doing something wrong. They’re HD on my computer, but not in YouTube. You can view them here:
YouTube - Diving Cozumel, March 2010, Part 1
YouTube - Diving Cozumel, March 2010, Part 2
I guess it’s not a big deal, but it just kinda tics me off after waiting 7 hours for the movie to upload that it jumps around like that.
In summary, the main thing I wish I had was better clarity in the edited clips. I’m not going to do this very often, so I could put up with some freezing if the end product was truly HD. The Stabilizer is important to me; I won’t give that up for better resolution, but I wonder if any of you have used other software that does it without losing quality. Anyway, unless you have a screaming hot computer, you may save your sanity by purchasing something other that PowerDirector 8. When I started having freeze-ups, I Googled it and found many others with the same complaint.
-Brad
I recently purchased PD 8 and edited my first movie with it from clips filmed while diving Cozumel in March. After spending many frustrating hours editing, I uploaded the production to YouTube here:
YouTube - DIVING COZUMEL, MARCH 2010, PART 1 in HD
YouTube - DIVING COZUMEL, MARCH 2010, PART 2 in HD
I am posting my experience with this software to A.) Spare anyone looking for video editing software from buying a product that may not work well for them, and B.) Seek feedback from anyone who may have had similar problems and found solutions.
System requirements for PD8:
Operating System
· Microsoft Windows 7, Vista or XP (Windows XP Service Pack 2 is required for HDV capture)
Screen Resolution
· 1024 x 768, 16-bit color or above
CPU Processor
PowerDirector 8 is optimized for CPUs with MMX/SSE/SSE2/3DNow!/3DNow! Extension/HyperThreading technology.
· AVI Capture/Production: Pentium 2 450 MHz or Athlon 64 2800+
· VCD Quality (MPEG-1) Profiles: Pentium 3 600 MHz or AMD Athlon 64 3200+
· DVD Quality (MPEG-2) profiles: Pentium 4 2.2 GHz or AMD Athlon 64 4000+
· High Quality MPEG-4 and WMV, QuickTime, RealVideo Profiles: Pentium 4 2.4 GHz or AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600+
· AVCHD and MPEG-2 HD Profiles: Pentium Core 2 Duo E6400 or AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+
Memory
· 512 MB required (2 GB DDR2 above recommended for editing HD videos)
Hard Disk Space
· 5 GB required minimum (note: 400 MB is for Magic Music Library)
· 10 GB (20 GB recommended) for DVD production
· 60 GB (100 GB recommended) for Blu-ray Disc/AVCHD production
My system:
XP Professional
1920 X 1200, 32-bit
Pentium Core 2 Duo E6700
4GB RAM
160 GB hard disk free space
As you can see, my system is not the latest and greatest, but still better than the recommended requirements.
In general, PowerDirector 8 is fairly easy to learn, and has a lot of nice features. This was my first attempt to edit video, so I have no prior experience, nor any other software to compare to.
This software is VERY buggy. The most annoying problem was constant freeze-ups and a pop-up window saying “PowerDirector has experienced problems and must shut down…”. I am not exaggerating to say the program froze and shut down over 100 times making this 20-minute movie. Many times the shut-down window would pop up when trying to reload the app, and the computer would have to be re-booted to get it to load. I contacted CyberLink (it took them over a week to respond), and they told me to update my drivers, which I did with little results. I got into the habit of saving after every little change I made, but the maddening thing was that it would lose clips I had edited and saved weeks before. It lost clips at random, never the same one twice, at least 15 times. Sometimes it would lose four or five clips in one freeze-up. Sometimes it would freeze trying to perform a particular task, and would keep freezing each time I came back to it. I would have to remove that clip from the timeline and add it back in before it would work. I rendered the final movie several different ways, and a couple of times it would go thru an hour of rendering and then freeze, losing what had been rendered. I’d go back to render it again, and it would work, but then when I played the movie there would be blank spots where it lost clips.
One feature I really wanted in editing software is what PD8 calls their Stabilizer. It takes some of the camera shake out of the videos. I have a Canon SD960IS compact point and shoot, and I shoot plenty of shaky video, especially while trying to film in Cozumel’s current. The Stabilizer works fairly well controlling shake. It slightly crops the viewed area, then follows the shake within the original window to minimize motion. What I didn’t like is that sometimes it cropped more than I wanted it to, and it sacrificed some resolution. I didn’t think it cropped enough to make a difference, but I’m really disappointed in the loss of clarity. I uploaded an unedited clip of an Eagle Ray here:
YouTube - Eagle Ray
That clip appears near the beginning of Part 2 of the movie. If you watch each in HD at full screen, you can easily see the shake control, but some of the time part of the ray is cropped out, and the finished movie is fuzzy compared to the unedited clip.
I found you can’t use the Stabilizer and transitions between clips at the same time. If the clips are Stabilized, the fade transition must work from the unstabilized video, and the picture would jump each time a transition started and ended. I tried putting the movie together without the Stabilizer and then rendering it. Then I took the rendered file back into editing and applied the Stabilizer to the whole thing. That worked fine except my movie includes a number of stills, and the Stabilizer really ruined the resolution of those, even more so than it did the video clips. I ended up rendering each clip individually with the Stabilizer, and then brought all those files back and created a new timeline with them. Since the new clips were already Stabilized, I had no trouble with transitions.
Obviously, I spent a lot of time experimenting, trying to figure out what produced the best results, doing the same thing over several times. To be fair to CyberLink, the 100+ freeze-ups occurred during many hours of tinkering that hopefully won’t be necessary next time.
Another disappointment is the quality of the upload to YouTube. There are many tiny momentary freezes that make the movie skip or jump, and the motion is not smooth. It doesn’t do that when I watch it at home. There is a button in the rendering window that automatically renders and uploads to YouTube, and the problem is in PD8. I rendered Parts 1 & 2 to a folder on my hard drive, and then uploaded them from my account in YouTube. The motion is smooth in those videos, but for some reason it didn’t upload either part in HD. This is my first experience with YouTube, so maybe I’m doing something wrong. They’re HD on my computer, but not in YouTube. You can view them here:
YouTube - Diving Cozumel, March 2010, Part 1
YouTube - Diving Cozumel, March 2010, Part 2
I guess it’s not a big deal, but it just kinda tics me off after waiting 7 hours for the movie to upload that it jumps around like that.
In summary, the main thing I wish I had was better clarity in the edited clips. I’m not going to do this very often, so I could put up with some freezing if the end product was truly HD. The Stabilizer is important to me; I won’t give that up for better resolution, but I wonder if any of you have used other software that does it without losing quality. Anyway, unless you have a screaming hot computer, you may save your sanity by purchasing something other that PowerDirector 8. When I started having freeze-ups, I Googled it and found many others with the same complaint.
-Brad
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