Cyberlink PowerDirector 10 Ultra review

1 / 3

Cyberlink’sPowerDirector 9 was a seriously impressive update, unleashing a massive performance boost and some powerful editing tools while maintaining lots of fun features to entice casual users. Version 10 is more of the same, with even faster performance plus new features for both casual and advanced users.

Preview performance is better than ever. Setting the preview resolution to 640×360, it managed 10 simultaneous AVCHD streams on our test PC – a stunning achievement. Meanwhile, Open CL support delivered impressive hardware acceleration of certain effects, both for preview and render. The competition is catching up, but PowerDirector is still the fastest consumer editor around for preview performance.

Resizing, positioning, skewing and animating of photos and video clips takes place directly in the preview window

Version 10 also adds 3D support. We had no problems importing 3D footage, and export to YouTube in 3D was handled effortlessly by the software. It can also burn discs in the official Blu-ray 3D format, although we didn’t have a chance to test this feature. There’s plenty of scope to edit in 3D too, with stereoscopic offset controls for 3D footage plus 3D transitions, text and picture-in-picture overlays. It’s even possible to up-convert 2D footage to 3D. This effect has its limitations – it’s a bit like virtual surround from stereo speakers compared to full 5.1 surround sound – but it’s a great way to experiment with 3D without the expense of a 3D camera.

2D-to-3D upscaling and plenty of 3D text and overlay options mean you don’t need a 3D camera to produce 3D videos

Doing so wasn’t always easy, though. PowerDirector makes the common mistake of presenting 3D shifts as plus and minus values – we kept forgetting whether plus meant nearer or further, and felt our sanity slowly seeping away as we stared at the screen trying to make sense of the 3D world we were attempting to create.

It’s now possible to create hand-drawn graphics, which play back each brush stroke as an animation. There’s a choice of six brush types but the drawing tools are a little crude and it’s not possible to pause the animation at the end. Exporting a snapshot as a PNG file and dropping it onto the timeline after the animation provided a workaround.

PowerDirector isn’t short of extras to pack into your videos; now it lets you create animated drawings too

Videos and photos can now be skewed to give them a sense of perspective simply by dragging handles in the preview window. Clicking Keyframe allows these skews to be animated. It’s a shame that the multi-track keyframe lanes introduced in version 9 aren’t used here, though. Skew keyframes get jumbled up with position and opacity keyframes, making them tricky to manipulate separately.

Other new features include time-lapse videos from a series of photos, audio normalising for balancing the volume of different audio elements and support for third-party effects, as demonstrated by 10 new effects from NewBlue. Overall, it’s an impressive update, although existing users might baulk at the £50 upgrade price.

PowerDirector still has a few problems that we’ve commented on in previous reviews. Ripple editing options dictate whether clips move along to make room or close gaps when earlier clips are edited – except in PowerDirector, there aren’t proper ripple editing options. There’s a Remove and Leave Gap command in the right click menu, but this it’s unavailable for picture-in-picture objects. After adding two animated drawings to the timeline, we were unable to delete the first one without being forced to shift the timing of the second one. For videos, ripple editing is always applied when a clip is truncated, but objects on other tracks aren’t rippled too. PowerDirector’s 100 tracks and superb preview performance lend themselves to complex video collages, but it’s extremely tricky to keep everything in sync.

We also found that the timeline controls and pop-up editors were sometimes slow to respond to our input. It’s crazy that the software can decode 10 simultaneous AVCHD streams on our test PC – a total of half a billion pixels per second – but took around three seconds for a small pop-up window to appear.

It’s for these reasons that Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum remains our favourite sub-£100 editor, although its superior colour correction plays a part too. PowerDirector is a compelling alternative, though, with more in the way of home-oriented extras and better handling of HD video on slower PCs.