Customer Reviews

PowerDirector 7 Ultra [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

My Sony TRV310 camcorder and ancient pinnacle DV200 capture card has been a pain on many software before this. In fact, this is the first software I EVER owned where I could recognize the camcorder with no problem. My relatives also have plugged in their camcorders, all of which were recognized flawlessly. That is the good news.

The capturing feature however has some issues. If you taped something at 9am for 5 separate days, the camcorder stamp may show up as 9:00, 9:00, 9:00. This software struggles to tell the difference between any of the 9:00. It works sometimes, but fails other times. My recommendation is to use manual capture all the time, preferably rewind to the very second where you're about to start capturing. It also has problem locating timecodes every once in a while, but I am not sure if this is related to my camcorder. The issue is noticable from tapes 10 years old to 1 week old. Cyberlink really could add a "save batch" button in the future though. Do they really expect users to have a 60 minute batch list, not to be saved?

The non-real time capture button pretty much guarantees no frame drop. This is a real plus, and a big selling point for people who are capturing on machines with just 1GB of RAM or less. The user interface is truly one of the best designed. And I have compared everything from low end to high end like adobe premiere. So far I have gone from capturing to burning 5.1 dolby digital dual-layer DVDs without reading a page of instructions. Undeniably this is the easiest time I EVER had using this type of software! The amazing thing is that it packs a ton of features into an interface without making it look complicated. Simply put, I am not overwhelmed by buttons, and I don't need to be an expert to maximize the software use. If not for the capturing hiccups, I'd give this 5 stars.

Good product. Simple and fast. Only a rare crash when trying to scanning digital TV channels using Hauppauge HVR-950. Everything else reliable.
The PC I use has a quad-core Q6600 and plenty of RAM and separate HDs for video. PowerDirector makes good use of all of these. If you have a lower spec machine don't expect miracles performance wise.

Only used it to edit avi and mov files so far. Imported mov (Quicktime) video doesn't look so good after import - but that could well be my setings (haven't investigated further).

PROs
Simple, slick interface.
Fast and easy to edit video.
6 PiPs
Some "special" effects (a bit cheesy to be honest, but there there)
Handles everything from capture to DVD creation

CONs
Only two audio tracks (music and dialog)
No Flash FLV/SWF export
DVD title editor is just bizarre - not good at all (but you can get most things done eventually). Hopefully Cyberlink improve this with a patch.

BIGGEST CONs
Unprofessional, agressive, obnoxious Cyberlink staff on Cyberlink forum. Don't worry they remove the posts that show them to be complete lunatics.
Fast but useless support. (Maybe run by the same people?). Ignore issue posted and tell you to edit the registry, turn off firewall, etc. Just ignore them - you'll end up doing more damage.

SUMMARY
Product: 4-5 stars
Cyberlink forum: -10 stars
Support: 0 stars

This product was highly reviewed for video editing. In fact, on many sites, this product was ranked higher than Sony Vegas, Adobe Elements, and a multitude of others.

Being cautious, I downloaded the evaluation version (free from Cyberlink's website). This free evaluation does not allow for HD content burning, but was enough to play with the look and feel of the product. It seemed like a reasonable product, so I bought a copy from Amazon.

This product was advertised as supporting AVCHD. Buyer beware that there are different versions of AVCHD.

Very Basic Summary:

AVCHD 4.0 = up to 17 Mbit/s transport stream.
AVCHD 4.1 = up to 24 Mbit/s transport stream.

Now I have a Cannon Vixia HF S10. This supports 24 Mbit/s video output/quality, and basically conforms to the AVCHD 4.1 specification. My hope was to buy PowerDirector 7 Ultra and use it's advertised AVCHD and BD (blue ray disk) burning support to create HD home movies for the family.

After playing with the product for a couple of days, it became very obvious that the product did not support AVCHD 4.1. Again this was not documented anywhere (online, in the user manual, etc.). So what does this mean? All video captured with my camera is down sampled to 17 Mbit/s. This wouldn't be so bad, if the stream was a steady 17; however, the codec PowerDirector uses does not work this way. My 22-24 Mbit/s source video (which looks great by the way), is down sampled to 12-14 Mbit/s. This results in very grainy and choppy looking video.

This in itself would have put the product at 2-3 stars. I'm giving Cyberlink's PowerDirector 7 Ultra a one star, because of the following.

Before writing off the product as unusable, I contacted their customer support about the issue. Their turn around on posted issues is ~1 week. My first post was just a general question about how to preserve my video quality, and described the drop in quality from the 24Mbit/s source. The response I got was a canned answer to try a very basic burn. Being patient, I tried this and provided feedback that this didn't work. Realizing the quality of tech support at this point, I changed my tactic to ask directly if the tool supported AVCHD 4.1. It took three exchanges (so three more weeks go by), before they answered my direct question, and stated the following:

"In regards to your concern related with the droping of video quality we would like to inform that PowerDirector doesn't support H264 Main-Profile, Level 4.1 = 24Mbps max."

Now that I have confirmation from them that this product does not support my needs, I start the process of requesting a return and refund of the product. I then get sent between Digital River, and Cyberlink customer support three times, each stating that the other group is responsible for the refund and return of the product.

I'll be contacting Amazon shortly, and see what they might be able to do for me, but my hopes are not that high.

Conclusion:

If you have a camcorder which does not support AVCHD 4.1, and you do not mind dealing with tech support for multiple weeks for simple direct questions (or don't need tech support at all), then this product is probably great. Otherwise, I would suggest looking elsewhere.

I installed on a fairly high end Windows Vista PC and it worked as advertised. Since purchasing and intial intallation a few months ago, there has been one downloadable "patch" which probably improves support for certain HD DVD and/or BluRay DVD movies, and/or PC graphics cards. I have an inVidia 7600GT in my Vista PC, which has performed flawlessly with PowerDVD Ultra. Playback picture and sound quality have been acceptable with no noticeable synchronization issues.

My only complaint and reason for giving this product one less than 5 stars, is the price. Cyberlink's main competitor (Intervideo) offers a similar DVD player application (with questionable Vista compatibility at time of this writing) as an online website downloadable version. I believe Cyberlink does the same, but at the same retail price as the "boxed" version sold in stores (or through mail order from their website). The boxed CD-ROM version comes with a 116 page User's Guide and CD-ROM which can be re-installed on multiple computers.

If in need of a DVD software player that supports HD DVD and BluRay drives (or even better, both combined into one DVD CD-ROM drive) in a high end laptop or desktop PC, running Windows XP or Vista, PowerDVD Ultra is probably the best such application currently available.

The installation failed.

I tried to get help from customer support, but they were no help at all. The customer support is very poor. I would write to them, explaining the problem, and they write back with canned responses that seemed irrelevant and didn't fix the problem. They force you to spend additional money if you want to speak to a real person for real customer support. I didn't want to waste more money, so I was out of luck.

I am sorry I purchased the product.

On the plus side, if you do get it to install properly, it seems like the program has a relatively simple, easy-to-understand interface. The documentation seems geared toward someone making home videos, rather than the professional user.

I purchased this program and it only worked sometimes. It crashed continually. The support is worthless.

Don't purchase the program! You are better off using the free Microsoft Windows Movie Maker. If you want to purchase something try Corel Videostudio, a much better program.

I have used a bunch of the budget video editors and PD7 definitely has the best feature set and most intuitive easy-to-learn functionality... if it only was stable. After months of back and forth with customer service, uninstalling and reinstalling versions and turning off background processes, the program still crashes routinely, multiple times in every session I use it. I'm running it on Vista with 4gb of ram on a quad-core, so processing isnt the issue - this is just a frustratingly buggy program.

First, this is a great program for the price.

I struggled with Adobe Premier for a year or so. It constantly crashed and was not friendly. Decided that I needed more computing power. Put a virgin copy on a new quad 4 pc with 4 GB ram, still crashes.

Went looking for a new program.

PowerDirector was rated well by many reviewers. Rated poorly by some. I' m not sure where many of these reviewers grew up, but apparently not in the real world. I've been using PC's since the IBM XT, so I'm familiar with the computer user world.

Bottom line, after two weeks of using the program for maybe 3 hours a day, it has yet to crash. (1/2 the time on a Pentimun laptop with 1gb ram) I'm using it to move standard video (MOV and AVI Files) and large file size still pix onto DVDs. Adding music, audio and other special effects as well. It does a great job and produces a very nice and eye appealing DVD. Could it be more user friendly? Yes. Could it have more features? Yes. But then you'ed be talking $399 not $99. I highly recommend this $99 version.

To those that are rating the program low, drop me a note and I'll recommend a high end video facility and software that `does everything flawlessly'. Of course you're looking at $10,000 or so, but you won't be whining.

Purchased the editing software for it's high def ability. Editing is simple to learn and use as is it's overall functionality. Adobe CS3 ($$$) blows it away, but PD 7 is only $100+. Had capture problems with Canon HV20. Cyberlinks forum is very helpful. Burns high def well. No install or operation problems on my Vista Premium HP machine. Download a trial version before buying. For me; very worth the $100. Amazon's purchase/shipping was easy and software arrived sooner than expected.

Exactly the same problem as Jay - as this seems to be pretty well-known out there (see Amazon.co.uk). The code that comes with the boxed and sealed software does not work. Cyberlink do not want to know about the problem, their first response to me was to contact the seller, not exactly their problem when the software itself is the fault. I recommend that you DO NOT BUY this product until Cyberlink clearly and widely state that they have overcome this problem (it seems to be a trivial QC issue) or you will simply be left out of pocket and very frustrated by Cyberlink's abysmal customer "service".