PowerDirector 5

by Cyberlink

Product Features

• Capture, edit and burn high-definition and widescreen formatted video
• Edit at light speed with 6 magical tools
• Add multiple titles with the enhanced Title Designer
• Create movies in latest High-Defintion MPEG-2/4 formats
• Insert smart captions and preview DV tapes quickly using RichVideo file information

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 8 x 2 x 10 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• ASIN: B000A3ZLHE
• Item model number: 5
• Date first available at Amazon.com: July 2, 2005
• Average Customer Review: 2.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #6,048 in Software (See Bestsellers in Software)

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  Software > Video & Music > Digital Video > Video Editing

Product Description

Product Description

Video editing is the latest craze of the Digital Home generation. Converting and transforming raw footage is never easy, but PowerDirector, with its intuitive interface, amazingly fast rendering, and ease-of-use, makes it fast and fun to edit stylish home movies. All it takes is three steps. STEP 1 - CAPTURE VIDEO AND AUDIO: Preview Digital Video with DV Quickscan. Scan an hour of digital video in 6-10 minutes. Capture video from a digital video camera, PC web camera or TV. Record audio via a microphone or line-in device and Import video, audio and image files from discs or your hard drive. STEP 2 - EDIT: Record a voice track while simultaneously watching your video. 121 transitions offer breathtaking effects for linking transitions of neighboring clips seamlessly. 56 titles allow you to add spectacular animated text. Add Picture-in-Picture effects by dragging photos or videos onto the PiP track. Refine your videos with a complete range of editing and enhancement tools: Split, Trim, Speed, Color, Delete. Auto-align your clips on the timeline with one click. Remove photo red-eyes with one click and Resize, rotate, crop, and adjust brightness and contrast of images. STEP 3 - PRODUCE: Automatically set your chapters to appear at the beginning of each video clip, at fixed intervals, or divided evenly according to the number of chapters. Bring your DVDs to life with stylish motion menus and thumbnails. Add chapter numbers for easy indexing. Render video faster while delivering quality results by estimating your rendering time with the new SVRT-2 information window. Create a file by saving to your hard drive in either AVI, DivX, MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 formats. Write back to DV tape, or stream your movie over the Internet by saving in either WMV, RealVideo or QuickTime formats.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

91 of 93 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good Video editing software - look here Pinnacle refugees!, January 1, 2006

By	J. Vierra "Joe" (Hayward, CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I'm a Pinnacle Studio 8/9/10 refugee (avoid at all cost!!), who tried PowerDirector 5 out of desperation. Thankfully, PowerDirector 5 software works quite well. The software is generally solid, has good performance, and you can really get work done. The functionality is quite good, though the user interface is a little quirky and takes a little while to get used to for a former Pinnacle user. The software is *quite* efficient at getting miniDV movies on the computer, it appears to be multi-threaded and can efficiently download data and recompress it into .mpg files simultaineously - even when running in non-real time mode. It is at least 3-4 times faster at this process than Pinnacle software (which completely copies the raw miniDV files onto your computer using multi-gigabytes of storage and then goes back and reprocesses the data into .mpg, which takes forever). The capture clips are clean. I haven't yet tried many of the advanced editing features of the program, but I'm really happy that the basic functionality of getting raw mini-DV footage into good quality .mpg files that are smartly divided up into seperate clips, can easily be edited, and rendered onto DVDs. In a couple of weeks of using this software, I've managed to catch up to 3 years of miniDV tapes that hadn't been processed because of the nightmare of using Pinnacle 8/9/10/10.1. PowerDirector is not perfect, I have experienced a couple of crashes in 30 or so hours of processing -- I've learned that after rewinding a miniDV tape to the start to let it play for a second or two before starting the capture process because the program will hang if you try to capture from the very start of a tape - not a big deal once I figured it out. Bottom line, I've been able to get everything I set out to do done with a minimal amount of dupicate effort. My productivity at getting miniDV tapes processed with PowerDirector 5 is somewhere between 10 and 20 times better than it was with Pinnacle Studio (PStudio has very bad performance and severe stability problems). Suggestion: it would be nice if the software would name captured clips with a datecode (shooting date, not capture date!)like YYYYMMDD(XX) instead of the default capture(XX). I've found that the only way to be able to reasonably manage a lot of video clips is to manually rename the clips with the date the video was shot on. Can't the software do this for me? If you do captures from different tapes shot over a long period of time it will result in duplicately named files by default (though you can change the default, you can only give every clip on an entire capture the same name -- since I use the same tape over a long period of time for multiple events, giving every clip off the tape the same prefix is not that useful). If the software used the shooting date as part of the name, you wouldn't have duplicate file names and you could easily seperate the clips from Thanksgiving from the clips from Christmas just by looking at the names of the files!

74 of 76 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Power Direcotor A Sleeping Giant, February 10, 2006

By	R. RYLEY "Bob The Bookman" (New Jersey) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

A couple of years ago I inheritied the task of producing video of public meetings for a local government. My normal way of learning something new is to gather all the available programs and tinker with each and decide which does the job for me.

As a result I've used high end products like Adobe Premier 2, and Sony Vegas. I hae also used Pinnacle Studio 9 and 10, as well as Cyberlink Power Director 4 and 5.

For almost all your home and small business editing needs Power Director gets the job done with, at least in my experience, the smallest learning curve.

Here are some importants points. All of these products are memory and speed intense. You will be disappointed with the results if you have less than 1 gigabyte of memory and a video card with less than 128 and preferably 256 meg of memory.

If you are capturing from multiple devices in addition to a digital video camera I got the best results from a Canopus ADVC-110 digital video converter box. This box connects to your computer via a Firewire/1394 connector. I used various Pinnacle devices all with no better than minimaly satisfactory results. In additon Pinnacle capture hardware often only works with Pinnacle software. The Canopus box gives me good quality conversion and few dropped frames.

Power Director's manual is bearly adequate and there is not much in the way of third party books or manuals. But, the program is relatively simple to use and quite powerful.

The program enables you to import and edit video, add titles, transitions, voice-overs, and then generate output to either digital tape, dvd, or video cd disks. With the Canopus converter you can also take digital output and write it back to an analog VHS cassette tape. Version 5 includes some really neat sound and video enahncement tools that will help you clean up color that needs enhancement or sound that could use some cleaning up.

Finaly one word of caution. If you have a computer with Windows XP and you are updating it by adding Service Pack 2, be mindful of one potential glitch. I don't know if Microsoft corrected this, but the installation upgrade to SP2 changed your Fireware 1395 port to it's slowest possible speed which is too slow to capture video. As a result a machine that was capturing video without problems suddenly experienced dropped frames. When installing SP2 go to the Microsoft website for an update that corrects the problem.

I like PowerDirector 4 and 5 better than Pinnacle Studio only because for me it was simpler to learn and get up and running. Studio is not a bad program, but in my experience slower (especially ver 10) and a tad more complex.

Good Luck!

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Don't do it!, October 1, 2006

By	Jonathan Purdy "Review for You" (Louisiana) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Believe it, believe it, believe it! This program is rough and almost useless. I have installed it on a beefed up Dell as well as some other computers to make sure it was the program and not my computer. It is the program. This uses almost all of your resources on your computer and LOCKS UP, SHUTS DOWN, LOCKS UP, CORRUPTS FILES, AND LOCKS UP !!! It is the most frustrating thing ever. You are constantly saving your work and re-opening the program. It takes 5 minutes each time to shut is down and open it up. Their help is is non-existent. You have to email them and they will tell you each time that it can take up to 3 days to respond. Also, it is a canned response that sometimes doesn't even come close to addressing the question you asked. Is there and online update of fix to download? NO! To make it function, you have to shut down all other programs such as internet, firewalls and antivirus software as well as set your monitor setting to a lower resolution. Just what you want when you are making films and looking at photos right? As you tell the program to perform tasks you will have to go very slowly. If you get proficient and move too fast it will just lock up. I made files and saved them on one computer, installed the program on another computer and guess what? When I tried to open my saved files it gave me errors and won't open its own file. More hours lost. This program does exactly what you would expect (if it worked) it to do and nothing more. It is easy to use because it does not do that much. Oh, this is great, if you would like to save your work as the best quality output, just hit the button to produce it and it will give you a link to purchase more software to accomplish that task BECAUSE IT IS NOT INCLUDED IN THIS SOFTWARE! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh!
I hate it and should have listened to the reviews. Maybe it works on a Mac or something else but definitely not a brand new beefed up Dell or any other computer I own. Trust me, just don't do it.