Cyberlink Power Director 7 Ultra

Zitat: Given the two year gap between looking at PowerDirector 5 and this latest release today, we perhaps expected to see something more in the way of fundamental changes to the software, but all in all PowerDirector 7 Ultra is incredibly similar to its predecessors aside from a facelift to give it a more Windows Vista-esque look and a handful of new or tweaked features. Having said that, PowerDirector´s interface has been about as good as I´ve seen for quick and easy video editing for some time now, so this can really be put down to a case of "if it ain´t broke, don´t fix it". As I mentioned in the introduction to this article, the rise of YouTube as one of the de facto places to have your say or share your life will doubtless see an explosion in users who want to make use of video editing without resorting to more expensive and complex solutions from the likes of Adobe, and in many areas PowerDirector fits that particular market perfectly by providing a complete yet simple beginning to end process for importing, editing and uploading or encoding video in whichever way suits you best. While it may take a while to get to grips with the layout and almost entirely icon-driven interface it provides, spending the time to learn that interface soon pays dividends, and beyond that rather steep learning curve initially you´ll soon be flying around trimming scenes, adjusting volumes and so on with ease. The one area where PowerDirector 7 still holds room for improvement is in its stability - We noted in our PowerDirector 5 review that it had a nasty habit of crashing if you tried to "overwork" it, and we again noted a few occasions where the application crashed when we gave it a lot of work to do. Losing a few hours hard work is not the kind of thing that any of us enjoy, so we soon took to hitting the ´Save´ button at frequent intervals just in case. This was the one issue I was hoping to see the back of with this iteration of PowerDirector, and although crashes seemed less frequent than with version 5, one or two application errors is still a couple too many. Overall though, PowerDirector 7 is a great resource for users who want to create their own videos without requiring a high level of technical complexity, be it for your friends and family on DVD or as part of the YouTube generation. The application does a decent job of guiding complete beginners through the creation process via wizards, while more seasoned users are still given plenty of functionality and customisation to play with to create their desired results. In this day and age though, the ability to upload your finished products to YouTube in a few clicks remains PowerDirector´s real killer out of the box feature, and as someone who spends a lot of time creating, handling and reading "new media" in its various forms it´s something that I can very much appreciate as a simple yet reasonably powerful tool. UPDATE: Since first publishing the review, it´s also been pointed out to us that buying the retail boxed copy of PowerDirector 7 from elsewhere rather than purchasing through Cyberlink directly can yield some very big savings. With this in mind, we´ve added a link to Amazon UK´s current pricing of PowerDirector 7 Ultra, which at under £50 is really quite a bargain for video editing software.

Zitat: For: + Nice interface + Easy to use + Supports CUDA + Download tools Against: - Quite resource intensive - Tutorials are a bit basic

Zitat: Pluspunten: + goede PiP-effecten + Cuda-ondersteuning Minpunten: - programma is traag en loopt soms vast - slechte kwaliteit bij export naar hd Power Director 7 Ultra is op zich wel geschikt voor bewerking van standaard videomateriaal, maar zeker niet voor hd. Op dat gebied schiet het pakket toch echt te kort.

Zitat: + gute Hilfe für Einsteiger +auch komplexere Tools zur Bildbearbeitung + großes Multimedia-Archiv - wenig Möglichkeiten in der Audiooptimierung - wenige Spuren auf der Timeline