Video Editing Software Review:
CyberLink PowerDirector 4.0

Kyle Cassidy
December 2005

» Next Image Previous Image «

PowerDirector 4.0 is CyberLink's answer to Pinnacle Studio and Microsoft Windows Movie Maker. It retails for $70 with a street price a little lower.

The target market is schoolteachers, casual editors, ambitious parents, precocious children, people who want to simply and quickly edit some video and make a DVD but don't need a lot of custom controls.

CyberLink PowerDirector 4.0 sports four "magic" features:

• Magic Cut: a scene finder which intelligently chops your bulk capture into places where the camera view changes or people start and stop talking. A 20-minute clip could be cut down to two minutes based on a choice of combinations between scene length, camera motion, and speech. This could be useful for perhaps distilling down video of a party, or something where one scene isn't particularly more important than another and you just want to get it down to size with very little effort on your part. Predictably, it doesn't do a good job on something you've already edited.
• Magic Music: a music library which allows you to easily add background beats to your flick--26 free tracks are included, many more can be bought .
• Magic Motion: what is often called the "Ken Burns Effect."
• Magic Clean: auto levels and automatic color correction.

For the most part the Magic features are collections of some of the more useful filters available on other edit softwares, but presented for the editor that doesn't want too much control over them. Sure, you can probably do your own levels better manually, but Magic Clean just requires one click.

Capturing is pretty straightforward, though I couldn't find mention in the manual of how to connect your camera to the computer, which might be obvious to most users, it is certainly a place many new users might find themselves stumped.

PD4 has some time saving features such as 6X scanning and an easy to use batch capture, as well as the ability to detect "scene" changes based on changes in the picture. This is very useful when importing, say, a tape from a trip to the zoo, where scenes could drop into easily identifiable clips "Olivia eating ice cream", "Sawyer looking at the lion", etc.

The capture devices are DV, TV, Webcam, Microphone and Audio CD. For those of you who, like us, have tons of VHS and 8mm tapes, PowerDirector can also be set to import analog video. Making things even simpler, PD4 auto-detects the presence of playback devices and only gives you options for ones actually available.

If you've used any editing software before, you'll be able to navigate fairly quickly through PD4. One thing that threw us for a slight loop was the single-track video. Typically, we're used to editing on multiple tracks with transitions jumping from one to the other. PD4 cleverly does everything in one track; you drop the transition between two clips and set a duration. If you prefer storyboard rather than timeline editing, PD4 supports that as well.

Transitions, titles, and effects are kept in browseable folders, (called "rooms,") which allow you to preview before choosing and applying. There are a lot of nifty title effects (such as letters blowing across the screen like leaves to magically line up and form your title), and the transitions go far beyond page curls and page turns, you can spin and flip your video if you're so inclined as well as more than a hundred other ready-to-go effects.