Cyberlink PowerDirector 10 Ultra review

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Verdict:

Some great new features including the best 3D editing to date, but Cyberlink needs to address some basic problems to take PowerDirector to the next level

Review Date: 25 Oct 2011

Price when reviewed: £49

Supplier: http://www.amazon.co.uk

Reviewed By: Ben Pitt

Our Rating 4 stars out of 5

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 640x360, 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.

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User comments

Does Not Work

Based on your review and a few others I read I purchased PowerDirector 10. It was unable to sync audio/video in any of my clips. These were single clips, not a montage I was putting together. The disparity in audio/video ranged from 14 seconds to over two minutes. The same clips worked fine in Windows Movie Maker, AVS Editor, Windows Media Player, Zune as well as YouTube and Vimeo. Doing more research this seems to be a common complaint.

14 emails to tech support at Cyberlink over the course of six days resulted in two suggestions. They suggested I made sure that my audio and video drivers were current, which I had checked prior to contacting Cyberlink. Then they tried to have me delete my downloaded copy and reinstall a new copy from a link they sent me. Unfortunately, the link they sent was bad. They never sent me another link. Tech support then wanted to send my problem to Research & Development. That was when I asked the people at Herman Street, where I purchased it for a refund, which they kindly provided.

My suggestion to anyone considering this software or anything else from Cyberlink based on my experience with the software or their inability to provide support is find something else.

By stompey on 6 Apr 2012

Audio sync problems

I too purchased PD10 Ultra based on recommendations. It seems to have a fundamental inability to keep the audio track in sync with the video track. I have been trying to produce a skiing video sequence in time to an MP3 music track, but each time I play back the preview, the video has "moved" in relation to the music. The music doesn't even seem to stay in sync with it's grpahical waveform representation on the timeline. It's pretty poor in my opinion. I'm using a top of the range i7 based PC with CUDA graphics and 64bit Win7.

By Apollo11 on 16 Apr 2012

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