Cyberlink PowerDirector 8 Ultra review

CyberLink's video-editing package has always trailed behind Adobe's Premiere Elements for sophistication. This latest version ups the ante with some impressive features, that you won't find in other low-cost editors.

One example is the particle effects generator, which overlays animated graphics, such as snow, blossom or dancing musical notes, on your videos. The supplied templates are pretty naff, but there's ample scope to customise them or create designs from scratch. The controls are surprisingly advanced, although you can't apply additional video effects, such as blur or dissolve, to your overlays or adjust the opacity. This made it tricky for us to produce anything remotely photo-realistic, such as plumes of smoke.

A new Power Tools button is home to four effects: reverse, crop, speed and rotation. We're particularly impressed with the speed control, which produces slow-motion effects. While other low-cost editors simply lower the frame rate, resulting in jerky motion, this one analyses the footage and generates extra frames to fill the gaps between the originals.

Another feature we're not used to seeing at this price is video noise reduction. Virtually all video cameras suffer from speckled noise in low light, and can benefit from a little help. Noise reduction sacrifices detail and takes a heavy toll on preview performance, but it's still welcome.

CyberLink has improved on version 7's excellent export facilities. Projects can be exported directly to Facebook or YouTube as 720p HD videos. The disc-authoring module provides fine control over DVD and Blu-ray menus. You can even export your movies on DVDs in AVCHD format, allowing HD video playback in a Blu-ray player without the expense of a Blu-ray writer.

Full-screen previews can now be viewed on a second monitor. Previews of demanding HD formats, such as AVCHD, were smooth, and there's GPU acceleration, with support for both Nvidia CUDA and ATI Stream. If your hardware still isn't up to it, you can work with low-resolution proxy files.

PowerDirector 8 Ultra is almost a serious competitor for Adobe Premiere Elements, but it has two serious drawbacks. One is that its core editing tools simply aren't up to the same standard. The timeline felt sluggish in our tests, with a small delay after every click. We also found it unreliable at times, with text objects drifting to the wrong position when we altered the length of earlier clips. While the new effects are generally excellent, the bulk of the library is too gimmicky for our liking, and colour-correction processing is crude. Keyframe editing, which varies an effect's settings over time, is badly implemented, and multiple keyframes are created when they're not needed.

Our pre-release copy of PowerDirector 8 was unstable in our tests. It suffered numerous crashes when running on a clean Windows Vista system, averaging more than one per hour. As such, we strongly recommend downloading the 30-day trial and giving it a thorough workout before spending any money. Better still, stick to the more polished Adobe Premiere Elements.