Cyberlink PowerDirector 11 Ultimate review

1 / 3

CyberLink PowerDirector 11 Ultimate is tricky to pin down. On the one hand, its inviting interface and various handholding features suggests that it’s aimed squarely at beginners.

However, with 100 tracks, sophisticated keyframe automation and superb preview performance, there’s lots to appeal to advanced users, too. This might seem like the best of both worlds, but a few issues have stopped us from giving it an unreserved recommendation in the past. Cyberlink has sought to address many of these issues in version 11, with improved colour correction, ripple editing options and a revamped picture-in-picture (PiP) editor for moving videos and images around the screen.

The old colour correction controls for Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, White Balance and Hue and now joined by Exposure, Vibrancy, Highlight Healing and Shadow. The latter two are particularly useful for revealing details in the brightest and darkest parts of the image. However, they behaved strangely in our tests. With the preview set to 720p or 1080p resolutions, adjusting them made the preview enter a weird series of glitches, fits and bursts. We also found that boosting the Shadow control caused clips to flicker in brightness – not just in the preview but in exports too.

The improved colour correction should be great, once Cyberlink irons out the erratic flickering and stuttering previews

The new ripple editing functions were no better. Various options appear when clips are moved or truncated on the timeline, but selecting from these verbose descriptions felt clumsy – a global switch would be much better. The implementation was buggy, too, with options appearing when we adjusted the right edge of a clip or moved it to the right, but not for adjustments to the left. Bizarrely, moving a clip to the right created a gap on both sides of the clip being moved. Another bug caused clips on overlay tracks to be sent careering down the timeline.

The new PiP Designer makes it much easier to create fluid animations

The new PiP Designer module is more of a success. Its controls for opacity, scale, rotation, motion, skew and 3D depth each have dedicated keyframe lanes, so it’s now possible to animate each element without getting clogged up in a tangle of keyframes. As before, it’s also possible to create curved paths between Motion keyframes – not quite with the precision offered by Premiere Elements, but PowerDirector comes a close second for manipulating animated graphics.

Version 11 also adds Content Aware Editing, which analyses footage to identify panning, zooming, faces, motion, camera shake and poor lighting. The latter two can be fixed automatically, while the others are highlighted to help users find the best footage.

A timeline shows which part of the clip contains what, and lets the user add sections straight to the main timeline. We welcome anything that takes the tedium out of trawling through footage, but we’re not convinced that it succeeds – ultimately, it can’t tell whether someone is doing or saying something interesting.

The new PiP Designer makes it much easier to create fluid animations

The most surprising new feature is support for 4K resolutions – that’s six times more pixels than Full HD. Coincidentally, 4K is also the starting price for these cameras and displays, and most cost ten times that much. It’s hard to imagine anyone using £80 software to edit 4K footage, especially as it doesn’t support these cameras’ files natively. We created an animated slideshow using 36-megapixel photos from a Nikon D800 and tried export at 4K, but it repeatedly crashed.

Preview performance is an area where PowerDirector used to dominate, but certain rivals have caught up. Premiere Elements matched its ability to play ten AVCHD streams in our standard test, and Sony Movie Studio Platinum 12 isn’t far behind with seven streams. PowerDirector 11 can now access multiple graphics processors, but we weren’t able to test this. We experienced occasional scrambled frames in both previews and exports, although disabling hardware acceleration altogether eliminated the problem.

PowerDirector was already a strong contender, but now that other editors have caught up for preview performance, it needs to do more to stand out. This update shows promise but numerous bugs take the shine off. We ran the problems described above past Cyberlink, and were told that many are known issues that we’re assured will be remedied soon. However, Cyberlink does itself no favours by releasing it in such an unfinished state. Serif MoviePlus X6 is the better choice.