Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I'm a Pinnacle Studio 8/9/10 refugee (avoid at all cost!!), who tried PowerDirector 5 out of desperation. Thankfully, PowerDirector 5 software works quite well. The software is generally solid, has good performance, and you can really get work done. The functionality is quite good, though the user interface is a little quirky and takes a little while to get used to for a former Pinnacle user. The software is *quite* efficient at getting miniDV movies on the computer, it appears to be multi-threaded and can efficiently download data and recompress it into .mpg files simultaineously - even when running in non-real time mode. It is at least 3-4 times faster at this process than Pinnacle software (which completely copies the raw miniDV files onto your computer using multi-gigabytes of storage and then goes back and reprocesses the data into .mpg, which takes forever). The capture clips are clean. I haven't yet tried many of the advanced editing features of the program, but I'm really happy that the basic functionality of getting raw mini-DV footage into good quality .mpg files that are smartly divided up into seperate clips, can easily be edited, and rendered onto DVDs. In a couple of weeks of using this software, I've managed to catch up to 3 years of miniDV tapes that hadn't been processed because of the nightmare of using Pinnacle 8/9/10/10.1.PowerDirector is not perfect, I have experienced a couple of crashes in 30 or so hours of processing -- I've learned that after rewinding a miniDV tape to the start to let it play for a second or two before starting the capture process because the program will hang if you try to capture from the very start of a tape - not a big deal once I figured it out. Bottom line, I've been able to get everything I set out to do done with a minimal amount of dupicate effort.My productivity at getting miniDV tapes processed with PowerDirector 5 is somewhere between 10 and 20 times better than it was with Pinnacle Studio (PStudio has very bad performance and severe stability problems).Suggestion: it would be nice if the software would name captured clips with a datecode (shooting date, not capture date!)like YYYYMMDD(XX) instead of the default capture(XX). I've found that the only way to be able to reasonably manage a lot of video clips is to manually rename the clips with the date the video was shot on. Can't the software do this for me? If you do captures from different tapes shot over a long period of time it will result in duplicately named files by default (though you can change the default, you can only give every clip on an entire capture the same name -- since I use the same tape over a long period of time for multiple events, giving every clip off the tape the same prefix is not that useful). If the software used the shooting date as part of the name, you wouldn't have duplicate file names and you could easily seperate the clips from Thanksgiving from the clips from Christmas just by looking at the names of the files!
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Video editing is the latest craze of the Digital Home generation. Converting and transforming raw footage is never easy, but PowerDirector, with its intuitive interface, amazingly fast rendering, and ease-of-use, makes it fast and fun to edit stylish home movies. All it takes is three steps. STEP 1 - CAPTURE VIDEO AND AUDIO:Preview Digital Video with DV Quickscan. Scan an hour of digital video in 6-10 minutes.Capture video from a digital video camera, PC web camera or TV. Record audio via a microphone or line-in device and Import video, audio and image files from discs or your hard drive. STEP 2 - EDIT:Record a voice track while simultaneously watching your video. 121 transitions offer breathtaking effects for linking transitions of neighboring clips seamlessly. 56 titles allow you to add spectacular animated text. Add Picture-in-Picture effects by dragging photos or videos onto the PiP track. Refine your videos with a complete range of editing and enhancement tools: Split, Trim, Speed, Color, Delete. Auto-align your clips on the timeline with one click. Remove photo red-eyes with one click and Resize, rotate, crop, and adjust brightness and contrast of images.STEP 3 - PRODUCE:Automatically set your chapters to appear at the beginning of each video clip, at fixed intervals, or divided evenly according to the number of chapters. Bring your DVDs to life with stylish motion menus and thumbnails. Add chapter numbers for easy indexing. Render video faster while delivering quality results by estimating your rendering time with the new SVRT-2 information window. Create a file by saving to your hard drive in either AVI, DivX, MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 formats. Write back to DV tape, or stream your movie over the Internet by saving in either WMV, RealVideo or QuickTime formats.
