By Terry Currier
PowerDirector from CyberLink is actually two packages. The
PowerDirector side takes in the movies and lets you do all the wondrous things.
The PowerProducer side takes the worked up version and helps to create a disc
or file. This updated version fixed one of the things I did not like in
PowerDirector 3. After working in PowerDirector 3, I would click to produce the
movie which then takes you to PowerProducer. Yet, I had 
to actually tell it
what file to load even though I was just working on a project. Now it loads that
movie right up.
Where I linked working with PowerDirector, but where I found weakness in the PowerDirector 4 suite is the PowerProducer side. When taking a movie into PowerProducer Step 1 is a choice of:
Choosing to make a disc Step 2 takes you to choosing the format - VCD, DVD, and SVCD. Here it tells you that HQ (High Quality) profile DVD is equal to 60 minutes of video. Click on the button to change it to SP (Standard Play) for 120 minutes. If you happen to have more then 60 minutes and you don’t choose the SP at the start PowerProducer will continue right along like it will work. You can go on making choices for menu and chapters only to find out when you go to burn the disc it will not fit. That also happened to me for an SP disc when I inserted too many chapters for a 118 minute movie. It added too much overhead to fit, but did not tell me. There is a slider bar showing how much space it was using. But it is too easy to “assume” you have room when you know you are within the time limits, or at the start it lets you go on.
The default title on the opening is “My Videos.” I of course change it to whatever title I wanted. I found after adding chapters and buttons, going into preview mode, and then back to author mode, it again said “My Videos.” Changing it back it stays, but why did it change to begin with?
Also what if you want to put it onto a 8.5GB double layered
disc, or use DiVX? You have to click the back arrow to select the type of disc.
That
choice really should be at the start of Step 2. DiVX is a MPEG-4 format
allowing it to fit on a smaller disc. Once done I was able to get my 118 minute
movie to fit onto a CD, which totaled 650MB. CyberLink includes a DiVX player.
It would not play in either of my home DVD players. There are home and portable
units that will play it. Windows Media Player 10 will also play MPEG-4.
It comes with 10 different backgrounds choices for setting up the menu. You can use a picture or screen capture of your own. I noticed that for some reason when I did that I could not get as many buttons (to click on for the chapters) as when I took their background. Also when I used my own and it went more than one page it did not put my background in for each page. I was suppose to notice and click on making it the default for each page. Okay duh to me, but it should put the same background on each page to begin with.
You can also take your movie directly into PowerProducer and edit it there, but it is so much easier in PowerDirector. I think PowerProducer would befit from a wizard to help people step through the different processes. Advanced users could turn it off if they did not want it.
PowerDirector has some nice new features in this
version. Magic
Clean uses CyberLink Eagle Vision™ 2 technology to enhance the colors and
brightness of the video. You can also use it to enhance photos and
automatically remove red eyes. It can also be used to remove audio noise in
video. At the risk of nit picking according to their help file they list the
choices Magic Clean has with audio files as: to reduce audio recorded outdoors
and filter out wind noise. Actually the choices are to reduce machine and wind
noise. It works, but it can not do miracles.
I have a really, really bad tape which you can actually hear the tape turning in the camera. Compounding that they lowered the quality putting six hours of video on it. After importing and playing it, the start of the tape sounds like locus are coming. Magic Clean could not fix that. However, you can do other things with PowerDirector. I imported some music, and brought up the Audio Mixing Room. With it I turned down the loud winding sound and had the music playing instead. In the Audio Mixing Room I can control the sound for the Video, Voice or Music.
Inserting Chapters on the timeline provides a quick way for users to create video chapters in their movies. I really liked and used this feature. You can have it set chapters evenly according to the full length of their video, at the beginning of each clip, or according to a set duration. I imported some TV shows, and edited out the commercials. I then had it set the chapters at the start of each cut. I can also go through and create more, or delete the set chapters. This information is transferred into Produce mode, making the DVD authoring process faster.
Magic Music helps you to create soundtracks that fit perfectly
within the length of a video clip or photo slideshow. Included is a
royalty-free soundtrack library arranged by genre. It will automatically
adjusts the playback of the music clips it contains to fit any length from 5
seconds to 2 hours, and fine-tunes the audio for a smooth cut-off.
Magic Cut helps you fit a video clip to a specific time by
automatically cutting out unnecessary portions and keeping only the best
moments. The Magic Cut feature uses video technology to locate and keep the
most interesting moments, while discarding sections of lesser importance. Great
for the times when you have to get that 70 minutes of video down to 60. I did
try it and thought it worked pretty good. You still want to check to make sure
everything you need is in it..
PhotoNow will let you edit images (stills.) You can resize, crop, rotate, remove red eye, adjust color, brightness and more. They show you the original and new image side by side so you can decide how it compares.
Multi Trim offers a handy way to manually edit a clip by inserting multiple in and out points along a timeline. You can choose where to put the points, or you can have it detect scene changes. Once the points have been set, users can delete unwanted video with one click.
Magic Motion I thought was really cool. With your pictures
in a slideshow you can have it pan and zoom in during playback. PowerDirector
analyzes each image for its main subject or subjects and then applies motion
based on this key focus. You 
can apply the Magic Motion effect to all
neighboring photos in the timeline.
In the Title Designer you can move the title to any part of the screen, change font, change the color, blur it, make it transparent (percentage), I can also change the gradient direction. I still would like to have a blank or black background choice besides just the title letters on the picture. I can trick it to do that by inserting such a picture.
One of the new features is in PowerDirector 4 is locking the timeline tracks. Doing that helps to protects changes by preventing the deletion or changing of elements.
It is really fun working with PowerDirector 4 especially the PiP (Picture in Picture). You may never use it, but when the option comes up it makes it makes for a really cool video. You can modify the degree of transparency of the overlapping clip, as well as its position, motion, and other properties.
The Voice-Over Recording Room contains controls for recording a narration from a microphone while watching the video clip the voice-over is destined to accompany. You can control the position and volume of the recording.
Memory management with PowerDirector’s is pretty good. With nothing loaded it took 8,648KB, with a two hour 1.2GB MPG loaded it still only took up 18,432KB of RAM. After doing a number of things it went up to 123,000KB. When I switch to PowerProducer it dropped to 60,804, while PowerProducer used 76,084KB.
For ease of use and all the features they give I think PowerDirector 4 is the best program for editing and authoring movies. Even with it’s minor shortcomings this is a really good program that can make movie editing and authoring fun and easy.
PowerDirector $90 from CyberLink www.gocyberlink.com, for $120 you can get a TV tuner card included. Download a trial version to see for yourself, the size is 107MB.
From our June 2005 newsletter
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