CyberLink PowerDirector 13.0

To turn your home videos and still images into professional-looking movies and animations you may spend hours going through cumbersome and cryptic specialized tools and features or use CyberLink PowerDirector 13. The results will be equally gratifying and will produce equally high-quality movies and slideshows, but without all the hassle. Alternatively, it also allows you to go from a bunch of video files or pictures to a fully-authored DVD in four or five easy steps using Easy Editor and Slideshow Creator instead.

Both Easy Editor and Slideshow Creator work in a similar fashion – both open a very similar interface that is actually an intuitive wizard. Both process your original media files and turn them into stunning videos in a maximum of five simple steps – add source, choose one of the predefined styles, make certain “adjustments” (i.e., add a soundtrack), and create your video or DVD. When creating a slideshow, you will find steps 2 and 3 grouped into one “Style & Music” step, thus making the entire process even simpler. Before saving your file or closing your video disc, you are also given the option to take your movie or slideshow into the “Full Feature Editor”, and here is where CyberLink PowerDirector 13 unleashes all its power.

The Full Feature Editor lacks nothing – captures media, edits it, adds effects and transitions, background music, disc menus, you name it. Not as straightforward as the two other tools described above, this is the equally intuitive professional environment that your unlimited creativity was craving for. Capture video from your webcam, your HD camcorder, or your TV; add any existing video, image, and audio files (and here “any” does mean “any” media file – 2D, 3D, HD, Ultra HD 4K, etc.); lay them into your timeline or storyboard in whatever order, and edit them, play around with them, mix them, and create professional movies and other media presentations from them in a comfortable and intuitive way.

This time, easy doesn’t mean simple. It doesn’t mean that the final product you are getting is amateurish and simplistic, and it doesn’t mean that the entire edition and production process requires but a few clicks. Professional results require professional tools, and these are not always extremely straightforward. CyberLink PowerDirector, though, is capable of bringing together high-end results with fairly-easy-to-use features. The program’s interface design helps – you can choose between a storyboard layout and a timeline layout. The latter is probably the most intuitive, as you can see where your video clips and audio files begin and end, where they intersect, and if the soundtrack you have chosen for your movie requires extra editing in terms of length and fading effects.

To help you edit your audio files in a professional way – waveform graph and all – this application includes WaveEditor 2, which installs on your system as a separate tool and that can be launched from PowerDirector as soon as some professional audio editing is required. To help you make your movies look like a pro product, you are offered a plethora of effects, transitions, textures, and frames for you to choose from. Trying them and playing around with them as much as needed is both simple and fun. Your original files will remain unchanged, and you can always preview the resulting file to check if the effects applied match your original idea.

Last but not least is the production or creation process. Here you can choose to export your work as a single video file, as a 2D or a 3D disc (DVD, Blu-ray, etc.), or upload your videos directly to the most widely used social networks. You can add stunning menus to your discs, which you can download directly from the program’s website once you have registered with CyberLink. This is true also for a number of other objects, such as transitions, particles, and effects, and will grant you access to the CyberLink Cloud, where you can store your projects safely and conveniently for future use from anywhere.

The benefits of using CyberLink PowerDirector 13 do not end here, and they are for you to discover. Suffice it to say that nothing you can read here will match the thrill of trying it for yourself. You will see your home videos turn into pro-looking movies in no time – with or without your special touch that’s for you to decide. Either way, the quality of the final product will surely surprise you.