Cyberlink Powerdirector 14 Release Date

Badge Art CyberLink's PowerDirector video editing software bridges the gap between professional editing and consumer-friendliness. It has often been ahead of pro products with support for new formats and new technologies. It's also loaded with tools that help you put together a compelling digital movie, complete with transitions, effects, and titles. Best of all, it's easy to work with and fast at rendering. PowerDirector is the prosumer video editing software to beat and an Editors' Choice winner.

As with Adobe's Creative Cloud and Microsoft's Office 365, new features now appear throughout the year to subscribers of the 365 version of PowerDirector and the larger Director Suite 365, which includes photo and audio software. CyberLink adds features, effects, and improvements at a dizzying pace, as you can see from PowerDirector's new features page.

The current Version 20 adds Sky Replacement for video (similar to a newish Photoshop tool), stock content from Getty Images, as well as new tools and effects for text, audio, and graphics. The interface is a bit darker and has fewer colors on its buttons, so you can focus on your project media and preview. The previous version saw a new Photoshop-like selection tool for video, access to royalty-free stock video and images from Shutterstock, better color matching and keyframing, and a streamlined interface.

How Much Does PowerDirector Cost?

PowerDirector runs on Microsoft Windows 11, 10, 8.1, and 7, with a 64-bit version required. For AI features, you need Windows 10 or 11. You'll need a minimum of 4GB RAM and at least a 128MB VGA VRAM graphics card (2GB for AI features). A macOS version arrived in 2021, which I discuss below; it requires OS X 10.14 or later and runs on both Intel and Apple Silicon M1-based Macs.

Similar Products

You can try out the software with a 30-day downloadable trial version that adds brand watermarks and doesn't support 4K. Two editions of the standalone video editor are available, the $99.99 Ultra and the $139.99 Ultimate. (Note that those prices are often discounted.) Another option is to bundle it with CyberLink's ColorDirector, AudioDirector, and PhotoDirector in the Director Suite bundle, which is only available as a subscription for $29.99 per month or $129.99 for a year. Finally, you can get PowerDirector 365 (the version tested here) as a $69.99-per-year or $19.99-per-month subscription (often discounted). Both subscriptions get you regular updates with new effects, plug-ins, and music samples, as well as the previously mentioned stock media.

The higher-end options add loads of third-party special effects from the likes of BorixFX, NewBlue, and proDAD. To see exactly which is in each edition, go to CyberLink's comparison page. The pricing is competitive with that of Premiere Elements ($99.99), Corel VideoStudio ($99.99), and Magix Movie Studio ($79.99). Two annoyances are that the program adds too many program icons to your start menu and you can't upgrade the free trial to the paid version—you must download and reinstall.

What's New in PowerDirector?

For CyberLink adepts, here's a synopsis of new features since our last review update. To be frank, PowerDirector is already so replete with tools that new versions can feel like they are delivering diminishing returns. But for subscribers in particular, the company manages to continually add new effects and tweaks to improve existing tools. I'll list the most interesting adds in the new version below.

AI Sky Replacement. This class of automating tool has become a popular update in photo editing applications like Skylum Luminar and Adobe Photoshop. It takes multi-step procedures and automates them. PowerDirector's new sky replacement option automatically detects the sky and lets you choose from more than 70 dramatic looks, with decent control.
Stock Content from Getty iStock. As if giving you access to ShutterStock content wasn't enough, PowerDirector 365 subscribers can now take advantage of a second source of stock images and video clips.
New AI Audio Tools. New tools here include Wind Removal and AI Speech Enhancement, which remove background noise very effectively.
Soundtrack Fitting. The new Smart Fit Audio Duration tool can adjust the length of background music in your video while maintaining the music's style and cadence.
New Aspect Ratio Options. The program now supports wide 21:9 and 4:5 (favored by some social media apps).
More Shapes and Motion PiPs. There are now 21 graphics primitives to choose from when creating a custom shape. Trapezoids, hearts, arrows—you're pretty much covered. Once you have a shape and have modified it to your taste, you can apply text, colors, shadows, gradients, and more. I wish you could combine shapes for a complex custom shape, however. Motion graphic PiP overlays are now available as well, such as the Social Motion Graphics set downloadable from the CyberLink Application Manager—no finding the files or restarting required.
Object Segmentation. Object Segmentation is basically green-screening without the need for a green screen. PowerDirector automatically selects the subject, letting you remove and replace the background. It's only for photos, but you can still easily select a subject in the Brush Mask Designer, the same place you find the new tool.
Plenty of New Transitions, Fonts, and LUTs. Every month, subscribers will see a new set of these effects that add more creative possibilities.
Pro Tools. The update adds functionality like the ability to add folders in the source panel and more support for editing items in nested projects.

Installation and Setup

Installing the program takes up over a gigabyte of your hard drive, so be sure to use a machine with room to spare. I tested the Ultimate edition on my Asus Zen AiO Pro Z240IC running 64-bit Windows 10 Pro. Director Suite 365 subscribers get the Application Manager applet shown above, which not only lets you install and update the suite apps, but also offers content packs like the Bloggers Social Media pack, with picture-in-picture (PiP), title, and particle templates.

After optionally signing in to a CyberLink online account, the program asks whether you want to optimize GPU hardware acceleration. I can't think of any reason not to unless you don't want the program to work as quickly as possible!

Welcome tutorial in CyberLink PowerDirector

A four-step startup wizard gets you started with video editing in the software, taking you through the program's main interface elements and basic options. A Quick Start tutorial window shows you the steps involved in creating a video—import; trim; add transitions, effects, and titles; and export. You have the option to watch an online video explaining the processes.

Video Editing Interface

The program's user interface is about as clear and simple as a program with such a vast number of options can be, but it can still get overwhelming when you're deep in the weeds of fine-tuning video or audio effects. It's not quite as simple and friendly as Adobe Premiere Elements or Ashampoo Movie Edit Pro, but that's because it offers more capabilities. CyberLink keeps streamlining the interface and cutting down on clutter, for example, Capture is no longer a main mode button but now a submenu option. You can see a bunch more interface updates on CyberLink's help site for the program.

The startup splash screen (below) makes getting to work easy. You start off in a Welcome screen offering big button options for Full Mode, Storyboard Mode, and Slideshow Creator. Two additional choices include Auto Mode and Learning Center—all these modes are self-explanatory.

If you don't need or want all these choices every time you start the program, a simple Always Enter Full Mode checkbox is for you. On this welcome screen, you can also choose your video project's aspect ratio—16:9, 4:3, and a 9:16 tall mode. Many people still don't think to hold their phones sideways for videos, and vertical videos just work better for some social media platforms.

The PowerDirector editing interface maintains the traditional Source and Preview split panels on the top, with your track timeline along the whole width of the bottom of the screen. You can now have two video preview windows—one for the source and one for the movie, which saves you from having to switch a single preview window between those two functions.

The storyboard view is more than just clip thumbnails. You can drag transitions between clips, apply effects, and add audio clips without switching to timeline view. I like the search box for media and the buttons at the top of the source panel for showing just video, just photos, or just audio in the source panel. Buttons link to video tutorials that pop up in the upper-right corner based on your current activity.

Recent versions have dispensed with mode buttons for Capture, Edit, and Create Disc—the only one left is for Produce, and when you're in that mode, you have a back-arrow button that makes getting back to editing clear and easy. You can quickly customize the timeline with a button for adding tracks, and the mouse wheel is your friend when it comes to zooming or moving in the timeline. You're allowed up to 100 tracks each for video and audio. Vegas Movie Studio limits you to 10 tracks (200 if you upgrade to the Platinum level), which is already probably more than most people need, though not enough for high-end projects.

While editing, you can drag media directly onto its source panel or even onto the timeline from File Explorer. You can tag media, and each project retains its own set of content, but you don't get bins as you do with the pro-level products and Pinnacle Studio. Bins bring together all the assets for your project, including transitions and effects. You can, however, pack project assets into a folder, and use the Nested Project capability, discussed below.

By default, you get three pairs of video and audio tracks with CyberLink, as well as effects, title, voice, and music tracks. You can switch the layer order of the tracks to your preference—in some video editing apps (including previous versions of PowerDirector), lower objects on the timeline appear on top of higher tracks, and on others it's just the opposite. For me, it does make sense to have what appears on top in the video above in the timeline. Now you can choose whichever you're more comfortable with. You can also lock, disable/enable view, or rename tracks from the left track-info area, and you can even use drag and drop to move them up and down on the timeline. Zooming the timeline in and out is also a snap, either with Ctrl-Mouse wheel or a slider control.

PowerDirector for Mac

Users of Apple's Mac computers can finally take advantage of a good amount of PowerDirector's multitude of effects, editing tools, and format support. An annual subscription plan costs $69.99, which, just like the Windows version, is often discounted. Also as under Windows, you install the Application Manager app. Unfortunately, it's not available from the Mac App Store—you have to go to Cyberlink's site. The software runs on macOS 10.14 and later and on both Intel and ARM-based Macs with Rosetta support.

The interface is nearly identical to that of the Windows version, and you get a surprising number of editing and effect features. These include up to 100 tracks on the timeline, transitions, effects (including LUT support and lens profiles), speed changing, PiP Designer, Particles (think rain and falling leaves), and keyframe control. You get green screen chroma keying, voiceover recording, and titles and subtitles.

The feature set on PowerDirector for Mac isn't yet at parity with the Windows version, though. There's no dedicated ColorDirector program, and you don't get motion tracking, stabilization, 360-degree, 3D, or multicam capabilities.

The latest update does add features previously missing for the Mac: Shape Designer, Enhanced Masking and Blending, Color Match, and Lighting adjustments.

Performance on my test 3.1GHz MacBook with Intel Core i5 and 8GB RAM gave me nothing to complain about. Adding long clips, applying transitions, and previewing everything went well, without any noticeable delays. Even a PiP sequence with four overlaid clips previewed smoothly.

Output options are excellent, with support for HEVC, MKV, MP4, M2TS, and XAVC S, along with easy output formatting for YouTube and Vimeo. You get CyberLink's fast video rendering technology with hardware acceleration, but there's no DVD authoring or burning capabilities—things YouTubers could care less about, but wedding videographers and hobbyists may still want.

Basic Video Editing

As with most nonlinear video editing software, PowerDirector lets you join and trim clips on the timeline. If you drag a clip to the end of the timeline, it firmly snaps next to the existing clip. If you drag a clip to the middle of the movie, you see a tooltip with five options: Overwrite, Insert, Insert and Move All Clips, and Replace. That last choice completely removes the existing clip, while Overwrite leaves parts of it that the new clip doesn't cover. If you use the Insert button that appears below the source panel when you select a clip, you can get your clip lined up without any fuss.

The Trim tool (opened with a scissors icon) allows precise control (down to the individual frame) with two sliders, and the multi-trim tool lets you mark several In and Out points on your clip—a useful tool for cutting out the chaff.

The Precut tool lets you work on source clips before you add them to the timeline, as you can in Final Cut Pro X and Premiere Pro. This is how pro editors work, so it's good to see CyberLink add the capability. In previous versions, you couldn't do trimming until after you dropped a clip onto the timeline, which left professionally trained editors scratching their heads. You can either do a simple in-and-out trim to create a single trimmed clip or use PowerDirector's wonderful Multi-Trim tool to create multiple Precut clips.

You use PowerDirector's unique and intuitive selection cursor to split video and delete sections. Fix/Enhance options also include video denoise, audio denoise, and enhancements to punch up color and sharpness. PowerDirector also makes it easy to fix lighting and color. You can independently adjust the brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, sharpness, and white balance.

Assisted Movie Making

One of the best things to come to home video editors in recent years was pioneered by Apple with the Trailers feature of the Mac's included iMovie app. Premiere Elements has a similar Video Story feature. With either of these, you fill templates with video and photo content that meets the needs of a spot in the production, such as Group shot, Close-up, or Action shot. These are elaborated with transitions and background music that match your chosen theme.

Similarly, PowerDirector offers Video Templates (in the Project Room left menu choice) with placeholders for your content. From DirectorZone.com, CyberLink's Web resource site, you can download these templates, called Express Projects on the site. These are usually in separate opening, middle, and ending units. Business users also get Ad Templates for Facebook and Instagram Stories. Unlike the similar iMovie tool, PowerDirector requires you to add your own background music—there are no canned scores in the wizard or for Express Projects.

An Express Project only requires two steps: Dragging an Opening, Middle, and Ending onto the timeline, and filling the resulting clip tracks with your media. It's nowhere near as intuitive or clear as Apple iTunes' Trailers feature or Adobe Premiere Elements' Video Story feature. But it does offer guidance in crafting a digital movie, it is more customizable, and the results look pretty cool.

Another even easier creation tool is PowerDirector's Magic Movie Wizard. You get to this right from the startup menu's Auto Mode option. This features a four-step process: importing source content, adjusting and enhancing that content, previewing, and producing. As with the templates you can download various Magic Styles from DirectorZone to use with this feature. It analyzes your content and delivers a project that you can output to a file, a disc, or to the main editor for tweaking. I found this last choice necessary, since the tool doesn't know if two photos are nearly identical, and clips aren't trimmed. I had better luck with Movavi Video Editor's similar Montage Wizard feature.

Stock Material from ShutterStock and Getty

Subscribers to PowerDirector 365 or Director Suite 365 (which CyberLink representatives told me account for most customers now) can get professionally created video, photo, and audio content from well-known stock supplier ShutterStock. With the new version 20 release, you can get photo and video content from Getty Images' iStock collection.

It's easy to get to. A Premium Stock Content thumbnail appears first in the source panel. Clicking on this opens the stock search window with two tabs for ShutterStock and iStock from Getty Images. You can use search terms to find an appropriate clip, picture, or sound sample. Clicking on the thumbnail of one you're interested in opens the full (watermarked) image in your default web browser. Note that you don't get the entire library of Shutterstock—a search for pizza only turned up 15 video clips, while the Shutterstock site has hundreds. Of course, you'd pay a lot more for access to the full selection. Shutterstock licenses start at $99 per month for use of just five clips.

When you add a 360-degree clip to your project, PowerDirector pops up a dialog box asking whether you want your output to be 360 or 2D. If you choose the latter, the View Designer window opens, which lets you choose the resulting movie's point of view. You can move the angle around in this window's preview in three axes (x, y, and z) with the mouse pointer.

360 degree editing inCyberLink PowerDirector

Clicking on the up, down, left, or right arrows alters your point of view, and clicking the center of the arrow control snaps the view to straight on. You can zoom the view, and very usefully, use keyframes to automatically switch from one viewpoint to another. That last option can take advantage of the Ease In option, which makes the motion more naturally accelerate and decelerate, rather than happening mechanically.

A cool effect I first saw on Vimeo, is produced by the Little Planet dropdown in the View Designer. This takes 360-degree content and realigns it so that the ground is shaped like a ball that any people in the video are walking around. Drag the image downward and you can create the opposite type of world, sometimes called a rabbit hole in which the inhabitants are on the inside of a sphere. Another nifty option is to use keyframes to rotate the world smoothly.

Stabilization and, remarkably, motion tracking can also be applied to your 360-degree videos. CyberLink has really pushed the envelope with these first-mover features. When I tested 360 stabilization in the last version, I could not get good stabilization results in footage from my Samsung Gear 360, but when I tried sample shaky footage from CyberLink's Steven Lien, the feature worked well. The program's Enhanced VR Stabilizer gives you even more controls to adjust the stabilization effect.

For projects that you intend to output in 360-degree format, you can still use the basic trimming, splitting, and joining editing tools. There are also a bunch of PowerDirector features you cannot use: Magic Movie, video cropping (think about it), and content-aware editing. Nor can you mix non-360 content into a 360 project.

Once you've edited the content to taste, you output to H.264 AVC .MP4 format, and H.265 HEVC. Alternatively, you can upload directly to Facebook, YouTube, and Vimeo.

Action Camera tools in CyberLink PowerDirector

PowerDirector can of course import and edit footage from GoPro cameras, as well as from other action cameras from the likes of Sony, Kodak, and Ion. The dedicated Action Camera Center under the Designer button menu appears when you select a clip. This offers effects like camera-profile-based corrections for fisheye distortion, vignette, camera shake, and color. It also includes effects favored by action cam users, such as freeze-frame and time-shifts like slowdowns, speedups, and replays.

Motion Tracking

Motion tracking lets an object, text, or effect follow around something moving in your video. You pick the Motion Tracker choice from the same Tools menu as the Action Camera, after selecting a clip in the timeline. The tool makes tracking an object and adding a title, effect, or even another media clip a simple three-step process. You start by positioning a target box on the object you want tracked, then press the Track button, which runs through the video while following your boxed object. You then choose what you want to follow the tracked object.

The tracker lost track of my subject's face when he turned around, a common limitation in such tools. I fixed this easily by stopping the tracking, realigning the box, and starting tracking again. It's easier to get a track correct than in Corel VideoStudio. Adobe Premiere Elements' motion tracking tool also lost track of a skateboarder in my test footage when he passed behind a pole.

Motion Tracking in CyberLink PowerDirector

For attaching text to motion-tracked objects in PowerDirector, you can easily attach a mosaic, spotlight, or blur effect, and you get a good choice of many fonts, colors, and sizes. You can even rotate the text with a handle. One thing I'd like to be able to add, however, is a speech bubble, something offered by Adobe and Corel.

The included Color Match option is important for movies shot at different angles with different equipment and lighting. The button appears when you have two clips selected. You scrub to the frame in each that you want to match, choosing a reference and a target that will receive the reference frame's colors. It previously did a spotty job in my tests with scenery and décor, but on retesting in version 20, it matched a cooler-toned interior to a warmer one with aplomb. You can adjust the level of matching, as well as brightness and saturation.

The Color Match inteface, before matching.

After color matching.

The support for LUTs, or lookup tables, can give your movie a uniform look by applying a color mood like those you see in the cinema—for example, the cool blue look ofThe Revenant. PowerDirector uses the alternate acronym in its interface—CLUT, for color lookup table. The program supports a healthy number of file formats, including 3DL, CSP, CUBE, M3D, MGA, RV3DLUT, and VF. CyberLink now offers a decent selection of LUT packs, so you're no longer on your own in finding them. I was successfully able to test LUT support using Kodak film-style and day-for-night LUTs from Adobe Premiere Pro.

3D lighting effects in CyberLink PowerDirector

For a higher level of color grading, use the Director Suite's included ColorDirector application. This now lets you do cool effects like shining a light source from a 3D point of your choice (see above), in addition to standard color grading functions.

Near-Pro Video Editing

Nested Projects

Both Adobe Premiere Pro and Apple Final Cut Pro X let you combine edited groups of clips and move them around as a unit. PowerDirector's Nested Projects feature adds this capability. To use it, you simply create a new project, and drop an existing one onto the timeline. This creates a tabbed interface above the timeline, which lets you edit the nested project separately from within the new main project. You can also treat an inserted nested project as a PiP.

Keyframes, Effects, and Transitions

If you're into keyframe editing (which allows precise control over when effects begin and end based on exact frames you choose) PowerDirector is there for you. It offers PiP, overlays, motion, cropping, and time codes. All effects and adjustments can be pegged to keyframes. You can also edit the anchor point and to use Hold mode, which stops the progression temporarily for a jumpy effect.

You also get more than 100 transitions and special effects to choose from, including ten from NewBlue. The app also lets you install third-party effect plug-ins from Pixelan and ProDAD. CyberLink often adds hot new transitions, the latest being shape, distortion, and glitch transitions.

Transitions are easy to add, and the program can decide what material before and after to use when you drop this kind of effect to a join line between clips. A search box lets you find a specific type, like Page Curl. You can even create custom transitions using your images with the Alpha set of transitions, which rely on masking and transparency. It's fun to make a transition out of a friend's head, as shown below.

Chroma Keying

Custom mask transitions in CyberLink PowerDirector

PowerDirector's chroma-key tool lets you shoot someone with solid-color backgrounds (usually green) and create the appearance that they're in an exotic scene by choosing a different background. CyberLink has simplified the controls from four to two. There are now just Color Range and Denoise controls. You can now add more than one color key, too. I tried this with an orange and gray background and with a yellow and gray background. These color choices showed me why pros use green: The orange background keyed out my subject's lips, and it was harder to get the correct mask.

With a green screen, the keying worked well. Even in the default mode, I noticed none of the green haloes I sometimes see around test subjects in other programs.

Video Masks

The Mask Designer lets you add transparency to mask objects (including your own images) and text. It includes tools for creating a mask with a brush or by defining vertex selection points. A feather feature lets you blend the mask into the background video for a ghostlike effect. These are fun effects, and as with just about all the others, you can use keyframes to gradually ease in and out of these mask effects. You can't use them for motion tracking, though, as you can with Adobe Premiere Elements' new masking tool.

Titles

Beyond simple static text, the Title Designer offers custom and preset motion possibilities. You get fire, electric waves, and neon, along with a good selection of fly-in animations. Two-color gradients, lighting, and glow are at your disposal. These can give those weekend trip videos George Lucas-style blockbuster opening credits. Put boxes around text to get a button, which you could use as your Subscribe button on online media, or edit the colors in motion title templates, and even use an eyedropper to match a color, for example, of a logo.

Picture-in-Picture Editing

Picture-in-picture in CyberLInk PowerDirector

The program offers preset PiP grids—from 2 by 2 to 10 by 10—and your clip tracks snap to fill the resulting spaces. The PiP Designer window makes creating PiP movies simpler than in any competing app. Some competitors can only preview these types of movies with stop-and-start, jerky playback.

An easier way to create PiP effects is with the Video Collage tool. You access the Video Collage Designer from the Plugins menu item. This opens a new window that shows templates with your clips on the side. You simply drag and drop the latter into the former, and you get a nifty styled and animated picture-in-picture.

Another PiP-ish feature is the Shape Designer, which you get to via the Video Overlay (PiP Objects) Room. This lets you customize shapes starting from squares, ovals, or speech bubbles, but it doesn't let you draw a shape in freehand. For that, you can use the program's Paint Designer, which shows your painting, animated.

Multicam Editing

With so many people shooting events simultaneously with their HD camera phones, multicam is no longer just for professionals. PowerDirector allows up to 100 multicam tracks, but what this really means is that you can sync that many tracks by audio in the main timeline. The actual multicam-switching interface still just has four video sources.

For synchronization, you get a choice of Audio Analysis (the best choice for amateurs), Manual, Timecodes, File Created Time, and Markers on Clips. When I used Audio Analysis, my two clips synced perfectly. The program lets you choose which track's audio should be used, or you can import a separate audio track. Hitting Record played all angles synchronized, letting me switch among them. The tool creates sub-clips labeled 1 to 4 for the camera angles, with adjustable split points.

When you're done cutting, the clip sequence appears on the regular timeline. Subclips are in separate tracks, but you can't adjust the cut points there without losing footage and messing up the synchronization. The multicam designer itself lets you adjust these. Thankfully, you can also reopen a multicam sequence in the designer after you've sent it to the timeline. In all, it's a well-done and powerful tool.

AI Styles

AI painting style filters were popularized by the iPhone app Prisma. PowerDirector offers plug-ins that perform similar magic on your video clips. Four packs of these AI styles are included: Chinese Painting, Van Gogh, Impressionists 1 (Manet), and Impressionists 2 (Monet). CyberLink plans to produce monthly new AI packs for subscribers. Note that they're not small, some at over a gigabyte download size.

You don't get to these styles from the Effects tab, but from the Plugins menu choice. (Effects already include non-AI Chinese Painting). The styles open a new window, where you need to open the clip for the effect again. It's not really integrated into the editor as the old Effects are, which work right on timeline clips selected.

The effects, like those from Prisma, are quite entrancing and beautiful. I do wish you could adjust their strength with a slider, but I guess that's up to the AI, rather than my inferior intelligence. You can trim the clip you're applying the effect to, and then you hit the Transform button. It's not super fast: A 16-second clip took 2 minutes to transform.

AI Sky Replacement

This is a separate plug-in, not an option from the timeline editor. In the tool's own separate window, you choose a clip from your drive, choose a sky to replace with, and tweak the result with Feather, Land Ambient (to adjust color on the non-sky portion of the frame), Sky Fade, and Position. When I first tried this with a skyline scene using no adjustments, the buildings were tinted by the blue-sky effect. What was tricking the tool was that some of the buildings were more distant than others in the foreground. It works much better (as you might suspect) with a clearly delineated land-sky border.

My second test was still tricky, since trees made a complex pattern in the midst of the sky, but the program handled that with aplomb:

This example could stand some de-saturation to look more natural, but the intent is to show you that it works.

4K Video Editing and Beyond

For several years, PowerDirector has supported 4K video content, but I put it to the test with much higher-resolution footage: 8K from my Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra. The software also supports XAVC-S standard of 4K and HD videos used in Sony cameras and camcorders. This joins support for Canon 1DC, JVC HMQ-10, and GoPro Hero3 4K content.

In editing GoPro 4K footage, performance is better than I expected, not even slowing down with complex transitions. The 8K clip I tested with PowerDirector was easy to work with, especially since the program downsized the preview resolution to HD for snappier editing. Being first with 4K capability was a real feather in CyberLink's cap, but most competing products, such as Corel VideoStudio, also now support 4K. You can preview in 4K, as opposed to viewing a reduced resolution, to speed up editing. You'd only want to do this if your PC has high-spec components and a lot of RAM, however.

Screen Capture

PowerDirector includes a powerful screen capture tool that lets you include a picture-in-picture view of simultaneous webcam recordings. You can size the resulting PiP image to taste and lock it to an app window. The utility's Game mode will appeal to YouTubers who want to show off their skills. A Time Limit option makes sure you don't record until your hard disk overflows with video data.

Audio

Audio tracks in the timeline by default show waveform lines, and you can turn up and down volume by grabbing and dragging them. The sound plays as you scrub in the timeline, which is helpful for locating a part of your movie based on acoustic events. The Audio Room, a simple track-volume mixer, features Normalize buttons for each track to even out clip sound levels.

It's also easy to create voiceovers with the Voice-Over Recording Room, accessible from a tab sporting a microphone icon. The included Audio Editor lets you correct distortion, equalize, generate reverb, and apply a few special effects. It also includes VST plug-in support for third-party effects.

You get loads of canned background music, and the standard video editor includes beat detection, which puts markers on the timeline at music beats so you can synchronize clip action.

For advanced mixing, recording, syncing, cleaning, and restoration, there's AudioDirector (included with the Ultimate Suite edition). This separate app offers round-trip editing from PowerDirector. It lets you easily apply effects and fixes that are preserved when you later open them in PowerDirector. Impressive ability to remove vocals from music and apply de-reverb are also in its arsenal. You can change pitch and remove wind noise—a common need for amateur video.

In fact, the Wind Removal tool now makes it to the main PowerDirector program's Fix/Enhance panel in the current version, along with AI-powered Speech Enhancement, which removes all but spoken words. I tried this with a friend talking while the mighty Niagara River was raging in the background, and the result sounded like she was in a studio! The Wind Removal tool was equally remarkable in its effectiveness in my testing.

Auto Remix fits soundtrack music to your video length. This now appears in the main PowerDirector program as Smart Fit for Duration atop the Tools dropdown. It can take any song, analyze it, and often convincingly shorten or lengthen it. The AudioDirector version requires you to manually enter the new length time; it doesn't bring your movie in for automatic fitting, while the PowerDirector version lets you set the length to the current insertion position. In either, you can see where the edit occurred with a squiggly line. Listening to the result, I couldn't tell that the music had been cut at that point except when cutting a song down very short.

Automatic ducking doesn't add quacks to your soundtrack. Instead, it automatically lowers background audio during dialog on another track. It didn't do much for a loud concert video on top of an interview but worked better with a standard background track.

Performance

PowerDirector is in the elite group of performers when it comes to rendering video projects, but it also feels snappy from the time you start up through all but the most demanding editing activities. CyberLink's investment in 64-bit optimizations and graphics hardware acceleration has paid off. Other speed-boosters include OpenCL (Open Computing Language) support and intelligent SVRT, which determines how your clips should be rendered for the best-quality output and fastest editing. In my latest round of performance testing, the program remains among the fastest consumer video editing applications.

We test rendering time by creating a movie consisting of five clips of mixed types (some 1080p, some SD, some 4K) with a standard set of transitions and rendering it to 1080p30 MPEG-4 at 15.5Mbps, H.264 High Profile. Audio is set to MPEG AAC Audio: 384 Kbps. I tested on my home workstation, a PC with a 3.4GHz Core i7 6700 CPU, 16GB RAM, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 with 4GB GDDR5 RAM, running 64-bit Windows 10 Pro.

The test movie (whose duration is just under 5 minutes) took just 1:15 (minutes:seconds) for PowerDirector to render. Pinnacle Studio took a minutely faster 1:12. Market leader Adobe Premiere Elements was in the bottom quarter of performers with 4:01. That's even after I switched my graphics card to one that Premiere Elements explicitly supports. During rendering, PowerDirector also shows you the time elapsed, time remaining, and the frame in the movie the process is currently rendering, a great help if you want to know how long a job to expect.

Real Power for Your Video Editing

PowerDirector continues to lead the way among consumer video editing software. With each release it gets closer to professional-level apps. There isn't sufficient room here to discuss its entire vast feature set, including slideshows, disc menus, 3D editing, screen recording, content-aware features, and animated object design tools to name just a few. Its wealth of powerful tools would be enough to earn it a strong recommendation, but the combination of that with extremely fast rendering speed and an intuitive interface really give it the upper hand. The recent addition of a macOS version is yet another feather in its cap. CyberLink PowerDirector remains PCMag's Editors' Choice winner for enthusiast-level video-editing software, along with Corel VideoStudio and, for Mac users, Apple Final Cut Pro.

CyberLink PowerDirector 365

Cons

The Bottom Line

PowerDirector is a fast, full-featured consumer-level video editing program. It offers macOS and Windows users all the latest technology support yet is surprisingly easy to use.

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