CyberLink PowerDirector 12 is the latest edition of this popular, feature-packed video editor.
The program includes everything you need to create professional videos. There's a 100 track timeline to organise your movie; more than 400 effects, transitions and objects to apply; smart tools to stabilise shaky camera work, remove noise and fix lighting issues; powerful audio tools, excellent 3D support, a huge selection of export options (DVDs, Blu-rays, a host of video formats, direct uploading to Facebook, YouTube, DailyMotion and more).
This is no minor update, either. PowerDirector 12 comes with a lengthy list of new and enhanced features, and gives you even more creative options and opportunities.
The MultiCam Designer helps you to combine, organise and edit footage of the same event from up to four cameras, for instance. Your footage can be automatically synchronised via audio or timecode, and you can switch between shots with hotkeys to quickly deliver the best possible results.
The Theme Designer is a capable tool for customising PowerDirector's Magic Movie Wizard templates. And so, as before, you can create a polished video slideshow automatically by combining your clips with an existing template. But if this doesn't quite suit your needs then you can tweak it with new effects, transitions, animations and more.
Useful new effects start with a customisable motion blur which you can apply to picture-in-picture and text objects, while the core program gains excellent Lens Flare, Water Reflection, Tilt-shift and Magnifier tools.
The Subtitle Room now allows you to set your subtitle font, colour and positioning. Which is great, although harder to get excited about as we should really have had that ability before.
The Surround Sound Panner is a smart addition, though. Whether you've a 7.1, 5.1 or just a stereo soundtrack, you now get to control where your video sound comes from.
Everyone will appreciate the major leap in performance, with CyberLink claiming a 40% speed increase in H.264 encoding, and a 300% increase when using Intel's AVX2.
And there are plenty of smaller but still welcome tweaks elsewhere: PowerPoint import, 5.1 Dolby Digital Plus import and editing, enhanced chroma key, smarter content-aware editing, and more.
PowerDirector is available in multiple versions. This one, PowerDirector Ultra, is the base edition, and includes everything we've described above, as well as the PowerDirector Mobile and WaveEditor 2 Express applications, and CyberLink's Content Pack Essential.
PowerDirector Ultimate takes the same feature set, and adds NewBlueFX Video Essentials 2 & 3 (that's 20 extra effects in total), as well as several more of CyberLink's Creative Design and Content Packs (Travel Pack 2, Holiday Pack 4, Romance Pack 3).
PowerDirector Ultimate Suite then has everything in PowerDirector Ultimate, and adds the applications AudioDirector 4, ColorDirector 2 and PhotoDirector 5.
Please note that the trial version here will download a 1MB CyberLink downloader stub, which will then proceed to download the main application from the CyberLink servers.
