Budget video editing has never had it so good. With the capabilities of an average PC now easily able to cope with the demands of cutting, overlaying and playing back video edits in real time, the competition among providers vying to offer the best features for the best price – along with ease of use – has really heated up.

That’s great news for editors, but the problem still remains of which option to go for – which is more important, in-house effects and pre-prepared style templates, or in-depth functionality allowing greater creativity? Ultimately, you have to take a look at what’s on offer and decide what suits you best, but PowerDirector enjoys a decent reputation, offering the ability to make good edits without a steep learning curve, while it also offers a fair amount of style templates to experiment with and some decent customisation.

Design and layout

The main screen at start up is the editing setup, made up of a preview screen at the top-right, the timeline along the bottom and, at top-left, a tabbed screen gives access to the libraries of media (video, images and sound), video effects, picture-in-picture effects, titles, transitions, audio-mixing capabilities, voiceovers, and panes for the addition of chapter markers and subtitles for DVD preparation.

Along the top of the screen are buttons that show you where you are in the edit process: Capture, Edit, Produce and Create Disc. By default, you start at the Edit stage, but clicking on Capture prompts the program to look for all the attached audio and video devices. 

If you have a DV camcorder already attached by FireWire it should pick this up immediately and you can import footage using the program to control the cam. Alternatively, if you have a webcam connected to the PC, the program should also pick this up, and you can actually start recording MPEG files from this into PowerDirector directly.

The media library at the Edit stage allows you to import video already stored on the system, as well as any images and sound clips you want to use. We had some trouble importing clips that weren’t shot withPAL settings – the program warns that non-standard video will be converted to PAL with some loss in quality, but some clips shot with mobile phones and stills cameras that we tried to import failed when dragged to the timeline. Footage shot with a camcorder or ripped from disc imported with no problem.

Features

The timeline is clearly laid out with a Video track, Effects track, Picture-in-Picture track, Title track, Voice track and Music track. The Video and Picture-in-Picture tracks make it easy to understand the process of overlaying video, and there are plenty of options for customising the effect using the PiP Designer.

Transparency and motion as well as size are all fully customisable and the Chromakey effect is especially good for making certain areas of colour in the PiP video transparent, making this quite a sophisticated overlay effects editor. 

The split audio function for clips on the main video track combined with the lock function for all tracks can be manipulated to give professional style J- and L-cuts, where the audio from the second clip comes in before the video, making the transition smoother and less noticeable to viewers.

There is a large array of effects on offer in PowerDirector, and many are genuinely useful – although the more flashy effects are best kept to a minimum. The best thing about them is the level of customisation possible.