Professional video editing for all with PowerDirector

The world of commercial video-editing suites offers popular alternatives like the timeless Sony Vegas or Adobe Premiere, but the license price can be a bit excessive for individual users. To serve this niche Cyberlink has always offered PowerDirector, whose current version 13 has reached maturity to offer an accessible and functional tool for both amateur compositions and professional projects.

PowerDirector and Director Suite is divided into six different editions of the pack that suit different needs. The basic version of the tool, Deluxe, includes a wide array of features, filters, and editing resources that are more than sufficient for your average project, with its license at €53.99/$69.99, while the more advanced editions, with their greater depth in the array of options and the inclusion of additional effects and audio and image editing programs, is priced at the still-accessible €174.99/$194.99 – much less than the aforementioned packages. This info should give you an idea of the value of the goodies we’re about to tell you about now—oh, and you can also use a fully-functional trial version for 30 days.

PowerDirector 13 is so conscious of scalability that it directly splits up its features by level of complexity, with a professional editor on one side and other paths for wizards to create video compositions and presentations via preset templates. The first of these, with the bulk of the content, is the one of most interest to us, and should be totally accessible and familiar to anyone coming from Sony or Adobe as it has the same multi-track timeline layout, preview, and source window – all embedded into an intuitive drag-and-drop control system when the greatest difficulty is the one posed by your project itself.

It’s easy to tell which components are which in the left sidebar: you can insert transitions, effects, superimposed fonts, and post-processing effects visually by checking the preview for each action via the interface itself and dragging the track sets around the screen. All these elements play with the concept of modularity, such that you can expand the array of tools with the catalogue on the Cyberlink website. In fact, advanced packs of presets are sold completely independently of the pack, although the content is completely optional and you can already manipulate, modify, and transform all the existing tools to suit your needs.

In terms of editing support, it’s obviously up to current standards, meaning it can handle videos in 4K resolution as well as H.265, XAVC-s and DTS audio codecs and containers. In addition, the tool catalogue includes features to edit 3D post-processing effects on the video.

Analyzing each of this version’s features one by one doesn’t make much sense given that all the specs are laid out on the official webpage, ranging from a multicamera composition system and a moving-image stabilizer to the edition for mobile devices or the option to sync your projects via a cloud-storage account provided by Cyberlink itself. To see what’s included in each of the editions, check out this comparison table of the different versions of the suite.