Creating home movies for the home user continues to be a challenge for many, and what I like about this application is the ease of importing different types of video and still image material it recognized my Hi-8 Recorder and captured . Power Director 5 comes with a excellent pre-loaded media library, the editing portion of the package allows you to do picture in picture, editing if you have tuner card for your PC and is easy to place titles, record voice, import video, overlay music, simple video editing and click and drag effects placement all in a easy to understand timeline editor.
The application allows you to export in widescreen or normal mode. One feature I wanted to try was what they term Magic Fix, it was able to sharpen a blurred image dramatically, the application also had a function called Magic Clean that automatically enhanced the video brightness the application seemed to do a very good job in this department, I always am skeptical about non pro level editing applications ability to actually clean up images with out over compensating or making the image look unnatural. Titles were easy to make and the application cam with 41 different styles which makes for a very good starter package to give your videos each a unique look. They do offer additional styles packages online.
Overall a very good application which is priced at 89.95. In my opinion this application would be targeted to the person that is getting started in video editing . I would recommend utilizing the tutorials in the application to understand the relationships of editing within the timeline editing area as it took me a few minutes to get the hang of the interaction of the elements in the timeline editing bar. [www.cyberlink.com]