Others say...

"A Great Improvement Over Version 5 and Version 4"
I first bought PD vs 4 and loved the ease of the program. It's only flaw was that it was so easy I quickly wanted to do more than vs 4 could handle. So I purchased vs 5 and was shocked at how bad the program was. It would hang and crash if I looked at it sideways.

If you are still using vs 5, the only way I ever found to make anything with it was to save the project as a huge AVI file, get the trail version of Ulead, bring in the AVI file as a movie clip, and burn it via Ulead. I would have switched to Ulead totally, but PD is just a better program during the production phase of the project.

Don't bother with their customer service. Every plea for help will tell you to uninstall the program, reinstall it, and update your drivers. A total waste. I even changed out DVD drives and it didn't work.

So I was very hesitant to buy vs 6 but I finally decided I would try it one more time and if it didn't work, I would go with Adobe. As always, I made a 5 minute movie WITH SOUND that changed in a scene so I could see if it would record and if the sound would drift during the project. A problem with vs 5. Vs 6 worked without a hitch.

With vs 5 if you left the program to look for a picture on the internet or did anything, the sucker would hang and crash. With vs 6 that has never happened even once after months of use. In fact I have it open now and am using it with no problems.

The new menu templates are far better than the ones in vs 4 where you could not move anything around and vs 5 which never worked.

My ONLY complaint has been that when I have tried to have it render and burn more than 1 disk at a time, the burn fails. No explanation other than an error code which would cause customer service to tell me to uninstall and reinstall the program.

So I have to either burn a disk and move the audio/video folders to the computer and burn them with another program, which can take 1 hour per disk, or render and burn them 1 at a time via the program. Which can take 2-3 hours per disk on my pretty fast computer.

All of that aside, for the person who does not want to take months to learn how to use Adobe, this is a great program. You don't need any instruction on how to use it, but allow a day to practice with special effects and sound mixing. The controls are not that precise in this cheap program. But for the money I have made some really amazing projects and would recommend vs 6 to anyone.

If you have vs 5, give vs 6 a chance via the trial version and see if it makes a difference.

"Flawed and poor support"
Looks great when you start out with some nice features - but it is flawed. As you will read in many places it is prone to crashing. The biggest problem for me is that an mpeg clip looks great in the media collection but as soon as you add it to the timeline it degrades in quality badly (fuzzy and with artefacts). I though this was just a problem with the preview (although I had it sent on highest quality rendering preview), but it carrys through to the final 'high quality' movie. Support are, of course, no help - they send you an automated reply that is of no help at all. Don't waste your money - under no circumstances buy this product - you will be disappointed in a very short time.

"Works as promised"
I don't understand why some people have had trouble with this software. I have made several DVD's now and have had no problems. The only thing I don't really care for is the long time it takes to burn the DVD. That may be my hardware rather than the program. It can take awhile to create a DVD but I think it comes down to what kind of product you wish to produce. I find the drag and drop feature to be so easy and intuitive to use.

I have added music and subtitles with ease, creating DVD's for family and for achive purposes.

I have recommended this program to all my friends and family with video cameras. I recently made a nice DVD of our second childs birth and was able to add still photos as well. Use of the multi trim was great for cutting out parts that ran long but still wanted to use the core video file.

You don't need a degree in video to use it, which was a relief to us.

Great product.

"Frustrating experience"
I started trying Powerdirctor from its 5th version. PowerDirector has some nice features. But at every video task my kids and I tried to do, it has never been a smooth process. It crashed so many times during the process that I had to save for each step. After you finally passed editing and authoring part, it started its very slow and long producing (generate MPEG file) part. You just pray it would not stop in the middle, and unfortunately it often did. And in the final burning stage (write to DVD), it can also stuck some where, which means you have to repeat the painful process again. That night, my daughter's little video project was due the following day, so she just needed to get it done, But 2 minutes of small video project turned into a 6-hour of nightmare. We burned DVD 3 times, and still could not get that to play on two of our DVD players.

The reason I still tried to use PowerDirector is that it is one of the few to allow me to drop my DVD Video Camera's file directly into the program. I don't know why other software do not allow me to do that? Like I said, this program has some nice features, but if it cannot make basic functions running smoothly, it is worthless.

After wasting $100 for this one, I'm in the process of finding another video editing tool again. Adobe Premier is too complicated and too expensive, all the others have all kind of problems. Maybe it's time to switch to MAC again.


"Mine has worked 99.9% perfectly, happy to say."
This is available on a 30 day free trial basis, if you find it via Google. I have had only one minor problem with one video clip, that I did solve. I have had no crashes or other problems at all. I went crazy trying to get Pinnacle Studio to ever work - that one crashed all the time. I have captured video clips with no problems, have edited them with no problems, and have put the result on to a DVD disk. So I'll buy it. Stay away from Pinnacle products is my advice, though.