I just wanted to share with you all my experience with PowerDirector 8:

It started off as a love story. The smell of warm summer days filled the air, daffodils waving in the distance. PowerDirector 8 was like the woman every man always hopes one day they'd meet. She had the right features, an impressive history, and she was quite a looker. Infatuated, I bought the "Deluxe" (aka "Standard" heh) edition after a short run with the trial.

Well let me tell you. Like marrying that perfect woman, things soon changed.

The features I liked the most were:
- Hardware acceleration for both editing and encoding
- Output to modern formats like m2ts streams using H.264
- Intuitive editor interface with capable controls
- Functional transitions, keyframeable effects, etc
- Actually stable...rare for a video editor
- Fast: Creates shadow copies of videos for HD editing to make it responsive.
- Worked fine on Vista

I started working on a short video project to break in the full version of the editor, and it's like everything had changed:
- Hardware acceleration doesn't work anymore
- Dumbass interface behaviors have become apparent. Right clicking on a clip in the timeline causes the timeline to go back to wherever the carat is if the video wasn't first left-clicked. The trim control provides no way to seek to the current trim points. Etc.
- Crashed five times during the making of a simple 52-second video using no effects and only one transition.
- Randomly refused to work with clips already in the project.
- Shadow copies quit functioning. This caused the trim editor to display pure white video, rendering it useless.
- The encoder would randomly hang so that you have to stop and start rendering again. It would use 100% CPU but do no I/O, so somehow it got into an infinite loop.

And here I thought I'd finally found something worth buying. The last editor I bought was entirely useless--Pinnacle Studio 11. It won't even run or if it does it dies on the output/render screen.

This post is meant to be 50% rant and 50% warning. I'm starting to think all video editor program vendors are conspiring to offer awful, incapable software. They are all unstable, buggy, and unusable as far as I can tell. I've test driven many.

Anyone here use something that wasn't designed by wholly incompetent programmers for under or around $100? Maybe there's something better out there. So far, Windows Movie Maker has a better track record with the exception of having virtually no feature set.