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Xtreme X.I.P.
Cyberlink PowerDirector 8: The Demon Spawn from Hell's Seventh Layer
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.
Particle's First Rule of Online Technical Discussion:
As a thread about any computer related subject has its length approach infinity, the likelihood and inevitability of a poorly constructed AMD vs. Intel fight also exponentially increases.
Rule 1A:
Likewise, the frequency of a car pseudoanalogy to explain a technical concept increases with thread length. This will make many people chuckle, as computer people are rarely knowledgeable about vehicular mechanics.
Rule 2:
When confronted with a post that is contrary to what a poster likes, believes, or most often wants to be correct, the poster will pick out only minor details that are largely irrelevant in an attempt to shut out the conflicting idea. The core of the post will be left alone since it isn't easy to contradict what the person is actually saying.
Rule 2A:
When a poster cannot properly refute a post they do not like (as described above), the poster will most likely invent fictitious counter-points and/or begin to attack the other's credibility in feeble ways that are dramatic but irrelevant. Do not underestimate this tactic, as in the online world this will sway many observers. Do not forget: Correctness is decided only by what is said last, the most loudly, or with greatest repetition.
Rule 3:
When it comes to computer news, 70% of Internet rumors are outright fabricated, 20% are inaccurate enough to simply be discarded, and about 10% are based in reality. Grains of salt--become familiar with them.
Remember: When debating online, everyone else is ALWAYS wrong if they do not agree with you!
Random Tip o' the Whatever
You just can't win. If your product offers feature A instead of B, people will moan how A is stupid and it didn't offer B. If your product offers B instead of A, they'll likewise complain and rant about how anyone's retarded cousin could figure out A is what the market wants.
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