Review CyberLink PowerDirector 18 review

[admin]

Best video editor for Windows

CyberLink PowerDirector 18 review : Read more

 

[Lars Tomasson]

Your review reads like it was copied from the manufacturers product page. When I was in school, I learned to compare and contrast. Without compare and contrast to other products a "review" is near worthless.

I will share my journey so far:
I am looking for a low cost video editor. I prefer to buy rather than rent because of time and money. I don't want my tool to be changing all the time so I need to relearn it.

So far I have looked at Premier Elements 2020, Cyberlink PowerDirector 18, Corel VideoStudio 2020. VideoStudio 2020 doesn't support ALAC (apple lossless) audio, so this was immediately eliminated since all my music is in ALAC format. I have used Elements 2020 and PowerDirector 18 for the last few days. Below are the most significant differences that I have seen.

Render Speed:
PowerDirector 18 is significantly faster (more than 2X) than Elements 2020 since it can use GPU resources for encoding and has an optimization routine. Elements 2020 does not have GPU acceleration. On my Desktop (Xeon E3 1240 V3 with a NVIDEA GTX 1060 6GB) A 1hr 20min 1920x1080 video took 35min to render in PowerDirector 18 and 75min to render in Elements 2020. You would probably see less of a difference in rendering speed on a laptop.

Dual Monitor Display:
PowerDirector 18 makes better use of a 2 monitor display than Elements 2020. On PowerDirector 18 the Media (assets) window can be broken out as well the video display window. If I had three screens, I could probably use all three, since once you break out the screen you can position them anywhere. Elements 2020 has a dual screen mode that allows you to break out the video window from the timeline. The problem is that the timeline tool menu is on the split out video display window, instead of being on the timeline screen. It does allow more screen real estate, but it is not very efficient to have to go over to the other screen to access the menu items. If I learn all the keyboard shortcuts then this will be less important but that is unlikely.

Features:
The jury is still out on this. Offhand looks like PowerDirector 18 has more features then Elements 2020. There are tons of special effects, transitions, and title options. I don't think I will be a big user of these. The main thing I am interested is video stabilization. Both programs have this. PowerDirector also has image lens corrections for all the GoPro cameras as well as others. So if you want less of a fish eye look on your videos you can apply corrections. I can see myself using this. I am not aware that Elements 2020 has lens corrections.

Summary:
PowerDirector 18 looks like a more professional and efficient tool than Elements 2020. Elements 2020 continues to get top reviews, so I am continuing to look at elements 2020 to understand why a lot of "reviewers" think it is superior. So far I am not seeing it. PowerDirector 18 is about 2X more expensive than Elements 2020 but I don't think I will miss that $60 in the long run.

I would have posted this under your review of best 2020 video editing programs, but comments are locked for that "review". Additionally, the comments associated with that article are from another article and are frome 2014-2016 time frame so none of them are relevant to the article. Maybe you could look into deleting those old comments and opening up the comments section for some real comments from your readers?