CyberLink PowerDirector 365 Review

Sep 14, 2023

CyberLink's PowerDirector 365 video editing software bridges the gap between professional editing and consumer friendliness. It's often ahead of professional-grade software in terms of support for new formats and technologies, and it's loaded with tools that help you put together compelling digital movies complete with transitions, effects, and titles. Best of all, it's easy to work with and fast at rendering. PowerDirector is the prosumer video editing software to beat, and a PCMag Editors' Choice winner, earning a five-star rating thanks to its full feature set, ease of use, and polish.

As with Adobe's Creative Cloud, new features appear throughout the year to subscribers of the 365 version of PowerDirector and the larger Director Suite 365, which includes photo and audio software. CyberLink adds features, effects, and improvements at a dizzying pace, as you can see from PowerDirector's new features(Opens in a new window) page.

For CyberLink adepts, this summary shows new features that have appeared since our fall 2022 review update. For subscribers in particular, the company manages to continually add new effects and tweaks to improve existing tools. I'll list the most interesting ones here:

AI Object Selection Effects. These are some striking video effects that let you surround, extend, or duplicate an object or person in your video. See the video below for examples.

Nvidia Denoise. PowerDirector has new tools for denoising both video and audio. The video part is more exciting, as most competitors have audio denoising. Note that each of these new tools requires recent Nvidia graphics hardware on your PC.

Enhanced AI Sky Replacement. This tool, popular in Skylum Luminar and Adobe Photoshop, detects and replaces the sky in your footage with another one you choose or upload.

Intro Designer. Choose from nearly 7,000 templates and contribute intro sequences from an online community.

AI-Powered Motion Tracking. PowerDirector already had motion tracking capability but the new feature is more accurate.

Plenty of New Templates, LUTs, and Content. Every month, subscribers see new sets of media, fonts, and effects that add more creative possibilities.

PowerDirector runs on Microsoft Windows 11, 10, 8.1, and 7, with a 64-bit version required. For AI features, you need Windows 10 or 11. You need a minimum of 4GB RAM and at least a 128MB VGA VRAM graphics card (2GB for AI features). A macOS version arrived in 2021. It requires macOS 10.14 or later and runs on both Intel and Apple Silicon M1-based Macs.

You can try PowerDirector for 30 days with a downloadable trial that adds brand watermarks and doesn't support 4K. Two editions of the standalone video editor are available with a lifetime license, the $99.99 Ultra and the $139.99 Ultimate. Those prices are often discounted.

Another option is to bundle PowerDirector with CyberLink's ColorDirector, AudioDirector, and PhotoDirector in the Director Suite option, which is only available as a subscription for $29.99 per month or $129.99 for a year.

Finally, you can get PowerDirector 365 (the version tested here) as a $69.99-per-year or $19.99-per-month subscription (often discounted). Both subscriptions get you regular updates with new effects, plug-ins, and music samples, as well as the previously mentioned stock media. Note that the subscription is the only option for PowerDirector for Mac.

The higher-end options add loads of third-party special effects from the likes of Boris FX, NewBlue, and proDAD. To see exactly what is in each edition, go to CyberLink's comparison page(Opens in a new window). The pricing is competitive with that of Premiere Elements ($99.99), Corel VideoStudio ($99.99), and Magix Movie Studio ($79.99). Two annoyances are that the program adds too many icons to your start menu, and you can't upgrade the free trial to the paid version—you have to download and reinstall.

Installing the program takes up over a gigabyte of your hard drive, so be sure to use a machine with room to spare. I tested the Ultimate edition on my desktop PC running 64-bit Windows 10 Pro. Director Suite 365 subscribers get the Application Manager applet shown above, which not only lets you install and update the suite apps, but also offers content packs like the Bloggers Social Media pack, with PiP, title, and particle templates.

After optionally signing in to a CyberLink account, the program asks whether you want to optimize GPU hardware acceleration. I can't think of any reason not to, unless you don't want the program to work as quickly as possible!

A startup wizard gets you started with video editing, taking you through the program's main interface elements and basic options. A Quick Start tutorial window shows you the steps involved in creating a video—import; trim; add transitions, effects, and titles; and export. You have the option to watch an online video explaining the processes.

The program's user interface is about as clear and simple as a program with such a vast number of options can be, but it can still get overwhelming when you're deep in the weeds of fine-tuning video or audio effects. It's not quite as simple and friendly as Adobe Premiere Elements or Ashampoo Movie Edit Pro, but that's because it offers more capabilities. CyberLink keeps streamlining the interface and cutting down on clutter. For example, Capture is no longer a main mode button but now a submenu option. You can see a bunch more interface updates on CyberLink's help site(Opens in a new window).

The startup splash screen (below) makes getting to work easy. You start off in a Welcome screen offering big button options for Full Mode, Storyboard Mode, and Slideshow Creator. Two additional choices include Auto Mode and Learning Center. All these modes are self-explanatory.

If you don't need or want all these choices every time you start the program, a simple Always Enter Full Mode checkbox is for you. On this page, you can also choose your video project's aspect ratio—16:9, 4:3, or a 9:16 tall mode.

The PowerDirector editing interface maintains the traditional Source and Preview split panels on the top, with your track timeline along the whole width of the bottom of the screen. You can now have two video preview windows, one for the source and one for the movie, which saves you from having to switch a single preview window between those two functions.

The storyboard view is more than just clip thumbnails. You can drag transitions between clips, apply effects, and add audio clips without switching to timeline view. I like the search box for media and the buttons at the top of the source panel for showing just video, just photos, or just audio in the source panel. Buttons link to video tutorials that pop up in the upper-right corner based on your current activity.

Recent versions have dispensed with mode buttons for Capture, Edit, and Create Disc. The only one left is Produce, and when you're in that mode, you have a back-arrow button that makes getting back to editing clear and easy. You can quickly customize the timeline with a button for adding tracks, and the mouse wheel is your friend when it comes to zooming or moving in the timeline. You're allowed up to 100 tracks each for video and audio. Vegas Movie Studio limits you to 10 tracks (200 if you upgrade to the Platinum level), which is already probably more than most people need, though not enough for high-end projects.

While editing, you can drag media directly onto its source panel or even onto the timeline from File Explorer. You can tag media, and each project retains its own set of content, but you don't get bins as you do with the pro-level products and Pinnacle Studio. Bins bring together all the assets for your project, including transitions and effects. You can, however, pack project assets into a folder, and use the Nested Project capability, discussed below.

By default, you get three pairs of video and audio tracks with CyberLink, as well as effects, title, voice, and music tracks. You can switch the layer order of the tracks to your preference—in some video editing apps (including previous versions of PowerDirector), lower objects on the timeline appear on top of higher tracks, and in others, it's just the opposite. For me, it makes sense to have what appears on top in the video above in the timeline. Now you can choose whichever you're more comfortable with. You can also lock, disable/enable view, or rename tracks from the left track-info area, and you can even use drag and drop to move them up and down on the timeline.

As with most nonlinear video editing software, PowerDirector lets you join and trim clips on the timeline. If you drag a clip to the end of the timeline, it snaps next to the existing clip. If you drag a clip to the middle of the movie, you see a tooltip with five options: Overwrite, Insert, Insert and Move All Clips, and Replace. That last choice completely removes the existing clip, while Overwrite leaves parts of it that the new clip doesn't cover. If you use the Insert button that appears below the source panel when you select a clip, you can get your clip lined up without any fuss.

The Trim tool allows precise control down to the individual frame with two sliders. And the multi-trim tool lets you mark several In and Out points on your clip, a useful tool for cutting out the chaff.

The Precut tool lets you work on source clips before you add them to the timeline, as you can in Final Cut Pro X and Premiere Pro. This is how pro editors work, so it's good to see CyberLink add the capability. In previous versions, you couldn't trim until after you dropped a clip onto the timeline, which left professionally trained editors scratching their heads. You can either do a simple in-and-out trim to create a single trimmed clip or use PowerDirector's wonderful Multi-Trim tool to create multiple Precut clips.

A unique and intuitive selection cursor splits video and delete sections. Fix/Enhance options also include video denoise, audio denoise, and enhancements to punch up color and sharpness. PowerDirector also makes it easy to fix lighting and color. You can independently adjust the brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, sharpness, and white balance.

Both audio and video denoising got a notable boost in version 21 with an Nvidia-powered version for computers equipped with that flavor of graphics hardware. The standard CyberLink denoising did show a subtle improvement on my noisy test footage. I was unable, however, to test the Nvidia method, since you need a card that supports Nvidia Broadcast, meaning an RTX GPU.

One of the best things to come to home video editors in recent years was pioneered by Apple with the Trailers feature in iMovie. Premiere Elements has a similar Video Story feature. With either of them, you fill templates with video and photo content that meets the needs of a spot in the production, such as Group shot, Close-up, or Action shot. The software elaborates these clips with transitions and background music that match your chosen theme.

Similarly, PowerDirector offers Video Templates (in the Project Room left menu choice) with placeholders for your content. From DirectorZone.com(Opens in a new window), CyberLink's Web resource site, you can download these templates, called Express Projects. They are usually in separate opening, middle, and ending units. Business users also get Ad Templates for Facebook and Instagram Stories. Unlike the similar iMovie tool, PowerDirector requires you to add your own background music, as there are no canned scores in the wizard or for Express Projects.

An Express Project only requires two steps: Dragging an Opening, Middle, and Ending onto the timeline, and filling the resulting clip tracks with your media. It's nowhere near as intuitive or clear as iMovie's Trailers or Premiere Elements' Video Story. But it does offer guidance in crafting a digital movie, it's more customizable, and the results look pretty cool.

You get to the Magic Movie Wizard right from the startup menu's Auto Mode option. This features a four-step process: importing source content, adjusting and enhancing that content, previewing, and producing. As with the templates, you can download various Magic Styles from DirectorZone to use with this feature. It analyzes your content and delivers a project that you can output to a file, a disc, or to the main editor for tweaking. I found this last choice necessary, since the tool doesn't know if two photos are nearly identical, and clips aren't trimmed. I had better luck with Movavi Video Editor’s similar Montage Wizard feature.

Intro Designer, new with 2022's version 21 update, addresses one of the most pressing needs of today's online video creator or vlogger who needs consistency in their productions. You access the Intro Designer with its new left-rail icon to enter the Intro Video Room. Here, you can choose from a selection of nearly 7,000 intro templates, mostly contributed by other PowerDirector users and shared to DirectorZone, the online service of the app. They're organized into Themes like Beauty, Education, Food, Pets, Sport, and Travel—23 categories in all.

You can tap a heart icon to save a template to your Favorites for easy reuse. For user-created templates, you can see the creator's other contributions. As with other PowerDirector sources, you can search within the collection, and you can sort it by Likes, Views, Remixes, and Date.

Double-click on an intro template you like and the actual Intro Designer window opens, letting you customize its text, duration, animation, content, and music. Other options are to right-click it for more choices or drag it to the timeline. You then save your modified template and can optionally share it to the online community. After that, it's a simple matter to add it to the beginning of your next episode.

Subscribers to PowerDirector 365 or Director Suite 365 (which representatives told me account for most customers now) can get professionally created video, photo, and audio content from well-known stock supplier Shutterstock. You can also get photo and video content from Getty Images' iStock collection.

It's easy to find the stock you want. A Premium Stock Content thumbnail appears first in the source panel. Clicking it opens the stock search window with two tabs for Shutterstock and iStock from Getty Images. You can use search terms to find an appropriate clip, picture, or sound sample. Clicking on the thumbnail of one you're interested in opens the full (watermarked) image in your default web browser. Note that you don't get the entire library of Shutterstock. A search for pizza only turned up 15 video clips, while the Shutterstock site has hundreds. Of course, you'd pay a lot more for access to the full selection. Shutterstock licenses start at $99 per month for use of just five clips, so there's real value in having some included.

PowerDirector can import and edit footage from GoPro cameras, as well as from other action cameras from the likes of Sony, Kodak, and Ion. The dedicated Action Camera Center under the Designer button menu appears when you select a clip. It offers effects like camera-profile-based corrections for fisheye distortion, vignette, camera shake, and color. It also includes effects favored by action cam users, such as freeze-frame and time-shifts like slowdowns, speedups, and replays.

Motion tracking lets an object, text, or effect follow around something moving in your video. It's a common technique for blurring moving objects or displaying text that moves together with something or someone. This feature has been updated and improved with AI since my last test of it. You pick the Motion Tracker choice from the same Tools menu as the Action Camera, after selecting a clip in the timeline. A download ensues, and in the resulting dialog, you have choices of "AI-based tracking with better results" and "Track with faster speed."

Using the AI option is simple. You move and size a selection box (or circle) over the person or object you want to track, choose the AI option and click the Track button, and then choose the text, video, clip, or effect you want to follow the track. With the AI option, the box stays with the tracked item as it moves around in the frame impressively accurately. When I tried again with the faster, non-AI option, the box lost my subject a few times.

For attaching text to motion-tracked objects in PowerDirector, you get a good choice of many fonts, colors, and sizes. You can even rotate the text with a handle. You can also overlay a mosaic, spotlight, or blur effect. One thing I'd like to be able to add, however, is a speech bubble, something offered by Adobe and Corel.

The AI option makes it easier to get a track correct than in Corel VideoStudio and Adobe Premiere Elements, which is prone to lose an object if it, for example, passes behind a pole.

The included Color Match option is important for movies shot at different angles with different equipment and lighting. The button appears when you have two clips selected. You scrub to the frame in each that you want to match, choosing a reference and a target that will receive the reference frame's colors. It previously did a spotty job in my tests with scenery and décor, but on retesting, it matched a cooler-toned interior to a warmer one with aplomb. You can adjust the level of matching, as well as brightness and saturation.

Here's how two clips look before color matching:

And here's the result after using the feature:

The support for LUTs, or lookup tables, can give your movie a uniform look by applying a color mood like those you see in the cinema, like the cool blue look of The Revenant. PowerDirector uses the alternate acronym in its interface, CLUT, for color lookup table. The program supports a healthy number of file formats, including 3DL, CSP, CUBE, M3D, MGA, RV3DLUT, and VF. CyberLink now offers a decent selection of LUT packs, so you're no longer on your own in finding them. I was successfully able to test LUT support using Kodak film style and day-for-night LUTs from Adobe Premiere Pro.

For a higher level of color grading, use the Director Suite's included ColorDirector application. It lets you do cool effects like shining a light source from a 3D point of your choice, in addition to standard color grading functions.

Both Adobe Premiere Pro and Apple Final Cut Pro X let you combine edited groups of clips and move them around as a unit. PowerDirector's Nested Projects feature adds this capability. To use it, you create a new project and drop an existing one onto the timeline. This creates a tabbed interface above the timeline, which lets you edit the nested project separately from within the new main project. You can also treat an inserted nested project as a PiP.

If you're into keyframe editing, which allows precise control over when effects begin and end based on the exact frames you choose, PowerDirector is there for you. It offers PiP, overlays, motion, cropping, and time codes. All effects and adjustments can be pegged to keyframes. You can also edit the anchor point and to use Hold mode, which stops the progression temporarily for a jumpy effect.

You also get more than 100 transitions and special effects to choose from, including ten from NewBlue. The app also lets you install third-party effect plug-ins from Pixelan and ProDAD. CyberLink often adds hot new transitions, the latest being shape, distortion, and glitch transitions.

Transitions are easy to add, and the program can decide what material before and after to use when you drop this kind of effect to a join line between clips. A search box lets you find a specific type, like Page Curl. You can even create custom transitions using your images with the Alpha set of transitions, which rely on masking and transparency. It's fun to make a transition out of a friend's head, as shown below.

PowerDirector's chroma-key tool lets you shoot someone with solid-color backgrounds (usually green) and create the appearance that they're in a different scene by choosing a new background. CyberLink has simplified the controls from four to two. There are now just Color Range and Denoise controls. You can now add more than one color key, too. I tried this with an orange and gray background and with a yellow and gray background. These color choices showed me why pros use green. The orange background keyed out my subject's lips, and it was harder to get the correct mask.

With a green screen, the keying worked well. Even in the default mode, I noticed none of the green haloes I sometimes see around test subjects in other programs.

The Mask Designer lets you add transparency to mask objects, including your own images, and text. It includes tools for creating a mask with a brush or by defining vertex selection points. A feather feature lets you blend the mask into the background video for a ghostlike effect. These are fun effects, and as with just about all the others, you can use keyframes to gradually ease in and out of these mask effects. You can't use them for motion tracking, though, as you can with Adobe Premiere Elements' new masking tool.

Beyond simple static text, the Title Designer offers custom and preset motion possibilities. You get fire, electric waves, and neon, along with a good selection of fly-in animations. Two-color gradients, lighting, and glow are at your disposal. They can give those weekend trip videos George Lucas-style blockbuster opening credits. Put boxes around text to get a button, which you could use as your Subscribe button on online media, or edit the colors in motion title templates, and even use an eyedropper to match a color, for example, of a logo.

A recent update added an automatic speech-to-text tool for creating captions, accessed via the appropriately named Subtitle Room button or via the Use Speech to Text right-click context menu. Simply tap the CC button on the left rail, then choose a particular track or all audio tracks and the language (English, Japanese, or Chinese) and press Create. The new component is downloaded the first time you use the tool, then it analyses the clip and creates text overlay tracks. For a 23-second clip, it took about 15 seconds. And the result was impressive, with very few errors, which I could easily correct in the created clips. You can also move where they should appear in the video, though the initial result was excellent.

This kind of feature is in demand by professional video producers, and it only came to Adobe Premiere Pro in 2021. But the capability has become fairly widespread, arriving in TikTok and Instagram during the past year.

If you have multiple video tracks on your timeline, you can simply grab the corner handles in the preview window to resize an overlayed clip or even rotate and animate it. The program also offers preset PiP grids—from 2 by 2 to 10 by 10—and your clip tracks snap to fill the resulting spaces. The PiP Designer window makes creating PiP movies simpler than in any competing app.

Another tool for creating PiP effects is the Video Collage Designer. You access it from the Plugins menu item, which opens a new window that shows templates with your clips on the side. Drag and drop the latter into the former, and you get a nifty styled and animated picture-in-picture.

Another PiP-ish feature is the Shape Designer, which you get to via the Video Overlay (PiP Objects) Room. It lets you customize shapes starting from squares, ovals, or speech bubbles, but it doesn't let you draw a shape in freehand. For that, you can use the program's Paint Designer, which shows your painting, animated.

With so many people shooting events simultaneously with their HD camera phones, multicam is no longer just for professionals. PowerDirector allows up to 100 multicam tracks, but what this really means is that you can sync that many tracks by audio in the main timeline. The actual multicam switching interface still just has four video sources.

For synchronization, you get a choice of Audio Analysis (the best choice for amateurs), Manual, Timecodes, File Created Time, and Markers on Clips. When I used Audio Analysis, my two clips synced perfectly. The program lets you choose which track's audio should be used, or you can import a separate audio track. Hitting Record played all angles synchronized, letting me switch among them. The tool creates sub-clips labeled 1 to 4 for the camera angles, with adjustable split points.

When you're done cutting, the clip sequence appears on the regular timeline. Subclips are in separate tracks, but you can't adjust the cut points there without losing footage and messing up the synchronization. The multicam designer itself lets you adjust these. Thankfully, you can also reopen a multicam sequence in the designer after you've sent it to the timeline. In all, it's a well-done and powerful tool.

AI painting-style filters were popularized by the iPhone app Prisma. PowerDirector offers plug-ins that perform similar magic on your video clips. Four packs of these AI styles are included: Chinese Painting, Van Gogh, Impressionists 1 (Manet), and Impressionists 2 (Monet). CyberLink plans to produce monthly new AI packs for subscribers. Note that they're not small. Some are more than a gigabyte in size.

You don't get to these styles from the Effects tab but from the Plugins menu choice. The styles open a new window, where you need to open the clip for the effect again. It's not really integrated into the editor as the old Effects are, which work right on timeline clips selected.

The effects, like those from Prisma, are quite entrancing and beautiful. I do wish you could adjust their strength with a slider, but I guess that's up to the AI, rather than my inferior intelligence. You can trim the clip you're applying the effect to, and then you hit the Transform button. It's not super fast: A 16-second clip took 2 minutes to transform.

AI Sky Replacement is a separate plug-in, not an option from the timeline editor. In the tool's own separate window, you choose a clip from your drive, choose a sky to replace with, and tweak the result with Feather, Land Ambient (to adjust color on the non-sky portion of the frame), Sky Fade, and Position. When I first tried it with a skyline scene using no adjustments, the buildings were tinted by the blue sky effect. What was tricking the tool was that some of the buildings were more distant than others in the foreground. It works much better with a clearly delineated border between land and sky.

My second test was still tricky, since trees made a complex pattern in the midst of the sky, but the program handled that with aplomb. This example could stand some de-saturation to look more natural, but the intent is to show you it works.

New for 2022 are striking effects that encircle detected objects or people in your video. The feature requires a CPU with AVX2 support. From the fx menu, you head down to Style Effect and then choose AI Object Selection to see the 18 choices, including multiple flavors of Aura, Contour, Electric Shock, Ghost, Light Snake, Motion Trail, and more. The effect took 25 seconds to apply to a 12-second clip.

My first results with this new tool were not great. It was unable to select the person in my test clip, perhaps because the background wasn't flat. An attempt on another clip was more successful, and the electricity flashing around the subject was pretty darn cool looking.

For several years, PowerDirector has supported 4K video content, but I put it to the test with much higher-resolution footage: 8K from a Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra. The software also supports XAVC-S standard of 4K and HD videos used in Sony cameras and camcorders. This joins support for Canon 1DC, JVC HMQ-10, and GoPro Hero3 4K content.

In editing GoPro 4K footage, performance is better than I expected, not even slowing down with complex transitions. The 8K clip I tested with PowerDirector was easy to work with, especially since the program downsized the preview resolution to HD for snappier editing. Being first with 4K capability was a real feather in CyberLink's cap, but most competing products, such as Corel VideoStudio, also now support 4K. You can preview in 4K, as opposed to viewing a reduced resolution, to speed up editing. You'd only want to do this if your PC has high-spec components and a lot of RAM, however.

PowerDirector includes a powerful screen capture tool that lets you include a picture-in-picture view of simultaneous webcam recordings. You can size the resulting PiP image to taste and lock it to an app window. The utility's Game mode will appeal to YouTubers who want to show off their skills. A Time Limit option makes sure you don't record until your hard disk overflows with video data.

Audio tracks in the timeline by default show waveform lines, and you can turn up and down volume by grabbing and dragging them. The sound plays as you scrub in the timeline, which is helpful for locating a part of your movie based on acoustic events. The Audio Room, a simple track-volume mixer, features Normalize buttons for each track to even out clip sound levels.

It's also easy to create voice-overs with the Voice-Over Recording Room, accessible from a tab sporting a microphone icon. The included Audio Editor lets you correct distortion, equalize, generate reverb, and apply a few special effects. It also includes VST plug-in support for third-party effects.

You get loads of canned background music, and the standard video editor includes beat detection, which puts markers on the timeline at music beats so you can synchronize clip action.

With the version 21 update, the Audio Denoise option in the Fix/Enhance panel gets a new choice of Apply Nvidia Audio Noise Removal. Obviously, you need an Nvida GPU for this tool, which targets conversations, to work. After a download, the tool told me something wasn't compatible with it, though I do have a decent Nvidia-powered graphics card. It seems not to work on all content types.

The alternative CyberLink Audio Denoise tool has choices of Stationary, Wind, and Clicking noise—extremely useful options for what users are likely to experience. It also offers AI-powered Speech Enhancement, which removes all but spoken words. I tried this with a friend talking while the mighty Niagara River was raging in the background, and the result sounded like she was in a studio! The Wind Removal tool was equally remarkable in its effectiveness in my testing.

For advanced mixing, recording, syncing, cleaning, and restoration, there's AudioDirector (included with the Ultimate Suite edition). This separate app offers round-trip editing from PowerDirector. It lets you easily apply effects and fixes that are preserved when you later open them in PowerDirector. Impressive ability to remove vocals from music, apply de-reverb, and pitch changes are also in its arsenal.

Auto Remix fits soundtrack music to your video length. This now appears in the main PowerDirector program as Smart Fit for Duration atop the Tools dropdown. It can take any song, analyze it, and often convincingly shorten or lengthen it. The AudioDirector version requires you to manually enter the new length time; it doesn't bring your movie in for automatic fitting, while the PowerDirector version lets you set the length to the current insertion position. In either, you can see where the edit occurred with a squiggly line. Listening to the result, I couldn't tell the music had been cut at that point except when cutting a song down very short.

Automatic ducking doesn't add quacks to your soundtrack. Instead, it automatically lowers background audio during dialog on another track. It didn't do much for a loud concert video on top of an interview but worked better with a standard background track.

CyberLink's investment in 64-bit optimizations and graphics hardware acceleration has paid off. PowerDirector is in the top group of performers when it comes to rendering video projects. It also feels snappy from the time you start up through all but the most demanding editing activities. Other speed boosters include Nvidia CUDA and AMD OpenCL (Open Computing Language) support, as well as its proprietary intelligent SVRT, which determines how your clips should be rendered for the best quality output and fastest editing.

For render speed testing, each program joins seven clips of various resolutions ranging from 720p all the way up to 8K, and applies cross-dissolve transitions between them all. I then note the time it takes to render the project to 1080p30 with H.264 and 192Kbps audio. The output movie is just over five minutes in length. I run this test on a Windows 11 PC sporting a 3.60GHz Intel Core i7-12700K, 16GB RAM, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, and a 512GB Samsung PM9A1 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD.

Many of the programs in my test, PowerDirector included, use Nvidia's video encoder, which means the results are starting to cluster. The outliers are Wondershare Filmora on the fast end, and ACDSee Luxea at the slow end of the spectrum.

Mac users can finally take advantage of PowerDirector’s multitude of effects, editing tools, and format support. PowerDirector is available on the Mac App Store, which eases installation. The software runs on macOS 10.14 and later and on both Intel and ARM-based Macs with Rosetta support.

The interface is nearly identical to that of the Windows version, and you get a surprising number of editing and effect features. They include up to 100 tracks on the timeline, transitions, effects (including LUT support and lens profiles), speed changing, PiP Designer, Particles (think rain and falling leaves), and keyframe control. You get green screen chroma keying, voiceover recording, and titles and subtitles.

The feature set on PowerDirector for Mac is now nearly at parity with the Windows version. It now includes motion tracking and video stabilization, but there's no multicam editing, nor do you get the dedicated ColorDirector program.

Recent updates add features previously missing for the Mac: Shape Designer, Enhanced Masking and Blending, Color Match, Lighting adjustments, and even the new speech-to-text feature.

Performance on my test 3.1GHz MacBook with Intel Core i5 and 8GB RAM gave me nothing to complain about. Adding long clips, applying transitions, and previewing everything went well, without any noticeable delays. Even a PiP sequence with four overlaid clips previewed smoothly.

Output options are excellent, with support for HEVC, MKV, MP4, M2TS, and XAVC S, along with easy output formatting for YouTube and Vimeo. You get CyberLink’s fast video rendering technology with hardware acceleration, but there are no DVD authoring or burning capabilities—things YouTubers could care less about, but wedding videographers and hobbyists may still want.

PowerDirector continues to lead the way among consumer video editing software. With each release, it gets closer to professional-level apps. While this isn't a short review, there simply isn't sufficient room here to discuss its entire feature set, including slideshows, disc menus, 3D editing, screen recording, content-aware features, and animated object design tools, to name just a few. Its wealth of powerful tools would be enough to earn it a strong recommendation, but its extremely fast rendering speed and intuitive interface help it earn a PCMag Editors' Choice award and a five-star rating.

CyberLink PowerDirector 365 for Mac and Windows is fast and full of features, giving you pro-level video editing tools with consumer-level ease.

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