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Produce Movie Disc: Part 2 - Editing Video files and photos

Video editing:

Power Producer itself is only able to do three basic editing steps, more advanced editing must be done with its bundled Power Director software. Anyway, let's look into the Power Producer functions first.

Editing clips with Power Producer 3:

The three editing functions that Power Producer offers are: AB-cut, split and merge. All of these functions can easily be done within two or three steps.

AB-cut enables us to cut off the beginning or the ends of our clips while keeping the rest of the content or we can simply keep the beginning and the end by cutting out a part inside the clip. However, there is no option to cut out more single parts of our clips with one single step (multi cut). This means that we would have work with a 'trick" and must split our video into single clips on each position where we want to change something. Later, when all changes are made we can merge it again to one single video. This is in my opinion, an annoying and time intensive workaround.

The function works without any problems as long as we want to cut captured or add clips. But when it comes to video clips which are already edited with Power Director and are added as Power Director Project, then Power Producer quits without any error message.

On the next tab we can easy merge two or more of our clips to one single video file. The function itself is very easy to use and works without any problems. Although, we can only merge video files with video files and photos with photos and here Power Producer no longer cares when we want to combine a captured video with a video that comes from an added Power Director project.

The third and last tab in the edit clips section of Power Producer is the split tab. Once more an easy to use function which needs no further explanation.

So, that's all regarding the video editing functionality of Power Producer itself. Let us now take a look into the editing power of Power Director 2 Express, which can be opened by clicking the 'Advanced Editing" button, seen in the screen above.

Advanced Video Editing (PowerDirector 2 Express):

Once opened, we see again a well organised and easy to understand interface. The clip video window on the right is used for a quick navigation through the clip, or to preview our changes.

On the left, we can see that CyberLink has subdivided its advanced video editing into seven so called 'rooms". These rooms should make it easier to create good-looking videos step by step. Under the 'rooms" section we can also see some other interesting functions of this software, CyberLinks Magic Tools. Four Magic or better said auto editing functions which can better the video quality, remove annoying noise, zoom and pan still images, cut the video down to shorter duration and auto regulate the volume of the added background music.

Not to forget the buttons for splitting, cutting and colour settings as well as timeline and storyboard functions.

Well, a lot of functions but how reliable are they? We will see.

Since we have opened our video file by using the advanced editing button in PowerProducer we do not need to add a separate video file for editing, but to check out Power Directors ability to add clips and pictures we will take a short look on this function.

We just need to open the media room, click on the load media button and select if we want to add a single file or a whole folder. This works for all types of required file types. For videos and photos as well as for sound files which we probably want to add as background music. Once we added the media files to the room, we can detect the scenes and add them to the video track via drag and drop. Scene detection is possible in 3 different ways, automatically by setting the sensitivity, splitting conforms to the time code or manual split. All the functions are working well; however, the scene detection via sensitivity setting seems a bit too sensitive, especially when you are a home video recording newbie.

In the next step we want to split and cut our video and since it works in the same way like we have seen in PowerProducer itself, also with the same limitations, we do not go into much detail here and continue with adding some effects. But instead of adding some effects, we quickly notice that we need to upgrade to the deluxe version before we have the pleasure to add the effects.

However, let's continue with adding the title.

Power Director offers a lot of good looking title effects which can easily previewed by just moving the mouse curser over the icons, after choosing the effect we want, we just move it to a position elsewhere in the timeline via drag and drop. Editing the text, colour and to change the effect again is also a very easy job. You see, it's nothing more to say here. Let's continue.

The next things we want to add are some nice looking transition effects between the scenes. The function itself works in the same way as we have seen for the titles before, but we can choose between far more effects. Anyway, it's a nice feature.

Audio mixing and voice over recording is again self-explanatory and therefore we'll jump directly to the chapter settings.

The software shows us four possible ways to set the chapters of our project. We can set a chapter point at the beginning of each video clip; we can set them at fixed intervals, by a given number of chapters or by hand if we don't trust the software. For this project we have decided to go for nine chapters set via the 'evenly" option.

Now we have taken all the steps necessary  with the software in order to get a nice looking result. Anyway, we haven't looked into the 'magic" functions, but from our testing we can say that they work well and gave us fairly good results. The only negative thing to add here is once more the limitation of a feature, which many would like to have in their software, the magic music feature, a feature to synchronise the added music with the video in Hollywood style.

Well, now let's close the Power Director software to jump back to PowerProducer to test the photo editing capabilities of the software.

Photo slideshow Editing:

Like we have seen before in the adding files part of this review, the software offers the main slide show editing features, immediately after we have added the files to our project. Well, this is a bit out of order but still no problem.

The first option in this section is the background music. We can quickly choose the song we want to add and also set fade in and fade out effects.

Next, we want to set the duration time of our pictures. We are allowed to choose between the different types of duration, which are looking ok and are for sure enough.

Last but not least, we want to add some good looking transition effects and here we can really choose between many good looking effects or we can just set the option to random to see all the effects in our slideshow.

Another nice feature is the ability to back up the photos in original size on our disc.

Well, if you don't want background music or for slideshows that do not contain many pictures, then we will be very happy with these functions. But at the point where we want to create a big show with one hundred pictures and more, we want to combine them with background music and we want them to view over a acceptable time, we will quickly see the main limitation of the software. The fact that we can only add one song for the background music, and this is indeed too little for such slideshows. Of course we can set it to auto repeat, but who wants to listen to the same song three times in a row?

Now, let's take a look into advanced photo editing.

Advanced Photo Editing

Advanced editing is the next available option; by clicking the advanced editing button, the software opens the currently selected photo with Photo Now for advanced editing.

The program itself does not offer many of the advanced options which we can see in other photo editing software. It's very limited and offers only basic functions to improve photo quality. Of the available functions, one of the most important is the Auto Fix function, which we can see in the screen above. It is capable of automatically correcting of brightness, contrast and balance. The function works well, without any problems and the output quality of the edited pictures is good. More advanced users can also try to get the best result by using the manual settings.

Another function from which I expected more is the Special Effects function. It offers only six non-spectacular effects.

Other functions, such as rotate, resize, crop and red eye removal are also standard in each photo editing solution.

Further there is no option to jump directly to the next picture and it's a bit annoying to close PhotoNow every time after we have finished the editing steps and we want to edit the next picture.

Finally, we discovered big problems when we wanted to edit more than 10 pictures. After picture ten, the software was no longer able to find pictures which we have added to or edited a minute before and crashed with the following error message.

After the message appeared once, we had to quit and restart PowerProducer to be able to continue with editing.

OK, enough, we give up with photo editing and continue with adding/editing menus and chapters.