Cyberlink PowerDirector 11 Ultra

UPDATE 2013/04/04 (April) I did finally get it to work. It seems like it's going to be useful and maybe even fun but I've only had it up and running about a day and a half. It took many hours over several days...trial and error mostly...to figure out what PowerDirector did not remove in the uninstall so it could actually start out fresh. As I've had to do with quirky software in the past, I had to search the hard drive for any folders or files that might remain after uninstalling. Then, I search the Windowws Registry to find things of the same ilk and I try deleting them. Of course, before starting the process, I have to image my OS partition to be prepared in case I massacre the OS files to the point of no return. I don't know which "delete" made the magic because I did multiple things at once...however...it now will launch and run.Cyberlink did finally respond with human (rather than bot) intervention. However, they want me to send screenshots, dxdiag logs, and a whole bunch of other stuff so they can analyze. Well. I'm up and running on my own so I'm going to politely decline their offer. If they had asked for that a few days ago I might have done it but I don't know that would have helped any. I think it would have just been more busy work designed to keep me offline and out of their way. We now know the fix was deleting stuff. Tech support will never advise you to delete stuff from the registry. They know 90% of their customers can't do that.So, the basic install works. But, in addition, there are some additional "content" installers that are part of the Ultra package. One is a separate 1.7 Gig installer called "essentials" and then there's a 0.9 Gig installer that is called "premium". I haven't had the nerve yet to try them although I want to because I guess that's where the snazzy transititions and effects are harbored. I'm just not ready for more installation problems right now. Maybe some day after I've had a few martinis I'll be ready to do the deed.Oh, and get this. The update/patch files at Cyberlink carry a payload. Oh, yes. It's true. You have to carefully decline a Google installer when you run an update. How about that? You're in trouble so you run to get a patch to fix broken software and they slip a Google thing in there. Really? Is that they way to do it?UPDATE 2013/03/30: It did take 12 hours to download from Amazon. So, consider the "download" option to be similar to a "next day" delivery. I still cannot use the program. It did nothing but crash so I tried the uninstall/reinstall routine but now it won't launch as it complains that it is cannot find MFC90U.dll. (Of course, that's a part of Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 runtime and CyberLink installs that runtime as part of its install routine.) When I contact CyberLink support through email, they only regurgitate and reflect my statements back to me or they answer a question that I did not ask. It's as if they have a bot program autoresponding and I think that is the case. CyberLink support is of no help whatsoever but I must continue to hammer away at them hoping I'll eventually land upon someone or something that knows something and is willing to share because Amazon does not accept returns of downloaded software. And, of course, I'm Googling like crazy trying to find a fix. If I figure something out, I'll come back to post. I suspect others will experience this problem. In the meantime, my $58 for the software has only left me with a big obstacle to overcome so I can troubleshoot CyberLink's software for them.MY ORIGINAL REVIEW POST:It will take over 10 hours to download this from Amazon's server. Something is very, very slow. Web page for CPD11Ultra says it's 654 MB but when you fire up the Amazon download manager to get it, you discover it is actually over 3 Gigs. That would be okay because I've got a good fast fiber optic connection but something is dragging the bits through sludgy mud before they get in the stream. The server is doling out the bits so that over 4 hours have passed and I've only got about 1.2 Gigs of the total 3.21 Gigs. The Amazon download manager says there's another 8 hours to go! It's going to be 12 hours waiting for this application. Adding to the anxiety, however, is the expectation that the installer will fail because some bits are whacked and I'll have to restart a 12 hour download again. I'm pretty sure this will make me shy away from Amazon's other download services (movies, software, games, etc.) I called Amazon customer service. They could see what I was trying to download but said they couldn't do anything to speed it up. So, here I sit. 4 hours down and another 8 hours to go but I'll be in bed by then!2013/03/30 ELABORATION ON TODAY'S UPDATEI still can't use the program. It did nothing but crash when I tried to encode a short movie time line. Naturally, the next intervention was to uninstall and reinstall. Tried that. Now, I can't launch the program. It complains that it cannot find mfc90u.dll. Turns out that's a Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 file. Cyberlink PowerDirector installs an old version of M$ Visual C++ 2008 during the PowerDirector installation process. So, why can't PowerDirector find its own files? I think that's a question that CyberLink should easily be able to answer.I believe my download from Amazon was intact because the Amazon download manager utility ran a MD5 hash check on the files and it reported that all was okay.It's frustrating when I consider that CyberLink has sold thousands of software packages. You know that my problem cannot be unique. It must have happened to many. And, yet, when I contact the people who coded the software, all they tell me is a repeat of the things I say in my email query. I tell them I have already installed, uninstalled, and reinstalled. Their answer is to uninstall and reinstall. Do they think that just because they say it then it will be effective even though I have already done that?Obviously, the CyberLink uninstall/reinstall routine is flawed. That's why it can't find the Microsoft C++ 2008 runtime that CyberLink put there. So, what good does it do to tell me to do that over and over? If it failed, then it will continue to fail. Only CyberLink coders can determine why that is so. But, the problem won't get past the CyberLink bots! The bots just keep saying uninstall/reinstall!!!

UPDATE ! July 17, 2013The latest patch seems to have improved the stability quite a bit. I still had a couple of app crashes doing a complex video but nothing like it was before. Considering the power that this editor has, it deserves serious consideration now.[Original Review]I've used a few different versions of Power Director now (6,7,8 & 11) and they've all had an easy to use interface and good features but very crash prone.It's a 3.21 GB download and after you install the main program, you need to download and install a free patch. Then there are two content packs to install. It takes a couple of hours. My download from Amazon took a little less than an hour over my high-speed cable broadband.The activation key comes in the folder that the Amazon downloader will create on your desktop. It's an HTML web-browser file.So I decided to test my new PD11 app by editing a short 7 minute video. I have two monitors and two X-fired AMD Radeon 6770 graphics cards. The dual-monitor option doesn't work properly. It displayed on the 2nd monitor only when I played the primary video clip but would blank out when I tried to play all tracks in "MOVIE" mode.With PD8 I was constantly maddened by the app just suddenly forgetting clips in the movie. Often one or more video clips would just suddenly go blank/black and I could sometimes get them back by closing and restarting but usually I'd have to drag the original video source file back into the timeline and spend mucho grande time re-editing things back to what they were. PD11 looks like it has the same sort of bugs, except now it wants to GREEN-OUT some of your clips rather than BLACK-OUT. The app crashed twice during this small job. It crashed when I was done editing and left-clicked on the "Produce" tab and while on the "Produce" screen, when I selected "online" and "Youtube", it produced a perfectly useless/blank/black 720p WMV file and after a long pause decided to automatically upload said worthless video to Youtube. I of course, cancelled out of that.So this is the way of Cyberlink. It's their tradition. They focus on coding new features but never make any sincere effort to stamp out bugs. Perhaps if you happen to own/use the exact same hardware as found in the Cyberlink labs or get paid the same money that PCmag gets to ignore bugs, you'll never experience a crash, but I've used it on two different systems (1 Intel & 1 AMD) and it's just as crashy on both.Thankfully Power Director has the auto-save feature and if you set it to 5 minutes, you can almost always restart the app and get your work back without losing much.One question I had before purchasing which I can now answer is that YES!! you can now output Mpeg-4 in an mp4 container instead of that stupid *.M2TS container that PD8 restricted you to when you output H.264 video.So in summary. Easy to use. Lots of nice features but just as buggy and crashy as ever. I'll live with it, as I have lived with the past versions. The familiarity that I already have from using prior versions crosses over very well to the new version 11. There are some nice new editing features which make things easier.As far as encoding speed goes, it's faster than PD8 for sure! To achieve high speed though, you need to be careful about your settings. Try to match the same frame-rate as your source material. Also watch the bitrate. PD11 will, by default, slap a high & mis-matched framerate and an unnecessarily high bit-rate on you that will result in long encoding times and huge file sizes.This is just my preliminary review based on about an hour of use. I'll edit this later as I get more familiar with it.