Looking to upgrade my video software beyond GoPro Studio. Does anybody here use
PowerDirector?
Their "Ultimate" version is $80 & consistantly ranks high among consumer level editors. I dont need (or want to learn) a high-end program like Adobe Premiere. Thanks for any comments or recommendations.
I have been using PowerDirectory for a couple of years. I originally picked it because of the combination of what I can afford and the positive reviews. After using it for this long my opinion of the review sites has dropped considerably.
It is OK. It is constantly pushing product at you with ads for various other Cyberlink products or pestering you to upgrade. Crashes more than I like. In its favor its auto-backup works quite well so you end up loosing your work only about 30-40% of the time when it crashes. The stabilizer is poor and the enhanced stabilizer is enhanced-poor.
I use three platforms: linux, OSX, and Windows pretty much in that order (in fact I currently only have the Windows box so that I can run PowerDirectory and Mercalli [the later of which is excellent-excellent-excellent btw]).
So I'm often look'n around at what is available.
Housebound last weekend with some bug-or-other I again started looking around. Looked at OpenShot (which I liked back in the day), Pitivi, and ShotCut each downloaded direct from the respective project site.
To skip to the end: take a look at ShotCut, it runs on all three platforms and I found it to be very good. I was surprised at myself that I'd not heard of it before, don't know how I'd missed it. I found OpenShot to be a bit of a pig, Pitivi was really really sluggish, while ShotCut just sailed through everything. Very fast, responsive, and deceptively powerful. I say "deceptively" because when you first bring it up it looks quite minimalistic. Plus the author (and others) have put up a lot of tutorial videos on YouTube showing how to do various things with it. Another thing I like is that ShotCut is not some quick "
Lets do a multiplatform video editor!" project, the author has been at it for over 10 years.