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CyberLink Afraid it Cannot Profit from Windows 7 Release

Paul Lilly — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 08:05:01 -0500

Outside of Apple, you'd have to search far and wide to find someone not stoked about the release of Windows 7, or just take a visit to CyberLink's headquarters. The multimedia software maker pulls in most of its money from bundling PowerDVD and other apps with new PC purchases, and according to company chairman Jau Huang, Microsoft's snappy OS doesn't necessarily require consumers to replace their current systems.

Some analysts have noted that netbooks in 2010 should shoot up by 30 percent from 2009, but this too is of little consolation to CyberLink. Barring any major overhauls to existing platforms, netbooks typically are not equipped with video and audio functions necessary for CyberLink's software, Huang said.

So where does that leave CyberLink? Perhaps scrambling to make a buck in the smartphone market. Huang said there may be some business opportunities in the mobile phone market as new handsets come equipped with video and audio editing software.

Holy Moly! CyberLink Transcodes Four 1080P Video Files in Real Time on Radeon HD 4850

Paul Lilly — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 12:29:05 -0500

Chances are you own at least one high tech, handheld gadget, whether it be an iPod, iPhone, PSP, or other device capable of playing back movies. It's also a safe bet to say you probably don't look forward to transcoding your favorite flicks into a compatible format, particularly when dealing with HD content. That's what makes CyberLink's achievement so noteworthy.

CyberLink's PowerDirector 7 Ultra incorporates GPU-accelerated transcoding into the software suite, and during a business demonstration, Shuichi Takagi, CyberLink's VP of business development, showed just how powerful the algorithm is. Using an ATI Radeon HD 4850 videocard equipped with 512MB onboard RAM, PowerDirector 7 Ultra handily converted four HD MPEG-2 movies into MPEG-4 simultaneously and in real time. Details on the rest of the testbed remain sparse, but Shuichi did say it would take just 30 minutes to grind four full-length movies down into 200MB files. PowerDirector Ultra retails for $120 on CyberLink's website, awesome movies not included.

CyberLink PowerDirector 6

Gordon Mah Ung — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 19:31:38 -0500

PowerDirector 6’s powerful features are handcuffed by a mildly frustrating interface. Unfortunately, the app just won’t let you easily tweak things, which is strange because the product seems aimed at pleasing the button-mashers.

CyberLink embedded a simple process that allows users to upload rendered videos straight to YouTube, so you can tell who the company is marketing this product to. We easily uploaded a slide show we created using a wizard, though we did encounter some problems with this featurette.

In addition to one-click (well, three) uploads of your YouTube feature, PowerDirector 6 includes a host of pleasing video effects, but again, the clumsy interface forces you to hunt around for the proper controls. If you apply an effect directly to a video in the timeline, you can’t simply right-click on the track to remove it. You have to select the track, hit the Effect button, and uncheck all of the effects you don’t want to see.
It’s a minor quibble, but we struggled with the interface more than we expected to with a product that should be user-friendly. The updated slide-show wizard, in particular, annoyed us. If you autocreate a slide show but don’t like the result (for example, everyone’s head is cropped off), you can’t easily modify the slide show to fix the problem. The only thing you can do is keep applying different templates to see how they look—and that’s a multistep process. It’s almost as though CyberLink gets paid by the click.

But enough about the bad stuff. The software does include some pretty neat features, such as the PiP effect, which lets you easily move a still image or video across the screen. There’s no key-frame ability, but the method CyberLink uses to move, rotate, and resize objects in a video is probably easier for newbies to understand. And honestly, do you really need to key-frame the thought bubble over someone’s head in your Blind Date spoof video? It’s also worth noting that the subtitle engine can import .SRT subtitle files.

Unfortunately, subtitles can’t simply be turned on or off; they’re rendered directly into the video.
HDV editing is now included as well. We captured video from a Canon HV10 HDV camcorder in PowerDirector 6 with no hitches. Although one of the primary scene-detection methods did not work for us, post-capture scene detection effectively diced up our video for us. That’s certainly better than Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0, which doesn’t preview HDV video capture or have any post-capture scene detection. Likewise, Pinnacle’s Studio 10.7 requires that you activate scene detection. It doesn’t cost anything, but we shouldn’t be subjected to the hassle. One of PowerDirector 6’s weaknesses is how it exports HDV video. You can create an AVI file at high res or output it back to tape, but that’s it. There’s no Blu-ray or HD DVD disc support nor a way to master the disc so that it will play on an HD DVD deck using a standard single- or dual-layer DVD encoded at a higher resolution.

PowerDirector 6 does excel in VOB editing of commercial discs. While Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0 is unreliable in its handling of commercial VOB files and Pinnacle Studio 10.7 has issues, PowerDirector 6 easily imported a VOB file ripped from a commercial disc. That’s of great value if you want to recut The Godfather: Part III to remove all of Sophia Coppola’s scenes.

Whether PowerDirector 6 is for you depends on how far you want to go. If you want a quick-hit editor, it has more than enough to keep you happy. If you expect to get a little more medieval with your edits, you’d be better served by Pinnacle Studio 10.6.