£40 Deluxe

£60 Ultra

When most people think of video editing programs, Adobe Premiere is likely to spring to mind – but there are other decent and affordable options out there, which CyberLink’s Power Director 8 goes to prove.

Available in the £40 Deluxe package, or the £60 Ultra package – the latter adding Blu-ray authoring and AVCHD on DVD – Power Director 8 allows for both video and audio manipulation.

An easy to understand multitrack timeline makes getting to grips with the basics easy, including a variety of built-in transitions and effects. Whilst many of these effects appear basic or at least targeted at a younger audience, this doesn’t detract from the power at your fingertips.



Improvements over the previous version 7 include fully customiseable effects (such as snow or dust), an enhanced slideshow designer, Power Tools to crop, rotate, respeed or and video denoise and an increase in the number of effects that can be used simultaneously to enhance your video.

Audio has three individual channels too, allowing for music and sound tracks to be more layered with more complexity. GPU optimisation will see you whiz through videos without using unnecessary processing power, freeing your machine up for a better workflow.