Let me introduce you to . . .PowerDirector 9

. . . a program with similar features to the top of the line Premier Pro CS5 for about 1/10th the cost.

Now I know that many will just stick there noses up. But for those on a budget, who want to do HD without waiting 15 hours to generate a DVD or worst Blu-ray. Consider PowerDirector as a great alternative.

Cyberlink just released PowerDirector 9. 64Bit power, GPU accelerated v.264 and effects, Multicore support.

Granted you may want to stay away from the fluff. I have been using v.8 and will certainly look to upgrade to v9.

PowerDirector 9

I hope tomorrow to show you what effects are accelerated.

You can check out this review for more detailed info.

Top Ten Reviews dot com

Do you have any experience using Sony Vegas Pro? If so, is PowerDirector easier to learn/use than Sony Vegas?

I am not an experienced Vegas user. But I found it very hard to learn when I did the trial. It didn't seem intuitive to me either. Lets face it iMovie is the easiest. But without GPU acceleration it takes forever to encode. I used Movie Edit Pro 16 but it can be slow. They have a new version that I have not used but looks promising.

When using Power Director 8 I can see what effects are accelerated because the effect icons have a small accelleration icon similar to the windows shortcut icon added to the bottom corner of the icon.

Also it you are going to use a GPU, make sure that it has at least 96 stream processors and 1GB ram. I will find the link from the pro's that figured that out.

cool. I use PowerDirector 8. I think it's already worth the upgrade based on if it can dramatically reduce the processing time.

I have a GT240 graphics card. Not a high powered card at all. Yet I'm able to render 1280x720 HD faster than real time. So I'm happy my previous setup would take about 15 hours.

I guaranteed you if you start from one of the major NLE like final cut , premiere, or Vegas you'll develop a better foundation. Vegas the best bang for the buck right now. I am a Vegas pro user

Not to mention Vegas 10has built in tracking to do stabilizer. Not even sure any other nle have that feature for under 150 bucks

Trey T wrote in post #11450459
I guaranteed you if you start from one of the major NLE like final cut , premiere, or Vegas you'll develop a better foundation. Vegas the best bang for the buck right now. I am a Vegas pro user

A render time for one hour of HD 720p content?

Which compression? How long you looking at?

Previously I've always used Adobe Premier Elements, but since I built a new computer with Winows 7 64 bit, I'm looking for something new. So I downloaded Power Director Ultra64. I was rather disappointed when my first test, a very short video, came out without any audio. Did the same with Windows Movie maker and it came out perfectly, go figure.

hawkeye60 wrote in post #11451484
Previously I've always used Adobe Premier Elements, but since I built a new computer with Winows 7 64 bit, I'm looking for something new. So I downloaded Power Director Ultra64. I was rather disappointed when my first test, a very short video, came out without any audio. Did the same with Windows Movie maker and it came out perfectly, go figure.

I have an i7/8GB ram with Window 7 64 bit PC & had problems with PD8 but since installing PD9, it's stable 9 times out of 10. The times it's not stable, I get a msg saying "PD9 has stopped working". Suggest you contact technical support which is quite quick (within a day?) to response/help.
http://www.cyberlink.c​om/prog/support/cs/ind​ex.do
All the best...

Im sure it's a good piece of software. But whether or not it's good, my favourite 3rd party software will only work on the major pro NLE's.
I use CS5, but there's nothing from PD9 that would make me want to turn down Vegas.

So it would be interesting if Vegas users could tell us how long it takes to render a one hour HD video to output.