CONS

• Number of options can make interface overwhelming

Assisted Movie Making

One of the best things to come to home video editors in recent years was pioneered by Apple with the Trailers feature of the Mac’s included iMovie app. Premiere Elements has a similar Video Story feature. With either of these, you fill templates with video and photo content that meets the needs of a spot in the production, such as Group shot, Close-up, or Action shot. These are elaborated with transitions and background music that match your chosen theme.

Similarly, PowerDirector offers Video Templates (in the Project Room left menu choice) with placeholders for your content. From DirectorZone.com, CyberLink ColorDirector Ultra Crack Web resource site, you can download these templates, called Express Projects on the site. These are usually in separate opening, middle, and ending units. Business users also get Ad Templates for Facebook and Instagram Stories. Unlike the similar iMovie tool, PowerDirector requires you to add your own background music—there are no canned scores in the wizard or for Express Projects.

Express Project’s Steps

An Express Project only requires two steps: Dragging an Opening, Middle, and Ending onto the timeline, and filling the resulting clip tracks with your media. It’s nowhere near as intuitive or clear as Apple iTunes’ Trailers feature or Adobe Premiere Elements’ Video Story feature. But it does offer guidance in crafting a digital movie, it is more customizable, and the results look pretty cool.

Another even easier creation tool is PowerDirector’s Magic Movie Wizard. You get to this right from the startup menu’s Auto Mode option. This features a four-step process: importing source content, adjusting and enhancing that content, previewing, and producing. As with the templates you can download various Magic Styles from DirectorZone to use with this feature. It analyzes your content and delivers a project that you can output to a file, a disc, or to the main editor for tweaking. I found this last choice necessary, since the tool doesn’t know if two photos are nearly identical, and clips aren’t trimmed. I had better luck with Movavi Video Editor’s similar Montage Wizard feature.

Stock Material from ShutterStock and Getty

Subscribers to PowerDirector 365 or Director Suite 365 (which CyberLink ColorDirector Ultra Crack representatives told me account for most customers now) can get professionally created video, photo, and audio content from well-known stock supplier ShutterStock. With the new version 20 release, you can get photo and video content from Getty Images’ iStock collection.

It’s easy to get to. A Premium Stock Content thumbnail appears first in the source panel. Clicking on this opens the stock search window with two tabs for ShutterStock and iStock from Getty Images. You can use search terms to find an appropriate clip, picture, or sound sample. Clicking on the thumbnail of one you’re interested in opens the full (watermarked) image in your default web browser. Note that you don’t get the entire library of Shutterstock—a search for pizza only turned up 15 video clips, while the Shutterstock site has hundreds. Of course, you’d pay a lot more for access to the full selection. Shutterstock licenses start at $99 per month for use of just five clips.

Working With 360-Degree Footage

When you add a 360-degree clip to your project, PowerDirector pops up a dialog box asking whether you want your output to be 360 or 2D. If you choose the latter, the View Designer window opens, which lets you choose the resulting movie’s point of view. You can move the angle around in this window’s preview in three axes (x, y, and z) with the mouse pointer.

Clicking on the up, down, left, or right arrows alters your point of view, and clicking the center of the arrow control snaps the view to straight on. You can zoom the view, and very usefully, use keyframes to automatically switch from one viewpoint to another. That last option can take advantage of the Ease In option, which makes the motion more naturally accelerate and decelerate, rather than happening mechanically.

A cool effect I first saw on Vimeo, is produced by the Little Planet dropdown in the View Designer. This takes 360-degree content and realigns it so that the ground is shaped like a ball that any people in the video are walking around. Drag the image downward and you can create the opposite type of world, sometimes called a rabbit hole in which the inhabitants are on the inside of a sphere. Another nifty option is to use keyframes to rotate the world smoothly.

Motion Tracking

Stabilization and, remarkably, motion tracking can also be applied to your 360-degree videos. CyberLink ColorDirector Ultra Crack has really pushed the envelope with these first-mover features. When I tested 360 stabilization in the last version, I could not get good stabilization results in footage from my Samsung Gear 360, but when I tried sample shaky footage from CyberLink ColorDirector Ultra Crack Steven Lien, the feature worked well. The program’s Enhanced VR Stabilizer gives you even more controls to adjust the stabilization effect.

For projects that you intend to output in 360-degree format, you can still use the basic trimming, splitting, and joining editing tools. There are also a bunch of PowerDirector features you cannot use: Magic Movie, video cropping (think about it), and content-aware editing. Nor can you mix non-360 content into a 360 project.

Once you’ve edited the content to taste, you output to H.264 AVC .MP4 format, and H.265 HEVC. Alternatively, you can upload directly to Facebook, YouTube, and Vimeo.

Conclusion

CyberLink ColorDirector Ultra 12.0.3523.11 Crack is a fast, full-featured consumer-level video editing program. It offers macOS and Windows users all the latest technology support yet is surprisingly easy to use.