CyberLink Director Suite 365 Free Download v13.0 + Keygen

CONS

• The number of options can make the interface overwhelming

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.

Stabilization and, remarkably, motion tracking can also be applied to your 360-degree videos. CyberLink has 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 Director Suite 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 a 360-degree format, you can still use the basic trimming, splitting, and joining editing tools. There are also a bunch of CyberLink Director Suite 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.

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Action Camera Tools

CyberLink Director Suite can of course import and edit footage from GoPro cameras, as well as from other action cameras from the likes of Sony, Kodak, and Ion. The dedicated Action Camera Center under the Designer button menu appears when you select a clip. This offers effects like camera-profile-based corrections for fisheye distortion, vignette, camera shake, and colour. It also includes effects favoured by action cam users, such as freeze-frame and time-shifts like slowdowns, speedups, and replays.

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Motion Tracking

Motion tracking lets an object, text, or effect follow something moving in your video. You pick the Motion Tracker choice from the same Tools menu as the Action Camera, after selecting a clip in the timeline. The tool makes tracking an object and adding a title, effect, or even another media clip a simple three-step process.

You start by positioning a target box on the object you want tracking, then press the Track button, which runs through the video while following your boxed object. You then choose what you want to follow the tracked object.

The tracker lost track of my subject’s face when he turned around, a common limitation in such tools. I fixed this easily by stopping the tracking, realigning the box, and starting tracking again. It’s easier to get a track correct than in Corel VideoStudio. Adobe Premiere Elements’ motion tracking tool also lost track of a skateboarder in my test footage when he passed behind a pole.

For attaching text to motion-tracked objects in CyberLink Director Suite you can easily attach a mosaic, spotlight, or blur effect, and you get a good choice of many fonts, colours, and sizes. You can even rotate the text with a handle. One thing I’d like to be able to add, however, is a speech bubble, something offered by Adobe and Corel.

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Colour Tools

The included Color Match option is important for movies shot at different angles with different equipment and lighting. The button appears when you have two clips selected. You scrub to the frame in each that you want to match, choosing a reference and a target that will receive the reference frame’s colours. It previously did a spotty job in my tests with scenery and décor, but on retesting in version 20, it matched a cooler-toned interior to a warmer one with aplomb. You can adjust the level of matching, as well as brightness and saturation.

The support for LUTs, or lookup tables, can give your movie a uniform look by applying a colour mood like those you see in the cinema—for example, the cool blue look of The Revenant. CyberLink Director Suite uses the alternate acronym in its interface—CLUT, for the colour lookup table. The program supports a healthy number of file formats, including 3DL, CSP, CUBE, M3D, MGA, RV3DLUT, and VF. CyberLink now offers a decent selection of LUT packs, so you’re no longer on your own in finding them. I was successfully able to test LUT support using Kodak film style and day-for-night LUTs from Adobe Premiere Pro.

For a higher level of colour grading, use the Director Suite’s included ColorDirector application. This now lets you do cool effects like shining a light source from a 3D point of your choice (see above), in addition to standard colour grading functions.

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Near-Pro Video Editing

Nested Projects

Both Adobe Premiere Pro and Apple Final Cut Pro X let you combine edited groups of clips and move them around as a unit. CyberLink Director Suite Nested Projects feature adds this capability. To use it, you simply create a new project and drop an existing one onto the timeline. This creates a tabbed interface above the timeline, which lets you edit the nested project separately from within the new main project. You can also treat an inserted nested project as a PiP.

Keyframes, Effects, and Transitions

If you’re into keyframe editing (which allows precise control over when effects begin and end based on the exact frames you choose) PowerDirector is there for you. It offers PiP, overlays, motion, cropping, and time codes. All effects and adjustments can be pegged to keyframes. You can also edit the anchor point and use Hold mode, which stops the progression temporarily for a jumpy effect.

You also get more than 100 transitions and special effects to choose from, including ten from NewBlue. The app also lets you install third-party effect plug-ins from Pixelan and ProDAD. CyberLink often adds hot new transitions, the latest being shape, distortion, and glitch transitions.

Transitions are easy to add, and the program can decide what material before and after to use when you drop this kind of effect to a joint line between clips. A search box lets you find a specific type, like Page Curl. You can even create custom transitions using your images with the Alpha set of transitions, which rely on masking and transparency. It’s fun to make a transition out of a friend’s head, as shown below.

Chroma Keying

CyberLink Director Suite chroma-key tool lets you shoot someone with solid-colour backgrounds (usually green) and create the appearance that they’re in an exotic scene by choosing a different background. CyberLink has simplified the controls from four to two. There are now just Color Range and Denoise controls. You can now add more than one colour key, too. I tried this with an orange and grey background and with a yellow and grey background. These colour choices showed me why pros use green: The orange background keyed out my subject’s lips, and it was harder to get the correct mask.

Conclusion

CyberLink Director Suite 365 Free Download v13.0 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.