I have had Powerdirector 8 / 9 on the 3 different PC's and I now simply must go elsewhere for my next editing package, because I have spent the last 2 years living in constant hope that one day it will get better. But it doesn't - this has to be the worst software I have ever had the displeasure of having to suffer. Or can I be saved by a convincing argument?

It crashes, continually on every machione I have ever stalled it on - more than ever in fact on my newest macine which is Core i5 with 6GB of memory. It is a constant cvavalcade of surprises....sometime it crashes on startup, sometimes it crashes on saving, at other times it freezes or hangs in the middle of adding clips or music. And god forbid should you do something ridiculous like trying to add a transition (what was I thinking of!) or titles. If you don't get my meaning, any random event can cause this cruddy piece of junk to freeze, hang or crash without warning.

My machine has no odd settings or bits of strange hardware, I'm not using any types of video not normally found in modern cameras (AVCHD, .MOV etc), memory cards are high quality, fast access - in other words I do everything I can to make teh software's life easy. I even only record in 720p rather than 1080.

In the last 2 years I have suffered every problem imaginable with PD - the most annoying of which is it will randomly forget where to locate clips, mid-edit, and doesn't re-find them again if you revert to your previous save. This means, if you are construcing snappily edited movies with short cuts taken from one clip you can face hours of work to rebuild your now fragmented project.

By the way, I'm not an editing novice (in fact I even studied video editing at college a few years ago) and create a fairly professional video product as part of my business for my cllients on a weekly basis. In fact, in teh last 18 months I have uploaded around 80 movies to my youtube channel - all of which are on average around 10 minutes long - some as long as 20 minutes. Each one is assembled from around 2 or 3 hours of footage - so when PD crashes yet again it means I have hours of work to catch back up.

The final straw has come last week. My most recent video should have taken me around 10 hours to edit and publish - instead it took 4 DAYS. This was because 3 times it lost around 10% of my clips, and for 2 of those days it was crashing roughl;y every 15 minutes. So, I finally finished it and published it on Saturday - today I decided to remove one 4 second clip, right at the end of the timeline as I didn't like the ending, and republished it. SURPRISE SURPRISE it's now lost about 6 clips, spread throughout the movie.

Oh, and because of the way it completely forgets what the clip was in teh first place you then have to go back through all the source files trying to remember what the clip was in the first place, as it loses the filename too!

How I ever paid for this awful product I'll never know - but I wish IO could just get the damn thing to work properly, as I am now so familiar with how to use it. Reading consumer reviews a LOT of people have a LOT of problems with various incarantions of Powerdirector....I so wish I had seen them first and got a different package. In fact, I bought it online - but recently visited a very large multinational retailer who openly laughed at PD and said it was teh worst editing software they sell and they steer everyone away from it!

HOWEVER - what can be done to assure me PD10 is better? Like I say, I now know the software pretty well and would rather not learn another package - but if the reliability is the same I would rather edit my movies with the software that came with my microwave oven - it'd do a better job than PD9 right now...

Rant Ends!