I have been a fan of Powerdirector for many years. I use it to make wedding DVDs. I recently 'upgraded' (& I use the term loosely) to PD9 from PD8. I did this just after videoing a wedding & thought I may as well use the latest & greatest version. What a mistake.

I won't go into all the issues with the transitions, the freezing, the crashing. Most people are aware of those problems. Some of the more interesting ones were clips that simply disappeared when putting them in a space in the timeline, a fading transiton actually working backwards. i.e. it started off at 100% then faded to 0 (black) instead of the other way around when placed at the start of a clip. A period of silence where there should have been sound. To get around this I had to edit the sound, then bring it back in as a wave file & put it in a sound track below. Simply unlinking it from the video & moving it down didn't make any difference. Fun fun fun!

Previously in PD8, I could go straight to burning the DVD from the editing stage. It just worked (though the menu section was always crap). My 1st DVD in this exercise was a write off as I mistakingly used the magic fix stabilizer for a small section which looks great in the preview but the end result is a wiggling mess. I thought this may have been fixed in this version but sadly it hasn't. It might work on low res video but certainly not on HD.

But this wasn't the only problem. In the process it had trimmed off the top & bottom of the video for me. How nice. The text & other effects still appeared below the video where they should be.

Ok, I'd better produce a Mpeg video next time & see how that is. Almost perfect, except that all the places where I had muted the track had been turned back on. Great! This seems to happen every time your project is opened.
Back to the editing... Taking no chances now. I unlink the video & delete the sound tracks.
Wait! I've got an idea. I'll check if there's any patches (even though I have the program set to notify me about updates).
Yes, there is an update available. Great. Surely it would have fixed some of these problems. It would have to be better right?

I applied the patch & produced the movie. Now wherever I have a fading transition between 2 clips it produces a flashing effect & has thin lines running across it. This has happened directly after applying the patch & nothing else was changed.
I tried removing the transitions & putting them back in again. No difference. Even updating the video card drivers to the latest version didn't help. What a disaster!!

My only way around this mess was to use the beginning & end of a produced movie before the patch, remove the sound where necessary & put it back into the timeline replacing the parts where it was most noticeabley bad. There are still a couple of spots in the middle that has the lines & flashing for a bit but there's nothing I can do about that unless I uninstall it & re-install without the patches. I would probably have done that normally but I am so frustrated with this program that when I do uninstall it I will be putting PD8 back on. At least it didn't have all these problems.

My question is, how can a product be set loose when there are so many issues? My feeling is that it was rushed out too quickly with not enough testing.
I will certainly not be using PD9 again in its present form. I will use PD8 next time until things have been vastly improved. I have spent an extra 2 nights trying to finish off this project.

Does anyone know where there is a common list of bugs that can be added to for the developers? If not perhaps a thread should be stickied & people can add any bugs they come across without them being repeated in various threads spread across the forum.

Note: a short sample of the videos (before & after the patch showing the transiton issue) can be supplied if anyone is interested.

Regards,

Peter