I'm very pleased to find this forum and share some experiences with Power Director - what a shame Support won't answer in the forum though, it would save everyone a lot of time. I have been using Power Director since Version 2.0, and upgraded to Power Director 5 from Power Director 3 early this year, mainly to take advantage of HD and 16:9 formats (being innately sceptical of all the other "Magic"). I immediately regretted the decision, as Version 5 seemed to have lost features of Version 3.
Not wishing to believe that this might be the case I contacted Cyberlink Support with regards to:

- PD5 having a much thinner manual than PD2 - seemed like a bad sign!
- Much fewer format options evidently available for production; especially streaming files, no multi-bandwidth formats at all.
- Files produced in wmv format have only 4 or 5 lurid colours.
- Chapters must be set prior to production so cannot be changed after.
- Only one video file can be burnt to each disk, so multi-file projects have to be strung together prior to production, and only one level of menus (chapter menus) is thereby evidently available.

Cyberlink sent me a long reply on how to address performance issues, but skirted all the capability issues, admitting only that there were "limitations" with Version 5 which could be "implemented in the next version of the software". They didn't address any of my specific criticisms, or acknowledge that these features had been in previous versions. I took this to mean that maybe they were planning to release a more "professional" version to compete with Premier and the like, however this doesn't seem to have happened. To their credit, I returned the disk and they returned my money; I am plodding along with Power Director 3 still, and am as happy with that as most in this forum appear to be with Power Director 5 (albeit with the seemingly pervasive picture/sound synch problems).

I would really like to hear from anyone who can tell me that PD5 is really the bee's knees (or what is) or that I overlooked any of the above features in my brief evaluation of it. Power Director has always come out well in comparison to other software in the same part of the market; why would Cyberlink dumb it down to a point where it risks being overtaken by the next version of Windows Movie Maker and a dozen other packages already out there?

Cheers.