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Only thing is, why is it partly integrated into PowerDirector? None of it works so what was the point?
I don't have any inside knowledge, but that fact that the Animation Effect is missing and the Dispersion Effect is limited tells me there are technical issues when transferring the resulting media back to PD when PhD is invoked from the PD timeline.
As PIX wrote, the issue seems to be that if PD sends a photo to PhD, it can't receive back a GIF or WMV. Even if you use the Dispersion Effect tool after coming straight from PD, you only can create a static image from the tool, which is nothing like what the tutorial shows.
I agree that there should be some disclosure that neither of those new tools is available when accessing PhD as a plug-in. However, the options in that situation were already somewhat limited, and it looks like they didn't think to revisit the issue after adding these specific tools.
Here's what I'm talking about. Note that the Create menu is simply the interface for the Animate GIF tool:
So it certainly is an extra step to launch PhD when using either of these new tools, but maybe if you think of it as creating entirely new content, it's less burdensome. In fact, you can have PhD and PD running side-by-side this way, which isn't possible in the round trip method.