PowerDirector vs Camtasia vs After Effects

Godled

Newbie Joined: Jul 04, 2014 10:52 Messages: 28 Offline

Solved by

Apr 23, 2016 00:08

Hello Everyone

I feel it's fair for me to share my experince of using PowerDirector , Camtasia and After Effects

I was a novice to video editing and needed to edit some videos.

After doing my research, I decided to choose PowerDirector, which was generally described as a Hobbyist & Prosumer product. So I decided to buy it and learn.

So as I got better I heard that Camtasia is more of a professional product, so I longed for it. I downloaded it to try.

If your into Video editing you'll know that Adobe's After Effects is considered to be king for professionals,so I downloaded this too to try.

Now with the so called professional products I dived into to work.

With camtasia after doing the desktop capture I tried to put together an edited version showing a clip with a zoomed in window in sync with the main video. In other words a video within a video with the inset video zoomed.
To my surpise syncing the videos in camtasia was not easy while editing.
It took be the better part of 3days.

I now decided to produce some slick effects with Adobe's After Effect.
The learning curve was so much that in this time, I'd have learnt 4 different languages.

I now decided to do some work in Powerdirector, and lo Click & Drag my works done.

Sitting back I now appreciated PowerDirector for being easy to use and intutive, while at the same time producing a good end product.

Keep it up guys, and let no one deceive you, PowerDirector has made video editing easy & fun to use

CS2014

Senior Contributor Location: USA-Eastern Time Zone Joined: Sep 16, 2014 16:44 Messages: 629 Offline

Apr 23, 2016 09:03

Glad you like PD but I consider it still a 'consumer based' video editor. This is JUST my opinion as I have not used any professional editors. Do not misunderstand me - I like PD a great deal!

When anyone compares different anythings - in this case - video editors - I think you should use the same source (material) video clips and images and either create the same project in the editors that are being compared - to more accurately determine which editor does what better.

This is also my opinion also - but I just can not understand if you use different source material in each editor - how you could realisticly or fairly compare results. Perhaps we can to some degree but...perhaps not too.

CS PD13 Ultimate - Build 3516, WIN 8.1, 64 Bit, 16G RAM, Intel Core i5 4460, CPU @ 3.2GHz, NVIDIA GeForce GT720, Graphics Memory(total avail.)-4093MB
LG WH14NS40 Blu-Ray Drive

Richmond Dan

Senior Contributor Location: Richmond, VA Joined: Aug 07, 2014 17:17 Messages: 673 Offline

Apr 23, 2016 10:42

I agree with CS, but believe the only folks qualified to assess whether or not a product is useful to professionals is a professional. If they use After Effects and are able to do things (either more complex things, or do things more quickly or accurately) which they are unable to do in PD, then so be it.

For my purposes, however, PD more than meets my needs. And after trying to learn Adobe Photoshop (the full version) several years ago, I doubt that I'd be willing to invest the time and effort into learning After Effects. I, like Chiedu, find PD to be quite intuitive, a characteristic I value highly. Regards,
Dan
Power Director 21-Ultimate
v 21.0.3111.0
XPS-8940, Win-10 64-bit,
Intel Core i9-10900 processor
(10 core, 20M Cache),
32GB DDR4 RAM, 2TB M.2 PCIe NVME SSD, 2TB 7200 RPM SATA HDD,
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER 8GB GDDR6

SoNic67

Senior Contributor Joined: Sep 27, 2014 14:14 Messages: 1308 Offline

Apr 24, 2016 08:25

Yeah, every tool has it's place and value.
There is no point in driving a NASCAR (or F1) car to the grocery store... just because it is "professional", it doesn't make it adequate for the task (no trunk for your groceries for example).

PS: Camtasia doesn't even have GPU accelerated effects of final encoding, is limited to decoding.

IMO it's overpriced for a home user, they ask for that much for it because they got contracts with educational and government institutions and because it can be used comercially.

This message was edited 3 times. Last update was at Apr 24. 2016 08:31