Cranston,
Well, if I HAVE TO
say something positive about my experience thus far its that the folks I've encountered on this forum seem to be extremely friendly and helpful.
I'm relieved to hear that someone out there has had such a consistently positive experience with these programs. I do hope that the misfortunes I've experienced are the vast exception. I suppose it stands to reason that if the opposite were true, Cyberlink probably wouldn't be around to create version 7 in the first place?
I did a lot of google research before buying v7 and if I had to average all of the comments I read, it would say that PowerDirector is a great program with a lot of funcitonality....when it works. The consistent cons that I saw were frequent crashes and little help from customer service/tech support. Again, this is all just what I read. Having seen some impressive tools with v6, I decided to give it a gamble and see if I could be one of the lucky ones that never or rarely saw problems or issues with the program. When I saw that wasn't happening for me, I became instantly afraid that I was going to share a similar fate to the several tales of doom I read.
In response to your suggestions, I think my not being able to download the program might be a "fault" of my computer, but I highly doubt that the CD is. I tried running the CD on two different drives, reaching the same result. I also ran about 25 different program CD's, all of which ran completely fine.
To be fair, I will give an update on the up and down roller-coaster ride. When I tried to download the program from the site, I would get errors saying that my server had signature requirements that Digital River couldn't meet, despite the fact that I had practically shut off any firewall protection found on my computer. The strange thing was that when I would click 'OK' on the error, the download would continue. So after clicking 'OK' on this error about every 30 seconds or so (for half an hour), the download completed and I ran the installation successfully. This was the second time I made this attempt and the first time, everything blew to pieces. I was relieved when it worked this time.
I started running v7 and it crashed on me twice and wouldn't re-open another time until I restarted my computer. I've messed around a little with the buttons and I agree that it looks like a very nice tool....when it works. I'm still waiting to hear back from tech support/customer service as I would like to be sent a replacement backup CD.
My current project is making a wedding video for my fiance to play at our reception next month. If all holds, I think it can be a success *knock on wood.* Just NO more crashes!!! Let this serve as a lesson to CLICK 'SAVE' FREQUENTLY!!!
Thank you both so much for your help and attention. I'm willing to bet that we'll be bumping into each other more in the future (especially considering I still can't figure out with the 'fade to black' effect is!!!!).