Hi, I have just started using PowerDirector 16, and it seems more than adequate for everything I want to do, with one odd exception - I'm sure I'm missing a trick.

I can click to 'trim' a video - nice UI for selecting when the clip comes in and out of the original video, and I can 'sync to audio', aligning a video with an independently recorded audio track. But I can't do both!

If I sync a video and an audio track, if I then trim the video, the audio won't follow. I can detach and delete the original audio from the video then use 'link video and audio' to bond the new audio to the old video, the trim option is not then available (I guess because you can't trim a group).

I can't see any logical reason for this limitation. If I 'link video to audio' I can then drag the composite object to be shorter in the timelime, which is effectively trimming but without the nice user interface, and that works.

I can trim the original video and write down the 'in' and 'out times', then do the sync to audio, link them and calculate what I need to cut out of the joined object, but that's quite fiddly. I tend to record clapping at the beginning of clips and it seems the 'sync to audio' relies on that. When I've tried trimming the video then syncing to audio, it's failed to sync probably because the talking parts are too different from each source.

I have in the past 'cheated' and do the thing you're not supposed to do - sync the video/audio then save the result as a new avi file. When that's included in the project, trim works fine, but with potential loss from re-encoding.

Am I missing something obvious or is this a gap in the functionality?

Thanks,
Oli