Hands On With CyberLink Director Suite 365

PhotoDirector offers a comprehensive set of presets for commonly used corrections like its Blue Skies used here

CyberLink’s collection of editing tools have long been an alternative to Adobe’s Creative Cloud, but now the company has made the comparison more clear by wrapping them into a unified offering branded Director Suite 365. While still promoting the individual purchase of its applications, CyberLink has taken a page out of Adobe’s book by offering a “365 Subscription” option that provides some exclusive content — along with product updates and plenty of Plugins, Style Packs, and even some 3rd-party add-ins.

PhotoDirector: You’ll Love It or Hate It

If you’re an Adobe user wondering about whether PhotoDirector has something to offer, imagine a single application that took the modules of Lightroom, added some of the Guided Edits features of Photoshop Elements, and then extended itself through most of the features found in Photoshop CC. The result is an all-in-one, value-priced alternative for your full image editing needs. The Library module is not as full-featured as the one in Lightroom, but it offers typical features like tagging and search, plus the increasingly common option to enable facial recognition.

To use PhotoDirector effectively, though, you really need to get into the spirit of how its modules are designed to work together. That can be frustrating, at least at first. For example, to crop and resize an image I had to use the Crop tool from the Global Adjustments (which are non-destructive a la Lightroom), then resize when I exported it (this is a task I need to do all the time when preparing images for various websites like ExtremeTech). In Photoshop this is accomplished with a simple pixel-based preset for the Crop tool.

What’s New In PhotoDirector 10

Speaking of Photoshop, one of the biggest updates in PhotoDirector 10 is to help it match the Layers capability found in Photoshop CC. CyberLink has added Adjustment Layers, Clipping Masks, and Layer Groups. Tethered shooting has also been added, which should be a big win for many who work in a studio — a key market for CyberLink. On the snazzier side are some AI-powered Style features, starting with a Style plug-in. To accompany that there are various Style Packs.

Turn video motion into a multi-exposure shot using PhotoDirector 10

PhotoDirector also adds a Dehaze command, in line with other popular editing packages. On the more-innovative side, it can also extract a series of frames from a video and turn them into a multi-exposure still frame. I find that especially interesting since one issue with video is that it isn’t as easy to view or share as a still image, so a way to capture motion in a single image is intriguing. Turning that around, you can also create Motion Stills from a video clip, by highlighting a portion you want to move and keeping the rest frozen.

PowerDirector: the Power of Premiere Pro With an Elements-Like Approach

For anyone who doesn’t edit videos for a living, Premiere Pro is a daunting — and expensive — application. It is really designed for creative professionals who specialize in video. Elements, and soon Project Rush, are designed to provide simplified versions with fewer features. But CyberLink has instead decided to provide a full-on competitor, sporting a simplified interface, to Premiere Pro (and Final Cut) with its PowerDirector product.

PowerDirector's UI will look familiar to users of other video editors, but you'll need to adapt to the way its workflow is structured

PowerDirector’s UI will look familiar to users of other video editors, but you’ll need to adapt to the way its workflow is structured.

Similar to Premiere Pro, PowerDirector uses a step-through-workspaces workflow, although they are more like the well-defined modules of Lightroom than the “soft” grouping of Premiere Pro’s workspaces. If you’ll be recording live, you can start with Capture; otherwise, you can jump right into the Edit module to import and process your clips, and then head to Produce for rendering output. For those still burning DVDs, there is a final module called Create Disc. To work with a specific clip when editing you select the clip and then either Fix/Enhance to bring up a palette of adjustments, or Tools for certain built-in and plug-in tools.

Just as with PhotoDirector, your enthusiasm for PowerDirector may have a lot to do with how ingrained you are into your current toolset. As an example, with a fair amount of effort I’ve put together a drone video workflow that uses D-Log footage, an input LUT, noise removal with the Neat Video plugin, and custom presets for Neat Video developed by TheFilmPoets. Since I often just want to process a single clip, like a demo for an article, the overhead of doing this in Premiere Pro is annoying, but something I’ve learned to live with. PowerDirector makes the overall task simpler but doesn’t support the Neat Video plug-in. PowerDirector has built-in video noise reduction, but nothing as powerful as Neat Video. So if you’re put a lot of effort into a complex workflow in Premiere Pro or Final Cut, you’ll have to live with some changes. (At first, I thought it didn’t support all of my LUTs, but it turns out they just needed to have shorter filenames).

As a brief experiment I took an aerial sample clip I shot in D-Log with the Mavic Pro and processed it with PowerDirector 17. I started with the default settings, added an input LUT, and enabled Video Stabilization, Noise Reduction, and Edge Enhancement. The video below shows the original footage in the upper right overlaid onto the processed footage. As an aside, PowerDirector 17 makes it really easy to do cool overlays and layouts with your video. I think I’ll be doing more of that in the future. The output video framing is different because of the application of the digital stabilization (pretty typical). I started with the default stabilization and wasn’t that impressed, so this version uses the Enhanced version (slower rendering):

What’s New in PowerDirector 17

One of the coolest new features in PowerDirector 17 is a multi-camera editing mode. I haven’t used it personally, but the company’s demo shows a powerful system for creating video synchronizing, combining, and color matching clips shot from various perspectives of the same scene. Once that would only have been needed by studios, but now that video blogging is becoming more sophisticated and often uses multiple cameras, I suspect it will find a broad audience. Chroma key masking has also been enhanced to allow you to select multiple color ranges for the mask in cases where the screen isn’t perfect.

I also really like the idea of its new Nested Projects feature. Rather than creating a complete mess of a stack on a single project timeline, you can work on one piece of a project and then incorporate it into a parent project. Beyond those headline features, PowerDirector 17 has quite a few other interesting upgrades including integrated audio editing:

PowerDirector 17 is chock full of new features for just about every video editing use case

PowerDirector 17 is chock full of new features for just about every video-editing use case.

There Is Lots More

I’ve only been able to scratch the surface of the features in CyberLink’s new Photo and Video editors, and haven’t even touched their upgraded Audio Director product. If you’re a current user of the tools, there are quite a few reasons to upgrade. If you’re looking around for a new toolset, the Director Suite is certainly worth putting on your evaluation list.

Director Suite 365 Subscription and Cloud

While Adobe’s Photo plan is priced very aggressively, anyone needing to add video or audio editors to the package is in for a big price tag for the whole Creative Cloud suite. CyberLink has priced Director Suite 365 as a value-priced alternative. A subscription for all four of its editing apps and add-ons is $130 if you pay annually (or $30 for a month). The subscription also includes 100GB of storage in CyberLink’s new Cloud.

For those who continue to fume that Adobe has cornered them into a subscription model, you can still purchase the applications you need separately. PowerDirector 17 Ultimate is $130, and Ultra is $100. PhotoDirector 10 Ultra is $100, while ColorDirector 7 and AudioDirector 9 are each $130. Clearly, for anyone using more than one of the applications and who wants to stay at all current, CyberLink has made a 365 subscription the appealing alternative.

Now Read: Hands On With Photoshop, Premiere Elements 2018, Adobe Unveils Project Rush, and DJI Launches Drool-Worthy Mavic 2 Pro.

About Skype

Check Also

, Samsung Announces ‘Gauss’ AI for Galaxy S24, #Bizwhiznetwork.com Innovation ΛI

Samsung Announces ‘Gauss’ AI for Galaxy S24

For the last several years, smartphones have shipped with processors designed to accelerate machine learning …

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Bizwhiznetwork Consultation