Programs
At its core, the competent PowerDirector offers first rate tools to edit video. The program can preview and capture digital video from camcorders, edit video clips and apply some 60 transitions and 25 title effects. It's an excellent entry to video editing. To create DVDs, the PowerProducer program offers tools to author discs with menus and supports a wide variety of DVD formats that includes dual-layer discs.

Power2Go comes with features to burn data, music, photos, and videos onto disc. The program also comes with features to rip MP3 files from CDs, access online artist and album information, build music libraries, create playlists, print CD covers and more. And the PowerBackup program backs-up and archives data.

The Medi@Show program compiles digital pictures into multimedia slideshows. For this, the program offers a wide variety of title effects and transitions and can burn slideshows onto CDs and DVDs, share slideshows as EXE files, convert slideshows into screen savers and create streaming files for use on the web. There are also decent image-editing features that can retouch photos to adjust brightness, contrast and balance; resize, crop and rotate photos; remove red eyes and apply visual filters.

New & Improved
In version 4, CyberLink has added lots of enhancements that are well worth the price of the upgrade. The biggest and most useful improvements come in the video-editing features found in PowerDirector 4 Express. A Magic Motion feature allows you to add motion to still photos-pans, scans and zooms-a standard in historical documentaries these days. A useful Magic Clean feature automatically cleans-up video and audio and removes noise. New mask effects allow you to perform special effects and there features to automatically trim video, accept PowerPoint files and record audio.

There are stronger options to author DVDs. You can now create DVD menus with motion thumbnails and alpha menu technology allows for more flexibility when creating visual DVD menus. Another convenience, Smart Fit technology can adjust video files so that they fit on a disc. The program calculates the remaining disc space and automatically selects the best video quality before burning a disc. With the Power2Go program, you can now rip unlimited MP3 files.

CyberLink has added improvements to PowerDVD Express, the utility for watching DVDs on a PC. The program now features smart video deinterlacing, audio equalizer presets, audio pitch scaling, dual subtitle display and more. There are more options for burning DVDs. You can also split data across multiple discs, create mixed-media discs, normalize audio, convert audio formats, and encode Dolby and MP3.

Overall, DVD Solution 4 offers an excellent program for performing just about anything with visual media and DVDs. The creative tool is a worthy addition to just about any home's software library.

-Wayne N. Kawamoto

computers - DVD Solution 4