Something about CyberLink PowerDirector 5 ($89.95 direct) brings out the Simon Cowell in me; I just feel compelled to point out its faults. Paula Abdul would no doubt say that it's got a lovely personality, but, for me, PowerDirector just isn't up to scratch. It's not that the product doesn't have its charms. It's easy to use and performs many basic tasks—such as capture and trimming—well. It's just that once you go beyond the basics, the features, though well intended, disappoint, especially when compared with similar software in the same price range. Throw in dog-slow encoding speed and only two video tracks, and you've got a product I just can't recommend.

PowerDirector installed without incident. Basic editing tools are generally good, with a Multi Trim tool to help pull video from longer files, good title templates, and a decent range of transitions and effects.

Go beyond the simple, however, and the product doesn't deliver. A good example of a feature that doesn't live up to its promise is PowerDirector's Picture-in-Picture (P-I-P) track. It's got excellent controls for borders, placement, and beginning and end transitions. Unfortunately, it's a video-only track. You can't insert audio, which limits its utility, and the color filter controls (which provide a color keying function) are primitive and produced subpar results in my testing. In contrast, Adobe Premiere Elements offers 98 overlay audio and video tracks, and Ulead VideoStudio Plus has six. Furthermore, both outperform PowerDirector in chroma-key tests.

Though PowerDirector captured HDV video proficiently, editing was sluggish on my 3.2-GHz Pentium 4 HP Workstation. Ulead VideoStudio 10 resolved this problem with proxy editing. PowerDirector has no answer. And PowerDirector can only apply one special effect to each video clip, a limitation not shared by the Ulead and Adobe products.

Though there were some highlights, PowerDirector's suite of "magic" tools was also disappointing. For example, the color correction features in Magic Clean worked poorly in my tests, as did its audio-cleaning capabilities. There's no tool here like VideoStudio's Auto Exposure or Premiere Elements' Shadow/Highlight tool to correct backlit video, a frequent problem with home videos.

Neither Magic Cut, which cuts clips down to match background audio tracks, nor Magic Style, which adds special effects, proved particularly impressive. To be fair, however, the only tool I really like for these types of edits is muvee autoProducer. Bright spots include Magic Fix's red-eye removal and its image-stabilization functions, which both worked very well for me. I also like being able to use PhotoNow to edit my still images, though this is offset by PowerDirector's extraordinarily limited pan and zoom functions.

PowerDirector has added the ability to add chapter points while editing, a nice workflow improvement, but its DVD authoring is otherwise uninspiring, with no features to match VideoStudio's new SmartScene menus or Premiere Element's awesome templates. Rendering time was also dismal, with PowerDirector taking 63 minutes to render our 12-minute test file, more than three times as long as either of our Editors' Choice products. And if you want to produce videos for your Sony PSP or in MPEG-4 format, you'll have to spend an additional $29.95 or $19.95, respectively.