Although the features have seemed to get ok reviews on the Internet, no one seems to be talking about the limitations of this software. Being a paid user of PowerDirector 6 I thought I would state a few problems in hopes that people will be aware of them before they purchase the software. (all of the support is done on a private email basis, so there are no public forums to see what other users are experiencing.

Here is a simple list of limitations that I have come up against. I will try to expand the list as I use the program.

• files are not upgradeable, this means that something you make in PowerDirector 5 will not be usable in PowerDirector 6
• PowerProducer is very sensitive to file placement. This means that if you move one of your source files (for instance a video clip to another hard drive) the PowerProducer file is unreadable with no way to fix it (unless you remember what the files were and here they should go)
• Templates from one version are not compatible with a different version. For example, if you purchase DVD templates from them for PowerDirector 5 those templates will not be usable in version 6.
• Although templates can be edited, there are limitation. You cannot add or make new navigational buttons or navigation destinations and you cannot seem to make new title boxes either.
• Sometimes a jpg photo file from your digital camera may be readable on your computer but it will not be readable by PowerDirector.
• PowerDirector5 could sometimes get large amounts of clips/ photos out of order in the timeline when adding or changing a clip.
• PowerDirector 6 installs 4 DIVX shareware packages that supposedly should not be uninstalled because PowerDirector uses some of the codecs in the shareware installations. However you can delete from your desktop the links like "Buy DivX for Windows" and are not obliged to buy this shareware to use the PowerDirector software.
• The new subtitle feature of PowerDirector 6 can only make one subtitle track (the text does look very clear on the previews, a good thing)
• These Cyberlink applications always tries to connect to the cyberlink website when you start them up. The latest PowerDirector has an option to deactivate this connection but earlier versions do not seem to have this option.
• Personally I had a lot of trouble burning the DVD directly from the software and would simply make the DVD folder and use NERO to burn the actual DVD. Ihave not retried this with the latest versions.
• You cannot install 2 versions of the software at the same time. This means that if you had a photo album with custom movement on it the only solution is to either manually write down everything you did to every picture and recreate it or as their technical support recommends, render everything out to video from the old version , uninstall the old version, and then import it into the latest version.
  

Although there are no public forums (that would be a great way for users to help each other) they do respond rather quickly to technical support questions. So far always well within the 24 hours they state on their site.

In my personal opinion, they do somethings well but with these above limitations (especially the first) they have a ways to go before becoming a solid video editing utility.

Tags: cyberlink, powerproducer, powerdirector

I have a HP laserjet 1100 being shared on my Windows XP SP2 machine and I wanted to use it from MacOSX 10.4.9 without doing anything fancy. This apparently is a little harder than it would seem. I finally found two solutions of which I preferred the first (HPIJS).

• Install Foomatic/HPIJS
• Install Gutenprint
  

Once you have installed one of the two print engines above, you can use the standard Add Printer dialog of MacOSX 10.4.x and browse for the Windows XP machine in the correct workgroup, select the shared printer and choose the correct driver for it (the HP 1100 driver was installed with one of the above two print engines.)

Personally, I found the Gutenprint drivers to have a little too much contrast and boxiness in them. These problems did not happen with the HPIJS drivers.  Gutenprint had many more customization options so maybe enough test prints could give me a better result.

In the standard print dialog, you might also need to manually set the Printer Features option to enable high resolution printing (and then save it as a preset to avoid setting it again.)

Tags: printing, Shared printer, XP

If you picked up a 10.4.x macbook with the 512mb thinking that it would be more than enough then you probably found your MacOSX running a little slower than expected. This was the case for me and when I ran the Activity Monitor (Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor) I quickly saw that my system had about 8mb of free memory.

Although the Activity Monitor will show you exactly what software is taking up your precious memory, here are the two things that I did to help.

1) disable all of my widgets
2) used the Font Book to deactivate all Asian fonts

That helped me free up about 100mb of memory though I am sure a better solution would be to dish out the $$ and get some more memory.

Tags: memory, Optimize