Update: Cyberlink's Power Director

AS you may have read, Dad didn't enjoy editing video with WLMM. It had multiple issues that made editing a PITA. It was such a hassle, that Dad has yet to even tackle vacation video footage from 2010. It was all shot in full HD and WLMM just couldn't handle it.

So he downloaded and tried Power Director for free for thirty days. He liked it so well he bought it. It works great. It is fast and smooth on his 64 bit, dual core system with 4 GB of RAM. The interface is intuitive. He can control everything from audio to video and can even do things that are unavailable in WLLM like create chapters for a DVD. He gives it four out five stars. The final star is withheld only because the preview screen has issues. He has yet to investigate the problem, but sometimes he gets this

Bad preview screen

 instead of this

Good preview screen

So if you are in the market for powerful video editing software that can handle your large HD video files, you can shop for it here.

http://www.cyberlink.com/products/powerdirector-ultra/features_en_US.html

There is a less expensive version that runs on 32 bit systems. You'll save about forty dollars, but it also has fewer features.

Update: Cyberlink's tech team helped Dad to solve the problem. He was directed to disable the graphics acceleration option from the preferences menu.Problem solved.

Aside, Dad failed to film the video in HD. There is not much of a qualitative difference on the small computer screen, but when he blows it up to 46" or whatever size is the TV, it looks really grainy. No amount of image enhancement can fix that. Next time it will be full HD.

Also, while editing video, creating menus, and just generally being creative with all of it is a lot of fun, rendering (producing) the final movie is not. On his system it takes about an hour to render every ten minutes of footage. Those of you with more CPUs and RAM will likely wait less time.