CyberLink PowerDirector 7 Overview and Benchmarks
PowerDirector 7 Overview
Main video editing screen
PowerDirector 7 is a consumer-oriented video editing program that supports high definition video, from importing to editing and output. It also includes support for GPU-accelerated H.264 encoding and 10 CUDA-accelerated video effects, significantly reducing the time it takes to render projects.
Video effects screen
The program gives the growing number of consumers with high definition video cameras a user-friendly platform for all of their video editing tasks. PowerDirector 7’s support for CUDA technology delivers significant gains when encoding HD video into the H.264 format. Cyberlink claims the program offers performance gains of 270% for encoding high-definition video using CUDA.
PiP objects screen
Upon opening PowerDirector7, I’m greeted with a more traditional video editing interface with a movie timeline, preview pane, and various effects and transitions tabs. This layout is a lot more accommodating to experienced video editors or even novice users who have played with other types of video editing software.
Transitions screen
One major factor to note is that PowerDirector7 only uses CUDA when encoding high-definition video. Encoding lower-resolution video formats will rely exclusively on the CPU to handle the entire workload. This software also allows the output of H.264 content for playback on PSP, iPod, iPhone and PS3. It uses CUDA to accelerate video rendering for effects like abstractionism, color painting, Gaussian blur, glow, replace color, pen ink, kaleidoscope, color edge, radial blur, and light ray. These ten effects use the GPU instead of the CPU during final rendering.
Audio mixing screen
Power Director7 was the first application to use the CUDA video encoder library, but others have also integrated this library into their software. This library is an enabling tool that was designed by NVIDIA for video software developers to use in the development of high-performance GPU-accelerated video encoding applications.
PowerDirector 7 Benchmarks
We pitted PowerDirector 7 against our CPU-based transcoder called HandBrake. To throw another wrinkle into the benchmark, we added a CUDA-enabled video effect called Light Ray to make it more challenging for both these transcoders to output different video formats. The outputted formats include 640×480 MPEG-2, AVCHD 720×480 MPEG-4, and AVCHD 1920×1080 MPEG-4. We tested PowerDirector 7 with CUDA enabled and disabled to see if we could pin point how much of the workload was being off loaded to the CPU.
Overall transcoding times
Average CPU usage during transcoding
Whoa. We ran our PowerDirector 7 benchmarks over five times to see if we missed something in the output configuration options, but each time we received the same result — 100 percent CPU usage. However, the overall transcoding times were very good, which indicates this application was using the GPU and CPU at their maximum performance levels. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it doesn’t bode well for consumers who want to do multi-tasking like e-mail and Internet at the same time they are transcoding a video.
