Make a Video in Power Director

In this tutorial we’re going to look at how to make a video in Power Director. We’re not really going to try and produce a video with any real structure or flow, just familiarize ourselves with the features of Power Director so when you do have reason to produce meaningful video with an end goal in mind you’ll be able to do it with the knowledge of how Power Director works, and what you can do with Power Director to make the highest quality and most interesting video possible.

So far we’ve looked at what items you need to take video and how to download video clips to your computer. Now we’ll look at taking those clips and edit them into a video ready for distribution.

Here we are in Power Director and I have pulled a bunch of clips, in this case food clips as they are appealing to the eye, into the media room.

Let’s first have a look at the menu panel in the top left hand side of the screen. At the top is the media room icon. Click on this and it will take you back to the main page.

Below the media room is the effect room. By clicking on any of these effects you can preview them in the screen.
Below the effect room is the pip objects room.
Below the pip objects room is the particle room.
Below the particle room is the title room.
Below the title room is the transition room.
Below the transition room is the audio mixing room.
Below the audio mixing room is the voice over recording room.
Below the voice over recording room are the chapter room and subtitle room.

Back up to the top of the screen in the “all content” drop down menu box you’ll find “color boards” which are necessary if you want to use text on a plain background.

Just like video clips, these color boards can be dragged into the master video track where you can add the text of your choice and the duration onto the color board.
Just drag the text of your choice into the title track and align it with the color board.

Double click on the text box to edit the text, and remember you can expand or reduce the duration of the color board and text, either by clicking on them and hit “duration”, where you can set the time in seconds or by clicking on them and adjust manually

Back in the media room we begin to construct our video by dragging clips into the master video track.

The blue squiggly line under the video is the audio of the video. If you wish to remove the audio, just right click on the clip, scroll down to “split audio”. Power Director will ask you if you wish to put the audio in the voice track or if the voice track is full it will put it in the music track. From there just click on it and hit delete.

Then it’s just a matter of scrolling through the video and editing out, that is, hitting the “split” button and deleting part or parts of the video you don’t wish to use.

In this example I don’t want to use the first part of the clip and instead start at this point. So I hit split and delete the first part up to this point.

Just repeat the process until you have deleted all the parts of the clip you don’t wish to use.

Now sometimes as you’re working through the clips there may be something that you wish to talk about but you haven’t got a good enough or long enough section of video to add audio to. An example in this clip is I’d like to talk a bit about sushi rice but I don’t  have a long enough clip of sushi rice.

The easiest way around this problem is to stop the clip on the best picture, in this case sushi rice and then take a snap shot. I can then make the snap shot or still shot as long as is needed to accompany the audio.

So here I focus in on the best shot, without the arm and hit “freeze frame”.  Power Director will then add the still shot at this point. I can then just delete the serpia effect that automatically gets added to the effect track and also the default text box.

Next, let’s look at adding transitions between the clips. Scroll down the left hand side menu and click on the icon for transition room. This will bring up a bunch of transitions that you can use. Now you can either use a bunch of different transitions or to keep consistency us the same transition throughout the video.

By clicking on the different transitions you can view the transition in the preview window.

Once you find a transition you like, drag it down between the clips where you want it to go.

You can also set the length of the transition, either by clicking on it and dragging it out to the required length or clicking on the transition, then hit duration and set it accordingly in seconds.

Important to remember is that adding transitions is going to eat into your clips so always allow extra time at the end and beginning of clips that you’re going to separate with a transition to compensate for the time of the transition.

From here on in it’s just a matter of rinse and repeat, going through the various clips in the media room, editing out parts you don’t want, deleting the audio if you don’t need it and adding transitions between clips where necessary.

Don’t forget to save your work from time to time as computers do crash and you don’t want to spend time constructing a video only to lose it all should your computer or the program crash.

Periodically hit the “save” icon in the top left hand side of the screen.

If you need to periodically add titles or text to your video, just click on the “title room” icon, select the text you wish to use, drag it to where it’s required in the title track, double click on it to edit for font, size, position on the screen and duration.

You can expand or compact the time line by clicking on it. Left to contract and right to expand out for fine editing.

To change the font, including size and color, click on these buttons at the top of the title page. Experiment a bit to find the font of your liking. When done click “ok”.

As we go along and the video starts to take shape, we may wish to chop and change a bit, and alter the order of the clips. An example could be that instead of using the blue color board at the beginning of the video to introduce it, I’d rather use this still shot that I’ve taken from a later clip.

Clips can easily be rearranged simply by clicking on them and dragging them to where ever you prefer them in the master video track.

In this instance I’m just going to drag the preferred opening snap shot from the media room into the start of the master video track and delete the blue color board.   

Once you have your video and text tracks done, it’s just a matter of recording and laying your audio plus laying down a music track if needed. Then it’s time to produce your video.

But before we produce our video, let’s have a quick look at some other features you may wish to enhance your video with.

First, the effects room. The easiest way to get your head around these different effects is to drag what you think may enhance the video into the effect track and see the result. Does such an effect enhance, or detract the video.

Same for the pip objects and particle room, have a look through the various effects, try a few and decide for yourself what works with your video and go with them.