Cyberlink Powerdirector 6 is a video editing and production suite aimed at the home video market. It’s very easy to use and supports capture, editing and export of high-definition video formats. All home video editing programs follow the convention of dividing the whole process into chronologically ordered tasks and providing the necessary tools for each - Powerdirector is no exception.

Four buttons ranged across the top of the screen provide everything you need to capture and edit video footage, produce video files for distribution and create video DVDs. Most of the action occurs in the edit module, which, like every other aspect of the Powerdirector workspace, is well-designed, allowing you to easily find your way around without needing to refer to the Help option.

There’s a choice of storyboard or timeline layout, the latter providing a master video track, effects track, picture-in-picture overlay track, a titling track and voiceover and music audio tracks.

Free the director within using new tools and templates:

- DVD Template Designer - 29 new designs, moveable buttons, text and color tools let you create stylish menus for your movie DVDs. Learn how.

- Slideshow Wizard - New styles for presenting photos let you turn a folder of image files into a dynamic slideshow in minutes. See how it's done...

- Animated PiP Designer - New alpha-blended objects and a motion path generator create dramatic PiP effects to enhance your video content. See how...

- Video Subtitle Room - Easily inserted directly on the screen or imported as text, new video subtitles offer an easy way to caption scenes and describe video content.

Edit videos automatically, fix images and audio:

- Magic Movie Wizard - Great for beginners, convenient for experts, the automated step-by-step approach quickly guides you through movie production. See the Magic Movie Wizard in action....

- Improved Magic Style - New animation elements and refreshed themes let you automatically edit your movie, add effects, and insert a title and credits using a handy timeline. Add or remove any part of the timeline after creating it. See the Magic Movie Wizard in action....

- Improved Magic Fix - Enhanced precision ensures that shaky videos are stabilized with greater accuracy, photos are sharpened.

- Improved Magic Clean - New back light correction and white balance improve hard-to-fix mistakes often caused by poor lighting conditions.

Personalize videos with humor and style:

- Cool transitions and effects - Huge library of transitions and effects turns video clips and photos into an alluring storyline.

- Dialog Balloons - Drag-and-drop templates let you add unspoken thoughts and highlight sections of conversation for humorous results.

- Title templates - Multiple layers, animated text, and a choice of font and color, create professional opening titles, stylish chapter names, and closing credits.

- Audio track for PiPs - Heighten the impact of moving PiP objects with accompanying sounds.

Cakewalk Home Studio series has always been a trimmed down version of their flagship product at a more affordable price for the home studio owner. However, from looking at the feature set of this newest version, it certainly seems like an app that could satisfy most any home/project studio owner and many semi-pros as well.

Features:

While Sonar Home Studio does do everything you would expect, that being audio and MIDI recording, MIDI step-time sequencing, VST and DirectX plugin and instrument support, support for low-latency ASIO and WDM drivers as well as the old-school DirectSound drivers, it also does much more which one wouldn't typically expect out of such a program.

* It has a video playback window which allows the user to create sound tracks and add sound effects to a project. It supports AVI and MPEG video formats and will export video as well.

* It also has a music notation tool to allow the user to create and print musical scores.

* It allows export of mp3 and WMA audio for easy internet sharing.

* It contains a loop explorer to allow the user to find and use ACID-format loops quickly and easily, and comes bundled with a loop library.

* It comes bundled with a light version of Cakewalk Pyro to burn your music to CD.

* It also comes packed with a collection of tutorials to help you learn and understand the application, and get you up and recording quickly.

* Bundled with a collection of plugins that include chorus, delay, reverb, EQ and others (as stated earlier, 15 in total) it has enough to meet beginner's needs. Can also add any of hundreds of third party plugins with the previously mentioned VST and DirectX support.

* As mentioned earlier, the application packs instruments along with it as well including the Virtual Sound Canvas, Dreamstation and the Sfz SoundFont player. The VST and DirectX support also allows the user to add any third party VSTi or DXi as well.

* The user can use ReWire applications such as Reason, ReBirth, Project5, Kinetic and others with the ReWire support.

As seen in this article, Sonar Home Studio version 4 brings with it a whole batch of new features and functions. This new version can be an ideal choice for the new home studio owner that is on a limited budget but wants to buy a recording application that can help them in the short term, and be a good learning experience for upgrading applications later on.

Consisting of five splendid products: DVD Ripper Ultimate, Video Converter Ultimate, DVD Copy Express, DVD Creator, and Audio Maker, Xilisoft Media Toolkit Ultimate helps you rip/convert DVD movies, convert among various video formats(include High Definition videos), copy and backup your DVD movies, create DVD from various video files, convert between audios, rip CD to audios and burn music CD from audio files.

Whatever multimedia devices you own and wherever you want to enjoy videos and music, once you own this Media Toolkit Ultimate, you can always put any DVD movies, videos and music on PSP, PS3, iPod, iPhone, Apple TV, Zune, Archos, mobile phone, or any MP4/MP3/DVD/CD players for relaxed enjoying.

Xilisoft Media Toolkit Ultimate brings you amazing DVD ripping, video and audio converting, DVD copying, DVD creating, CD ripping and burning experience to spice up your multimedia life.

Bring the professional power of SONAR to your home PC with new SONAR Home Studio Version 4. There is no better software for musicians taking the first step into digital recording. The newest member of the SONAR family comes with a comprehensive feature set that turns your computer into a multitrack recording studio, giving you everything you need to take your music from inspiration to finished CD.

SONAR Home Studio is built with the same core features as Cakewalk SONAR 4. Its intuitive tools make it easy to record, edit, mix, and arrange professional-quality music. It includes powerful tools; built-in instruments and effects; support for DirectX, VST, ReWire, and MFX instruments and effects; support for ACID format loops; and much more.

CloneDVD mobile converts your DVD movies quickly and easily into a format that your mobile equipment (Sony PSP, Apple iPod Video, iAudio X5, Creative Labs ZEN Vision, etc) can play. You can also convert your DVDs to other file formats, such as DivX, XviD, AVI, MP4, etc. With CloneDVD mobile you can put your favourite movies or TV series on your mobile video equipment and watch them wherever and whenever you want. Let the kids watch their favourite cartoons in the car.

Incorporating the user-friendly interface of Elby's CloneDVD and the well-engineered open source project FFmpeg as the conversion engine makes CloneDVD mobile a fast, easy-to-use and quality product that is very reasonably priced. Copying a DVD to your mobile video machine is achieved in a few mouse clicks and without the need to rip it to your hard-disk. Note that copying protected DVDs also requires AnyDVD.

Features:

- Convert movie DVDs to play on mobile video equipment like the Sony PSP, Apple iPod Video, iAudio X5, Creative Labs ZEN Vision, etc

- Convert movie DVDs to other file formats like DivX, XviD, AVI, MP4, etc.

- Utilises a high quality picture conversion engine

- Supports multi-angle movie DVDs

- Video Preview shows an overview of all selectable DVD titles

- Target size freely adjustable

- Supports chapter trimming

- Very easy to use: Our unique Filmstrip assistant will guide you step-by-step through all settings - easy for beginners

- Picture snapshots while converting

- Logging window available

- Stable, fast and does not require an ASPI driver

CyberPower Audio Editing Lab 14 is an ideal solution for audio editing and mastering. The program contains everything you need to create great sounding recordings and audio CDs, including professional tools for recording, analysis and editing. The user interface was designed with speed, accuracy and ease of use in mind.

large range of high quality audio tools and effects are integrated in Audio Editing Lab — including tools for dynamic processing, equalizing, numerous effects such as echo, amplification, noise reduction, reverb, chorus and flanger, as well time stretching and key transposition tools. Recordings distorted by noise, clicks, crackle, clipping or missing high frequency content can be restored.

Prepared for iPod fans, Xilisoft DVD to iPod Suite includes two excellent products in one pack, i.e. DVD to iPod Converter and iPod Video Converter. The iPod software pack at discount is all-in-one and easy-to-use DVD to iPod converter, iPod music and movie converter software.

Xilisoft DVD to iPod Converter and iPod Video Converter make it possible to load up your iPod with all music and movie resources at hand. Xilisoft DVD to iPod Converter converts any DVD to iPod video, iPod music with high quality and fast speed. Xilisoft iPod Video Converter helps you convert videos and audios in nearly all formats such as AVI, MPEG, WMV, MKV, DivX, MOV, RM, RMVB, MP3, WMA, WAV and OGG to iPod movie MP4 and iPod music MP3, AAC, M4A.

Rip DVD and convert videos to iPod MP4, MP3, enjoy your iPod music and movie with Xilisoft iPod converter software pack in hand!

Build professional banners, advertisements and other commercial animations in minutes, with an impressively short learning curve. Animation Workshop handles the elements of its animations as objects, eliminating the need to understand how animation files are structured.

Animation Workshop will assemble your animations from still images, text and other animations. It brings an inexhaustible library of graphic effects to the table. It maintains its text as editable text objects, rather than graphics — the text content of your animations will be editable after they're created.

Export Animation Workshop's animations to GIF, MNG, AVI, MOV and SWF (Macromedia Flash™).

Driver Cleaner Professional Edition is an improved and better version of Driver Cleaner. Driver Cleaner Professional Editon is a program which helps you to remove parts of drivers that are left after uninstalling the old drivers. The program is for ATI, nVidia, Creative, Realtek, SIS, 3Dfx, S3 and more drivers. First you need to uninstall the drivers from the control panel, then reboot. After rebooting, run the program. If you really want a good description of what steps you should take, then you really need to read the readme file included in the zip file and installation as it contains a detailed step by step description. The program also fully supports windows themes and other kind of themes.

Alive Text to Speech also enables you to listen documents, emails, news articles or web pages without conversion. It supports schedule converting. It also allow advanced users to finish the conversion of text to mp3 with Command lines. You can change the different voices and the readout speed for conversion or listening, and download more voices from Internet.

Key Features:

1) Read text in any application, including Emails, web pages, news articles, PDF, Word or Excel Documents, etc.

2) Convert text to MP3, WAV, OGG, VOX files.

3) Convert text Files to MP3, WAV, OGG, VOX files.

4) Install Alive Text to Speech Toolbar in IE (Internet Explorer) Browser.

5) It is very simple and easy to use. Just right click on files in the Windows Explorer, select "Convert to MP3"(or WAV, OGG,VOX) and convert them using your predefined settings.

6) Command line supported.

7) Converting text to mp3 in batches.

8) Schedule converting support.

9) Microsoft text-to-speech engine.

10) High converting speed, wonderful output quality.

11) Windows Vista compatible.