Working with PowerDirector

Just completed a home movie which I shot using in Canon Powershot SX10 iS camera.
This camera takes very good movies even in low light but I found one maddening shortcoming: the autofocus under low light tends to lose the subject and go all blurry, refocussing after a few seconds. Luckily for me, this did not happen at crucial moments during the event.

The video format this camera uses is MOV. As I intended using PowerDirector as my video editor , I had to convert the MOV file to AVI because the free version of this program did not accept MOV files.

The MOV files were converted to AVI using Magix. I tried using MOVAVI to convert the files but for some reason or other, the quality suffered and the output was very poor.

In addition to the video, I shot, I added stills to my edited final product. PowerDirector can make stills from a movie and I made several of these. I then sequenced these stills using Microsoft's PhotoStory adding zoom and pan to slow down the action as it were -- to get a kind of pseudo-slowmotion.

PowerDirector was used to burn the completed movie on a DVD.

As an alternative to burning the final product on DVD, PowerDirector can export/save the completed movie as a Windows AVI which was, in this case, very large (13 gigs) or it could do a DV AVI which was much smaller (2 gigs).