Powerdirector’s strong point has always been its ease of use.

It might not have the sheer power of rivals such as Adobe’s Premiere Elements, but it’s a lot easier for newcomers to master.

But it still provides a range of editing tools and special effects powerful enough to produce sophisticated video projects.

For the most part, the program continues that tradition with this latest upgrade, although it does stumble along the way occasionally.

For newcomers to video editing, Powerdirector 7 includes a number of ‘Magic’ commands to help you get started.

In addition to the existing Magic Movie command that automatically compiles a series of clips and transitions into a complete movie, there are options such as Magic Clean, Magic Fix and Magic Motion.

Magic Clean automatically adjusts lighting and colour settings for any photo or video clip, and provides a useful split-screen preview so you can see the ‘before and after’ versions of your video alongside each other.

Magic Fix allows you to adjust the focus of a photograph, remove red-eye or stabilise shaky video clips taken with a handheld camcorder. Finally, Magic Motion can be used to instantly apply pan and zoom effects to photos that are used as part of a slideshow, or perhaps in the title sequence for a movie project.

In addition to its predefined pan and zoom settings, the Magic Motion dialogue box also includes a Motion Designer option that allows you to create your own animation paths to control how an image moves around the screen, so you can exercise as much control over the animation process as you want.

There is improved control over the various special effects filters too, as these now include keyframe controls that allow you to modify effects across a series of frames. So instead of simply applying a sepia filter to an entire video clip, you might make the effect fade in over several seconds instead.

If you really want to go to town with these sorts of effects, you can experiment with the improved PiP (picture-in-picture) controls.

Like most video-editing programs, Powerdirector has a Timeline window that is split into a series of horizontal tracks, with elements such as audio clips, video clips and special effects each placed into their own separate tracks.

You can also add up to six different PiP tracks to your project, which means you can create complex montages with multiple images and video clips superimposed over each other as they move around the screen.

This is where things get a little more complicated, though, and we could have used a bit more help from the manual and online help files, both of which have tendency to simply list features without really explaining how they work.

The upgrade is rounded off with a few ‘me too’ features that bring it up to date with the latest video technologies.

This Ultra version of the program allows you to import the AVCHD format used by many new high-definition camcorders and to burn video projects onto Blu-ray disc (there’s a less expensive Deluxe version that omits these features, priced at £39.99).

You can upload your edited videos straight to Youtube, and we also like the ability download photos and audio clips from Flickr and Freesound straight to your projects.

We’d like to see the manual and online help files improved so that they explain some of the program’s advanced features more clearly. However, we still like Powerdirector’s overall ease of use and would certainly recommend it to people who are just getting started with video editing.