Temperature can be dealt with, if you want video to edit in PD then you better generate some pressure in that warm jacket! Hard drives are not air sealed as you might think, the air pressure inside the drive is maintained by a small hole which communicates with the air pressure outside. If a drive is used at too high an altitude, the air pressure and density drop and becomes too thin to support the heads at their proper operating height. Keep in mind the heads float a few nanometers above the disk surface. If the heads get too close to the disk, the risk of head crash and disk failure will result.

Jeff

It's actually lower atmospheric pressure at higher altitudes, not lower temperature, that may cause a hard disk failure or damage. It's because standard hard disk designs rely on flying head air lift...

Hi,
Ok what if your camcorder is SdHC card or internal memory...no effect?
Jim Intel i7-2600@3.4Gz Geforce 560ti-1GB Graphic accelerator, windows 7 Premium 12GB memory

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I see now JL_JL explained the altitude issue before me; somehow, I didn't see the post yesterday.

Anyway, sure, solid state technlogies (I mean chips, or semiconductor memories, whatever name) are not sensitive to atmospheric pressure changes or, relatively speaking, mechanical shocks...

Hey Guys,

Thanx for all the feedback and suggestions, even on the unrelated altitude topic .
Just to let you know that after converting all 28Mbps 1080p50 video clips from the TM900 to L4.1 1080p50 (unofficial) @ 15 Mbps, PD (still 1424c) was able to finish producing the movie completely! There were quite some video freezes in the final result though, about 15. Peculiar difference is that where with the original footage the freezes were always at the beginning of a clip and lasted the entire clip, now the freezes are also in the middle of clips.
I believe PD has some bugs that the bigger the project, the more they occur. Probably memory related, processes writing outside of their buffers, whatever. So until fixed, I'll just follow the experts' advice and split up my projects in max 20 minute parts.

When I finally have my movie produced without error, I'll try the original project with the 1703 patch (unless I already run into the same problems on the 20 minute parts).

So CyberLink, 3 bug reports:
1) On big projects with 1080p50@28Mbps source material, PowerDirector freezes at undeterministic moments; freeze here means: the program has not crashed, is still responsive on its UI, but rendering has stopped and there is no way to get it to resume.
2) On big projects with 1080p50 source material (any bitrate), PowerDirector produces results with some parts (undeterministic) of video frozen.
3) At transitions between SVRT and Rendering (CPU rendering at least), artifacts are introduced. On VLC, the artifacts manifest themselves as black frames.

By the way, perhaps also interesting for somebody wanting to investigate further:
1) When doing Intelligent SVRT with the Handbrake-converted clips, it took hours to analyse and came back with more than a hundred profiles, all the same: AVC 1920x1080/50p (28 Mbps) with 25.500 Kbps video bitrate. I chose my custom profile instead.
2) PD stores a lot of info about precache and shadow files in the registry. So to start producing with a clean slate, deleting files may not be enough. According to CyberLink (link buried somewhere in the forum, search for RichVideo) the process RichVideo enables PD to reuse things determined while authoring during the production, to decrease production time.
3) The option to enable/disable RichVideo is not there in the GUI (shadow files is something else apparently). But there is a registry setting for it (like there also is for shadow files).
Cheers.

SVRT tests with new patch 1703:
Where with 1424c I used to get a number of black frames just *before* a transition, now with 1703 I get a short freeze of the video right *after* the transition. I was able to reproduce the artifact with two clips, each one trimmed (beginning and end cut off), and a transition between them. Two full clips with a transition between them renders fine.

I am also able to confirm what Peter100 writes here: http://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/posts/list/15/20483.page. I frame-stepped through the old black frames and the new freeze with VLC. Framestepping through the sequence:
- The black frames produced with 1424c show as black frames
- The freeze produced with 1703 shows as a mangled sequence of frames: suppose the right order is 0123456789, then frames are in order 0516273849, after which the rest continues correctly.

Tried DynamicGOP=1, no luck.

Hi Gerry

Thanks for the follow up

The members here do not work for Cyberlink nor do Cyberlink monitor this forum.

We are all volunteer video editors - like yourself - sharing information and helping each other out due to the (sometimes, well almost) inadequate support from Cyberlink.

Your great suggestions should be directed to Cyberlink Technical Support:

http://www.cyberlink.com/prog/support/cs/contact-support.jsp

Happy editing Happing editing

Best Regards

Neil
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Quote: Hi,
I am going to show my ignorance why would a video camera fail at a certain altitude? I
Jim

He's going to be in the Andes -- the problem is the llama spit. Jerry Schwartz