Hi all,

After using the search for some time I couldn't find an answer, so here goes:

It is possible, by any means at all, to alter the dimensions of the shadowfiles in Power Director 9 on Windows 7 Home Premium? Any solution, including hacks of any sort, will do.

Here is why I ask:

I am running said version to edit 720p movies from iPhone and a Sony point-n-click camera on an Asus netbook 1215PN. For obvious reasons this is not an ideal system for that purpose, except that I'm on a world trip lasting 12+ months and it would be near impossible to carry around a normal setup. A lightweight netbook is much more convenient. Carefully selecting the right notebook and configuration we are well capable to edit 720p video's of up to +/- 6 minutes in time, typically 20-30 different shots and background music. For us, that's all we need.

To make this (at all) possible we chose the ASUS 1215PN netbook which comes with 2Gb of memory, an Atom D525 dual core, NVidia's ION2 chipset and a 1366x768 resolution. We normally copy video's at the end of the day from our camera to the computer and have shadowfiles created overnight. We're ready for editing once we get into a bus or flight the next morning. To boost performance we altered the settings in the registry (making a copy of the originals first) so that Power Director's working directory and all shadowfiles are created on a Sandisk SDHC Ultra2 8Gb ssd card that sits in an integrated slot in the netbook. This comes with a huge gain while editing the timeline. Before editing we always reboot and run a script that will kill any unnecesary software, such as windows networking services, windows desktop themes and such. This also just adds to making the most resources possible for power director.

All this works well (you'd be amazed at how well and it's HD video editing on a netbook!), but we still have to be somewhat patient people, and we're looking for ways to further stretch the limit.

Our preview window, on screen, is actually 479x270 pixels.The actual shadow files created by Power Director have a resolution of 720x480. That's much smaller than the original, but still unnecesary large. If there would be any way to reduce them in size to 479x270 then Power Directory will simply have less data to process while editing the timeline and therefor perform better during timeline edit. Ideally, we would have Power Directory do this directly while creating them.

I have not tried converting the shadowfiles to a lower resolution by a third party tool yet but I might give that a try, even though it would mean shadowfile creation would become a two-step process.

Thanks so much!

Juice