I will just add something that may help with the transition problem. I will mention here I am editing full HD 1920X1080 videos anything from 1gig to 4 gig in size.

Now I had just typed about 5 paragraphs talking about how it appeared that turning on shadow files for COMPLICATED videos appeared to solve my freezing between clips in preview mode. This is with clips just butted up to each other there are no fades etc just playing from one clip to the next.

Well scrap that, further testing with a particular clip I had freezing every time I tried to run the preview from the previous clip to this one has revealed this.

1. If I open PD, go to the clip just before the problem clip and play the movie it freezes the PROBLEM clip at the transition but continues to play the audio. This particular problem clip had an X-RAY effect added to it but I have had similar freezing at the transition point on other clips. I just used this one as it froze every time I tried to play it.

2. If I go to the problem clip first and play it in clip mode even for just 5 seconds, stop, then go to the previous clip and play in movie mode the transition goes smoothly ALL of the way through the problem clip not just the 5 seconds I played in clip mode.

Now I am no expert but it appears to me that PD has problems with transitions.

Something that may help is I do not use the trim method with my videos I split my videos and delete the parts I don't want. Whether or not this alters the way PD sees the clips I don't know I am just throwing out as much information as I can to help.

If I get time I will see if I can replicate the problem with small videos. I would like to be able to send the packed files for Cyberlink to test but I just copied the two small clips that are causing a problem out of the timeline and put them into a new project but because they are part of two larger videos the packed project even for this 1 minute project was over 5 gig in size.
My youtube channel====> http://www.youtube.com/user/relate2?feature=mhsn

Dafydd,

Well further it may also have something to do with the cores because I just re-set my computer back to 2 cores, rebooted and the transitions play. There is a slight pause of maybe 1/2 second but it continued smoothly without having to run through playing the PROBLEM clip first.

So I am still chipping away at this problem and I just hope Cyberlink comes up with a solution before I have to go out and buy myself a wig to cover my bald head.

Look I like PowerDirector it is the best of the cheaper editors I have tried so far and really do not want to go and learn another program. It does everything I need and I do like the interface. My youtube channel====> http://www.youtube.com/user/relate2?feature=mhsn

Robert,

I applaud your tenacity. And I especially applaud you for your willingness to go to all the effort of taking the time to document and share your experiments and data with this forum and with Cyberlink.

It will surely only serve to benefit those with similar high end computer setups, who are attempting to work out their similar full HD issues. As well as benefiting folks like me who still plan to someday make that leap to a higher end computer and HD camera.

So Robert… Thanks!

I suppose a request could go out for you to once again make one of your 1920x1820 clips available for other forum member to test. But if even they performed satisfactorily for someone else, that wouldn’t do you a bit of good at this point. You need those clips to work on “your” rig.

I can only hope that Cyberlink is as willing to work with you, as you are willing to work with them.


Click here PDtoots for a collection of PowerDirector Tutorials and Tips

again, may I proffer my two bits.
While I dont see the reported problem, and I dont use the Trim, I simply delete unused parts.

But, in my opinion, when using Vista for long periods, there is a build-up of crap memory or memory fragmentation which leads to big applications suffering - only I cant prove this at all except by experience and observation.

Just yesterday, late in the day when I had been using Vista all day for emails, web development etc - but not PD at all... Then I started using PD with a few browser windows and windows explorer left open.
There had been ten explorer windows and some big development tools running all day.

PD ran terribly (slowly & with some small delays) and I happened to be dragging segments from the middle of a 5 minute long original AVI to the end of the movie.

I ended with about one minutes worth of 5 second clips, some were movie-in-reverse and some had other scene manipulations like speed and brightness applied.
Then PD froze for about 20 seconds and I had not saved the project . I was afraid it was a solid freeze up and I would lose my work, Then it continued OK.
I saved my project and rebooted Vista and continued editing for another thity minutes with absolutely no delays.

Maybe nothing to do with Roberts experience, but Vista should be booted before going into a 'troublesome' test project.
If you can't solve the problem - Change the problem

Hi Cranston, thanks mate, I am glad I am preparing the way for others to have a smoother path than me. Regarding uploading another clip of mine I don't really think it will work. The reason I say this is I just dropped 4 small clips all under 40 meg each onto the timeline and I split them, cut them, faded them to within an inch of their lives and not a problem when previewing. The project I am having problems with has clips that total about 20gig.

Now I still have the problem of rendering even a 10 meg video that has a stabilisation and video enhancement effect on the video when using all of my cpu's cores. Thankfully as a work around I can enable 2 instead of 8 cores.

Hi Videocentricity,

I would agree with you re the ram if I was using a lot of it. I have an lcd screen on my keyboard which shows cpu and ram usage. When previewing this particular project my ram usage is only around 41-52% and my cpu usage fluctuates from 1% to a maximum of 28% and this is with Firefox open as well with 7 tabs.

I still think it is something to do with the cores though, as using the 2 cores solves my preview and rendering problem. Plus even with a freshly booted computer with nothing open other than PD I still have the transition problem.

Just one thing about the cores, I find it interesting that it is built into the operating system the ability to turn off cores. Why would they even make that an easy option for a person to use unless they know that it causes problems with some programs. I have also heard of turning off cores to get certain games to work also, so maybe it is not just Cyberlinks fault.

Cheers

Robert My youtube channel====> http://www.youtube.com/user/relate2?feature=mhsn

Well some more information for Cyberlink.

1. I rendered my project using Mpeg2 using 2 cores but ended up with a video that had tears in it almost like it was interlaced. I have a post here somewhere with an example of the tearing on a separate video.

2. Sorry I did not take note of exactly what I did over the next hour or so as I was using 2 cores and did not expect any trouble. I did not re-render straight away and I am sure I closed down PD and did some other work on my computer.

3. When I re-opened PD the render failed with the old "out of system memory" fault again. I tried this twice and it failed at the same place. I checked the video left after the crash and it failed at a transition AGAIN!!!!

4. Just for information of Cyberlink all I did then without rebooting my computer I just restarted PD, took out the "fade" at the place where it crashed and rendered again which was successful with a proper clean render, no tearing.

I say again it appears PD has a problem when it gets to the end of one clip and goes to the next clip. I do not see any repeatable circumstance other than it is at a transition. The transition this time was a transition that had a pause when previewing but did not crash. The transition that was continually crashing when using all the cores rendered fine in the render.

The size of the project may have a bearing on the problem, I don't know. The project videos added up to over 20gig and the final output was 1.6gig.

I will post a link to the youtube video sometime tomorrow afternoon. It is not perfect but I just got tired of working on it and decided to just render it as is.

Cheers

Robert My youtube channel====> http://www.youtube.com/user/relate2?feature=mhsn

Hi Robert,
I am reading the posts here and monitoring what everyone is writing. I'm also requesting CyberLink R&D read the feedback etc etc.

Dafydd
[Moderator]

Thanks Dafydd, I really appreciate the effort you put into this forum and for Cyberlink.

Cheers

Robert My youtube channel====> http://www.youtube.com/user/relate2?feature=mhsn

Another workaround for anyone having Panasonic GH1 720p problems in PD8 - Nero 9 allows you to put all your clips on its timeline, then export to a single file with no rendering. Put that onto the PD8 timeline, right click and tell PD8 to use the video format "interlaced top field first", and if you then split it into separate clips again during editing or by using scene detection, each split item will retain that video format attribute. Then PD8 will handle it with no video freezes. Well, here at least...

Well as I mentioned above I successfully rendered my 1.6gig video in mpeg2 format but I am having a hell of a problem manually uploading it up to Youtube. I decided to render it to youtube from inside Powerdirector using a special setting I set in the profiles for a higher resolution.

Well back to the crashing at a transition again. This time a different transition than before but the same transition each time I try to render. This video should render to 1.1gig but has crashed twice leaving two videos of exactly the same length of 716mb and the exact same transition.

I am trying again but as there is no fade at this transition to remove, I don't really know what I can do. This transition though is going from a video in the timeline to a video in the pip track with a colour board in the timeline to take up the space to the next clip after the pip video.

Just a reminder this is rendering 1920X1080 video I may have to go back to 1289X720 for upload although I would like to render my videos just once instead of twice, once for the net and once for my archives. My youtube channel====> http://www.youtube.com/user/relate2?feature=mhsn

Give me a break, I take out the pip that was causing the trouble and put it in the timeline minus the pip edit and render the video using the Youtube option..... I was using a youtube setting that I had created in the profiles. I know I know I changed it to a different resolution and size from the default settings but.......I then get all the way to the end of the a 1.3gig render successfully.......then PD says "Can't upload video to youtube"

Not only that it did not save the 1.3gig version anywhere I can find. So I can't even upload it manually.

EDIT====I found it, PD said it was rendering it to Produce 10 but actually saved it as Produce 9???

1. PD rendered the pip included video fine using Mpeg2 and M2ts successfully but not .wmv.

2. Youtube will not play back my m2ts videos properly. The audio chokes after about 5 seconds of replay. Vimeo won't even accept m2ts so there must be a problem with the format.

3. The Mpeg2 video uploading to youtube is giving me trouble.

4. I am going to try once more and render the video to .wmv which is the format PD is using for youtube anyway and see if I can manually upload it.

EDIT====I didn't have to render again as i found thr video so I am now in the process of uploading the .wmv video to youtube......wish me luck, I think I need it.

I tell you it better be worth it when Cyberlink fixes the i7 cpu and transition problems. My youtube channel====> http://www.youtube.com/user/relate2?feature=mhsn

Well I finally got my video uploaded successfully to youtube.

1. It appears that youtube will not accept large high bitrate videos. The worse thing though, unlike PD (thank you PD) which tells you at the beginning of the upload, youtube tells you after you have uploaded a 1.1gig video.

2. This is a video processed at default .wmv standard quality 1280X720. It looks as though I am going to have to render my videos twice, once for the web and once for archiving.

3. The problem PD had with the transition is in the video where I go to X-Ray effect, when I had it in the PIP track where I took out the vignetting. Deleting the pip track and just putting the video in the timeline allowed PD to render the video properly.

Anyway enough of my musings here is the video. It is not exactly how I would like it but I just needed to get it out there. enjoy. You may notice a circular rainbow....who knew they even existed, you can imagine my surprise when I looked down and saw it for the first time. It is called in the hang gliding community a personal glory because it forms around your own shadow.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiJe8sWPJro My youtube channel====> http://www.youtube.com/user/relate2?feature=mhsn

Quote: 3. When I re-opened PD the render failed with the old "out of system memory" fault again. I tried this twice and it failed at the same place. I checked the video left after the crash and it failed at a transition AGAIN!!!!

Unfortunately this looks to be a huge issue for ALL video editing software programs as they struggle with multiple layered video files, with users adding effects, corrective measures and general editing. H264 1080i/p swallows memory by the bucket and the more feature changes you make the less you have in processing memory available to you.

The answer might be shorter section editing changes and compilation creating at the end.

I realise this isn't a helpful post - a moment of thought only.

Dafydd
[Moderator]

Thanks Dafydd for your input and it may help laying down my transition effects at the end of my editing process, just before I render.

Although as I mentioned in a previous post I have an LCD screen on my keyboard which shows cpu and ram usage and even during rendering my memory usage never gets above 60-70%. Not that I know enough about computers but I would have thought if it was a memory problem it would crash when I am closer to using it all not with 900mb-1.2gb of ram still free. My youtube channel====> http://www.youtube.com/user/relate2?feature=mhsn

PowerDirector does seem to be remarkably frugal in its memory use, though I guess there are limits.

For monitoring memory, CPU and disk, Bmem is your friend - http://badmofo.org/bmem/ - all my PCs have that installed before anything!

Also the DPC latency checker from http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml is another essential system checking tool.

I checked out the Bmem tool and is shows the same information as my keyboard LCD plus it shows virtual ram on the hard drive. The only problem is it does not show the 8 cores of my i7 cpu, it shows them as one single core.

EDIT=====Interestingly the CPU usage goes up over 100% when more of the cores are being used. I just hit 125% cpu usage when I opened up PD and opened a project. Looks as though it needs a code rewrite, I didn't know you could use more than 100% of anything. My youtube channel====> http://www.youtube.com/user/relate2?feature=mhsn

Right click on the Bmem display for settings, Robert, which here at least on a 4 core system enables me to display the separate cores.

I don't have a display option on mine but under "About" it says one physical cpu and 8 virtual cpus My youtube channel====> http://www.youtube.com/user/relate2?feature=mhsn

Did you ever find a fix for "freezing transitions" Robert? I have an i7 980X CPU with 12 cores. I am having the same problem

Hi Elwood,

WOW I had forgotten about the work I did with this.

To summarise things since this thread. I am not having half the problems I was having back then, which is a good thing.

1. I have upgraded to a 64 bit operating system, Win7. This lets PD use more than 2gig of ram where a 32 bit system only allows any one program to use a max of 2gig no matter how much ram is in your computer. I have not had to use the i7 2 cores workaround for a while, so I don't know if the latest build has fixed that or moving to Win 7 64 bit has fixed that.


2. I am using the latest build of PD.

3. I did strike a problem with my last video a week or so ago which was fixed by putting in a fade transition in the offending pip track.

Bottom line PD is still having problems with transitions, my suggestion is to either take out the transition, move the clip to a different place on the timeline if possible or change the type of transition.

You know PD does everything I want or need and having tried just about every other editing program out there they all have their different problems, even the ones costing $800 so I am sticking with PD and just work around the transition problem.

Cheers

Robert My youtube channel====> http://www.youtube.com/user/relate2?feature=mhsn