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Dafydd,
Attached is a screen snap of my preview options.
I finally got a video to render by removing all transitions so PD9 did not have to compute enhancements on 2 videos while executing a fade transition between them. Then cutting up that resultant video back into the original and putting the fades in so that it calculated fades with no enhancements on. What a royal pain. At least the final render goes faster as it gets to use SVRT for much of the video content, only having to render the transitions and the still photos.
My computer is within the hardware specs of the product, but clearly pushing PD9 to the limits. Cyberlink has not tested their product when it is pushing a computer to it's limits, as it comes up with many many different hangs and failure modes. This is scary for anyone trying to use the product on a moderate powered machine. Most people would not put in the time I have put in to get a resultant video. Very frustrating!
I'm not sure I care to keep using this product unfortunately.
Thanks again for all the help.
Joel
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Kevin, Dafydd,
Thanks for both your posts. I've determined the issues always occur during a Fade transition between two videos that have multiple fixes enabled. I've read posting where people are complaining that transitions freeze the last frame and just use it for the outbound transition and 1 frame for the incoming transition until the transition is complete. Fade appears to keep motion going on both clips. Doing all this processing on 2 video streams plus the fade seems to overload the system and all sorts of havoc ensues.
As a last ditch effort to at least get a video out of this project, I'm in the midst of rendering the video without any transitions or other tracks. Then I'll drop that long video stream back into the project, splitting it and inserting a transition at each location. That way PD9 does not have to render all the video with enhancements while also doing the transitions. A major hack, but it should work. Not something I'm willing to do for all my projects though. I'll let you know how this attempt goes.
If this goes well, I'm thinking I'll eventually render a DVD from the resultant MPEG-4 file instead of directly. Will this produce a good quality image on the DVD? I'm guessing so as the resolution will be lower, but there are likely other downsampling effects that could play in. Then again, it's all starting at 1920x1080 and 5MP stills, so the MPEG-4 file is no different than the source video content.
As for the questions you each pose:
Kevin's on driver level, I chose the 5/12/10 version as that is the latest one shown supported on Dell's website. I saw the 10/25/10 version on Nvidia's but wanted to try Dell's most recent tested first. I'll upgrade to Nvidia's most recent and see if there is any difference.
Dafydd's on video input: 1920x1080, 30 fps, 15 Mbit/s
Dafydd's on preview options: I'm not sure I follow what you are asking regarding what my previous options are. Help me better understand that one.
Dafydd's on memory: I noticed last night in the DxDiag that the system is only seeing 2GB of memory. A few weeks ago we changed it to a single 4GB SIMM and I did not even look to see if the system is recognizing it all. I'm thinking the computer has a max of 2GB per SIMM and thus not seeing it all, what a horrible surprise.
It may be that my computer is too light weight to work on HD video. That would be a shame as I'm not in a position to upgrade it ![]()
Thanks for all you guy's advise, this is great and far beyond what Cyberlink would ever provide.
Joel
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Well, this time it got about 5 minutes into rendering and just stopped. No CES_CacheAgent, nothing, just sat there doing nothing. Not even any CPU usage by PDR9. Yet Task Manager showed the program to be happy (i.e. status of Running).
Off to another reboot. Checked the Preferences and found that although I was selecting Hardware Acceleration in the Produce screen, using hardware CUDA was not enable in the Preferences, so I checked it. That seemed to be my death-nell.
Now PD9 starts up then goes to "Not Responding" once started. After about 3 rounds of this I decided to leave it for an hour. 10 minutes later it showed up Running. What the heck. To confirm this was the cause I went into Preferences and uncheck "Enable NVIDIA CUDA". All was fine. Checked it again and instantly PD9 comes up Not Responding. Took about 10 minutes for it to return to responsiveness.
Maybe my hardware does not support CUDA, but hanging for 30 minutes when it is checked is a bit out of line. It's probably waiting to timeout on some hardware call, but this is absurd.
OK, so now I am about 30 seconds from uninstalling this program permanently and demanding Cyberlink credit back my credit card. I've burned something over 30 hours in the last week trying to get this stuff to work and nothing seems to. Any suggestions?
Joel
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Kevin,
Attached is the DxDiag file.
I'll let it run without shadow files, certainly quicker to get up and going that way.
My computer is a 2 year old laptop, good specs at the time, though still 2 years old now, so it is not the fastest machine on the planet. My old tower machine can't even crunch on PD9, I tried and it's on its knees begging for mercy.
Thanks for all the suggestions and help.
Joel
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Kevin,
OK, I have deleted all the temporary files. It will take a while for PD9 to recreate all the shadow files, then I'll let it attempt to render overnight and let you know what I find.
I started this project in PD8 and the import to PD9 was a mess as well. Transitions were all screwed up, time sync of tracks was a mess, it might have even been easier to start over than to clean it all up which took a couple hours.
Joel
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Kevin,
Great insight, I was not aware of the Render Preview. I was also wondering what the green bar across the top by the scrubber was indicating. I had not noticed the button until you pointed it. PD9 must have done that at some point on it's own. If something is pre-rendered, is that pre-rendered content saved somewhere to assist the render engine when rendering the final video in the Produce function?
When CES_CacheAgent was consuming the computer I had to kill it and PD9 to even get my computer back. To ensure no remnants would affect another try at rendering, I rebooted prior to trying again. I've been through this cycle way to many times ![]()
Ultimately I found that having Stabilization, Denoise, and Enhancement all turned on is too much for PD9 to handle. I have them all on because of the nature of the video clip being low light, not sharp, and jittery due to being taken underwater. I turned off Stabilization and PD9 gets through the rendering now. So the program appears to have a problem doing that many transformations at the same time.
The next problem however is that after running through the complete 30 minutes of video and saying the rendering was complete, the output file (MPEG4 Best Quality, I'm starting with 1920x1080 MPEG4 video clips) only had the last 12 minutes of video in it (file size 1.05 GB). The first 18 minutes were no where to be found. Have you ever heard of this one?
I'm getting quite frustrated with all the issues in PD9 and wondering if I should drop back to PD8, was it more stable with all this work? Will a .pds file created in PD9 open in PD8?
Note: I am a computer engineer and PC Power user, so I'm putting a lot of work into analyzing this thing and doing all the tricks I can find, nothing is helping.
Thanks for your advice!
Joel
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I am trying to render a 30 minute video with PD9. It gets about 10 minutes in, reaches an MPEG4 source video that I have some Fix/Enhance features turned on, and the rendering stagnates. At that instant the process CES_CacheAgent.exe (a program in the PowerDirector directory) begins running and Task Manager shows it consuming 98% to 99% of the CPU. The computer will sit in the state forever. PD9 responds to Pausing the rendering (at which point CES_CacheAgent goes to 0% CPU) and Resuming (and it goes back to 99%) but no progress occurs.
I'm attaching a screen shot with in the "Hung State" (note, there is a video frame in the preview window but Snagit did not capture it when taking the image for this jpg) and an image of my edit screen per Dafydd Bevan's suggestion. There is no error event as nothing is crashed, it just makes no progress.
BTW - I have applied the latest video driver updates per FredB's post. Unfortunately that has not altered the behavior.
I need help from here, not sure where to turn to get PD9 to render my video
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Thanks for the quick reply. I thought I was going nuts and not understanding something. Sounds like this is the way PD9 is right now until they fix it, is that a correct understanding?
The other thing I'm finding is that sometimes PD9 does not seem to realize that two video elements truly abut to each other, thus the transition can't be made into a Cross-over. I have to move an element off the video track onto a secondary video track then put it back on the video track to get PD9 to abut them. This even happens with multiple elements that were drag-and-dropped on the video track all at once, so it is not just an issue with how I'm placing them on the track. Have others seen this behavior?
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When I add a transition between two elements in the video, I lay it across the two elements, yet every time PD9 forces it to the end of the previous element and makes it an Overlap transition. The only way to make it a Cross-Over is to then hit the "Switch" button or right-click and select "Switch to Cross-Over Transition" in the menu. I see in the Tutorial they can position the transition across the two video elements and PD9 automatically understands it is supposed to be a Cross-Over. What am I doing wrong? Is there a setting I need to change somewhere that I'm missing?
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