Messages posted by Alec200

Evening all.
I do a fair bit of 360 photo work and I need to find a better work flow of applying a custom nadir/zenith patch to my photos. Photodirector 9 makes it very easy to apply a blur or mirror patch which is great, but no obvious option to apply my custom patch.
I wondered if PowerDirector would make this possible with a 360 x180 photo and then export it? It’s a long shot I know, but worth an ask I thought.
I currently use www.nadirpatch.com which is a great free tool, but when I have a batch of 25 photospheres to patch, and a slow internet connection, it’s a time consuming task. The patch I need to apply is in png/jpeg format that’s not converted for 360 viewing.

Thanks for the ideas. I had looked at the nadirpatch site. A great free service. Unfortunately it's not as straightforward, for me anyway, with photospheres shot from a drone. That site seems to provide only for placing the nadir at the bottom of the photo.

I think I may have to do it the hard way and put some more hours into learning how to do it from scratch. Drone photography is a sideline business for me as well as my full time job so I don't have any spare time at the moment unfortunately!

Not the most appropriate place for this question, but I struggled to see a more general section-sorry.

So I have the Power Director Live suite.

I have just got into making 360 photospheres and sometimes linking them together to make virtual tours. I shoot these with a Ricoh Theta S from the ground and from a Phantom 4 Pro from the air. Does my Cyberlink suite have any tools that will;

Allow me to view photospheres?

Allow me to create or place my existing company logo to cover the tripod at the base of the photosphere for ground based shots and at the zenith to cover the drone in the aerial shots.

My service provider where I host and edit my tours doesn't current allow me to create discs to cover a mix of aerial shots and ground shots. It's a global setting which, when enabled, covers the base of all my photospheres which doesn't work for me as my mixed tours end up having a nadir in the right place on ground shots but in completely the wrong place on the aerial shots.

Thanks for any help.

Quote Yeah don't worry about my C: space, I clean it up like everyday/2 days, and I keep updated of what happens in appdata and programdata..
The documents/etc folders are set on the D: drive, the temporary folders are on the C: drive but I clean them daily, and I like to keep my pc clean and to know what's going on on it

I'm having it this way since like a month.

I formatted my pc last time because after updating the drivers, youtube videos started crashing and I had a lot of problems and sometimes I get the bsod.. fortunately I had the old drivers setup, so I prohibited Windows from updating it and installed the old ones.

Just tried Bandicam and it worked perfectly, and since I'm the only one who is having that problem I don't think CyberLink should care about it..
I think I'm gonna stick to it.. Sorry for bothering that much and thanks a lot

I realise this post has been inactive for years, but I found it when having the same issue using the screen recorder from the Powerdirector 15 Live suite.

I found that disabling "hot keys" from the screen recorder settings fixed the issue.

I tried editing the video with the shadow file option enabled but it made little difference.

Thanks for the idea of Magic+ PD. I've installed the components as directed and it converted my 3.95GB H.265 4K 25fps video into a 19GB AVI file. This opened and seems to make editing far quicker (I've only given it a short test so far).

Knowing little about file formats etc, could anyone tell me what, if any, image quality is lost during this conversion? Do these potential losses, amount to a level that I would be better off just setting the Phantom to record H.264 rather than H.265 in the first place?

I do have a reasonable i7 HTPC at home, but the nature of my work dictates that I have little opportunity to use anything other than my laptop to edit videos

The rational that has been quoted on the Phantom 4 Pro specific threads is this:

max bit rate of the camera is 100mbits/s (excuse me if I have mixed up my units). If this bit rate is used to create h.265 files then there will be more information available than if the same bit rate is used to create h.264 files.

Hi all.

I'm just trying to get to grips with editing the footage from my Phantom 4 Pro on Windows 10 64bit. To get the best from the camera I'm told that I should have it output in UHD h.265 which is what I've been doing. The issue in having is that my laptop isn't very beefy (i5 6200u/20GB DDR4/480GB SSD). Whilst it was just about tolerable when editing h.264 UHD, its just far too slow when with h.265. I use the shadow file option for editing but still a no go.

Can anyone recommend an intermediate file format that I could convert the h.265 into that would be easier to work with. Ideally lossless. Ideally it would be free or nearly free to use. I've explored Prores but not found any cheap and simple solutions.

Thanks for any ideas.

Quote Alec,

I'll be curious to what CS says, to be honest, I see no issue with your choppy playback on my system for what PD is doing. All I see is that for every 6 frames of original footage, a frame needs to be dropped to get to 5 frames for your 1.2 speedup. So for each sec of video at 25fps, you need to drop just over 4 frames. In regions where the car has traveled a reasonable distance per frame, dropping one of these frames makes things appear choppy as you call it. There is no "interpolation" that I see, you simply drop a frame. This effect can easily be seen by the following:

1) Put your original Alec200 original.mp4 in track 1
2) Put your Alec200 speed increase 1.2.mp in track 2 and set opacity to like 50% or so
3) set the scrubber to 00:00:06:00
4) now move the track 2 video so it's clip time is at 00:00:05:00 to line up with the 00:00:06:00 of original clip. These frames will exactly overlay as 6/1.2=5
5) now start frame advancing one frame at a time (period "." key works good for that)

What you will see is the original car and the opaque car exactly overlay at this aligned timepoint, and also for the first 4 frame advances, on the fifth frame (00:00:06:05) you will see some blur for the dropped frame to get your speedup. So now the two cars are no longer aligned but slightly offset. This exact offset between the opaque car and the real car will stay until the 10th frame (00:00:06:10) when another offset (skipped frame) will occur. There is no blending as you desire, one simply has a dropped frame during speedup which can cause the playback chop you observe, especially when the source is only 25fps.

Jeff

Thank you for your analysis of the issue. I'm not suggesting that PD has a fault and is causing the choppy playback. I'm more interested in how to speed up the video whilst producing a smooth result. You mention that the source material is only shot at 25 FPS so I presume I would have been better off recording at a higher rate? I will note that on future shoots if that's the case. Is there anything I can do to produce a smoother result with what I have or am I stuck with it?

Thanks for any further advice.

Quote Hello Alec,

Can you provide the following so CyberLink QA can investigate?

Generate and attach DXDiag.txt file. See here for details: http://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/posts/list/50105.page#post_box_263486

Duplicate your editing, and then take a screen snapshot of the Produce window just before you click the Produce button. Attach that image here as well.

Submit a technical support ticket using the link below. You should attach 1 and 2 items as well. Let me know the support ticket number once submitted.

If possible can you create a short clip from the original video? Maybe 5-10 seconds. Then share it on Google Drive or somewhere it can be accessed. Two clips if possible, both before and after the speed effect is applied.

Cheers

PowerDirector Moderator

Thank you for your reply.

The ticket ref. is CS001676380

Original footage shot at UHD 25p PAL then Produced at 2K H.264 PAL 25p

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxPT5TweZIzOdlluX1E1SUhTelE/view?usp=sharing

Choppy output is the above clip with speed increased to 1.2 using Video Speed Designer (Entire Clip).

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxPT5TweZIzOUy1fNnFTd19vT2c/view?usp=sharing

Thank you,

Alec

So I am cobbling together my first video and have run into an issue.

The clips are shot in UHD 25p with a Phantom 4. When I produce the video at 2K 25p in H.264 format it plays back as smoothly as the original footage.

However, when I increase the speed of some of the clips to 1.1 -1.4 the produced video is choppy in those clips alone. I notice that PD15 is capable of using interpolation at defined speed reductions e.g. 80% to smooth playback. I see no mention of any smoothing technology when increasing the speed - is this what is causing the choppy result?

Is there any way to combat this issue such as choosing certain speed increase multipliers that are more sympathetic?

Thanks for looking.

Quote Glad it helped.

That "glitching" was the result of doing the screen capture on a not-fit-for-purpose laptop (I was on the road), so playback was anything but smooth. The poor little thing was trying to cope with cropping, playback AND running Camtasia.

I didn't produce that file but - you're right - the produced file would not have the same issues.

Cheers - Tony

Thank you for your help - much appreciated.

Quote Hi Alec200 -

It's probably the terminology that's leading you to think that way, & understandably.

Being a drone flyer, you're familiar with the "follow me" feature which tracks & follows the "transmitter". It sounds like that's the kind of thing you're trying to achieve in PDR... crop the video so a particular thing/person/subject is at the centre of the action.

Yes - that can be done my manipulating crop/zoom keyframes, BUT PDR's Motion Tracking is a distintly different thing (even though they kinda sound alike).

Here's an example I posted for another member recently - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pg_a5_dusbQ

Yes - Motion Tracking could have been applied to the same video clip, but that would not achieve the same thing (keeping the subject in the centre of the frame).

Cheers - Tony

Thank you for the reply and link to the tutorial. It shows how painfully new to I am editing that I haven't even used key frames yet!

In the video tutorial, once the key frames have been applied, you return to the main screen and play back the clip. During playback, there seems to be very significant "glitching" in the bottom 1/3rd of the frame. Would this be fixed once the clip had been rendered?

Thanks for your help.

I'm still drawing a blank on this.

Am I missing something though my lack of experience in editing, but wouldn't being able to apply a crop that followed a defined Motion Track be a very useful feature that would be relatively easy to implement.

Quote

Quote It would be useful if PD15 had a benchmark feature that measured a PCs performance of a variety of common tasks, so a more accurate estimate of configurations could be made.

I spent years in that line of work (system performance analysis), and I'm afraid that would be a horrendous task. It can be harder to design a good benchmark than the system it's supposed to measure.

i thought there must be a good reason why PD15 & other similar packages didn't have a benchmark feature - & there it is!

It would be useful if PD15 had a benchmark feature that measured a PCs performance of a variety of common tasks, so a more accurate estimate of configurations could be made.

Only my second post as I'm new to video editing, but a very important consideration is what you want to be editing. All things being equal, Full HD is far less demanding on hardware than 4K.

I have a laptop that I recently purchased as a cheap option to allow me to do basic photo editing and web page design etc. It's a Lenovo V110 with the 120GB SSD and i5 (6th generation) 6200u(I think the latter is correct). It had just 4GB of DDR4 RAM.

It would just about edit 4K video but was very slow with real time previews and simple tasks like clicking the "Trim" button but it was just about usable at a push.

It cost £324 delivered. I have since put an additional 16GB DDR4 RAM in there and a 480GB SSD. It now edits 4K video ok but is still slow as expected. It produces quick enough though 5min for 30s 4K video transcoded to 1080p.

Expect to pay at least double for a laptop if you want it to run well I'd say as a rule of thumb.

Hi to everyone on the forum. My first visit. I've owned the directors suite for over a year but so far used it little and I had a question about Powerdirector 15.

So the scenario is I have a lot of footage shot from a Phantom 4 in UHD. I have some scenes that I'd like to be able to track a moving subject such as a car or boat and have the software automatically zoom/crop on that subject as it moves. I tend to output in Full HD and the subject is generally originally fairly central in the frame but some distance away so there's plenty of scope to zoom in.

So im not even sure that this is a "thing" and my searches so far haven't helped. My inexperience with video editing means I'm possibly not using the right terms. I've used the motion tracker and that seems to work very well to track the subjects I have shot. I was just surprised that I couldn't find a simple was to use that motion tracker to apply a zoom/crop function.

Thanks for looking.