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Post the mediainfo of the video clip or a 5 sec. sample video clip from your camera. Some cameras do have that black line that I have seen.
Hmm, you're absolutely right and I had never noticed that before. The black line was there all the time, including in PD14, but it ws only when it turned green in PD15 that I noticed it. Before posting here about the problem I checked a scene produced with PD15 against one from PD14 and saw no black line in the latter which is why I assumed it was a PD15 problem. I've now discovered that by chance I had selected a scene taken with my other camera, which does not have the black line.
So I'm now satisfied that PD15 doesn't have a problem in this respect. It does have other problems - for example, for every clip in which I have adjusted the exposure setting, PD15 has multiplied the values I set in PD14 so hundreds of my clips are way too dark and all have to be reset  But that's another issue. I wish upgrading was simple and straightforward.
Alan
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Try to disable hardware decode or update VGA driver?
I've disabled hardware decoding and the green line has now disappeared, but the black lines are still there. Not quite as bad but they will still be noticeable when shown on a white screen.
I'm aware that my graphics card is obsolete (an onboard Radeon 6410) and I'm willing to upgrade, but I can't see why the graphics card would cause PD15 to be unable to fill the screen properly when PD14 can do so perfectly well. Can anyone offer help on that score? I can't afford to splash out money for a new card and find it hasn't solved the problem.
Alan
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I upgraded from PD14 to PD15 yesterday and now I'm seeing this green line on clips from the camera. In fact, sometimes it's green, sometimes it's black, and there also appear to be thin black lines down each vertical edge. It's as though PD is having difficulty fitting the clip to the frame. Stills which have been cropped to 1920x1080 are OK.
I work in 1080p 25fps throughout, from camera (Canon 5D2) through to final output. I was using PD14 for about a year and this never happened, so why does PD15 do it?
I have a deadline looming for the première of a film I'm producing, so unless there's a simple answer I will have no option but to ditch 15 and go back to 14.
It's a great shame about PowerDirector. I love what it does; it just doesn't do it very well.
Alan
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Is this fix intended to work with PD14 as well?
Alan
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I even managed to get better audio bitrate by using the -b:a 384k option. Hope this helps.
Gosh, yes it does. I thought I had tried this but obviously I hadn't. Many thanks Mikhail
Alan
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Right, I've now had a little more time to investigate. I hadn't used ffmpeg before and wasn't familiar with all the options, so I just used the parameters I found online. Although the resulting output did indeed remove my distortion, on further listening it introduced other problems. In the section which was previously distorted there were traces of artefacts - not very noticeable to the untrained ear but clearly there if you listen closely. Secondly, it seemed to introduce some kind of AGC - a section that had a voiceover on top of countryside sounds with birds twittering muted the background sound whenever the voice spoke, which sounded very unprofessional indeed.
I looked more closely at the output from ffmpeg. The original audio as output by PD is 384k AAC. The replacement file is 1536k WAV. But ffmpeg saves the output as 128k AAC. So I started investigating ffmpeg's options. I found that changing the audio codec from libvo_aacenc to aac (which is describes as 'experimental') did the trick and the output now no longer has distortion, artefacts or AGC effects. It still encodes at 128k and although there are options to change the bitrate I got a "sample rate not supported" error for everyting I tried.
However, the fact that ffmpeg can produce a good result at 128k that PD can't manage at 384k suggests that there is something very seriously wrong with PD's audio output algorithms.
The command I'm now using is:
ffmpeg.exe -i input_video.mp4 -i replacement_audio.wav -vcodec copy -acodec aac -strict -2 -map 0:0 -map 1:0 output.mp4
Alan
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Interesting. Does ffmep compress the replaced audio also? If so, at what bit rate? Or does it somehow embed an uncompressed wav file?
I don't actually know. But it gets rid of the distortion!
Alan
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Quick update: I've found that I can use ffmpeg which appears to do a good job.
I output audio only from PD14 as a WAV and used ffmpeg to substitute it for the distorted audio in the MP4 file, using the following command which I found on another forum using Google:
ffmpeg.exe -i input_video.mp4 -i replacement_audio.wav -vcodec copy -map 0:0 -map 1:0 output.mp4
Many thanks for your help.
Alan
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After a month's use, you may find the cost is well worth it. Not having to struggle with audio synch (!!!), faster editing and applying of effects, no worries with mysteriously reversed cross-fades, better audio and output options and so on, might sway you.
Limited budget I'm afraid. I've already ditched Premiere Elements for PD 14 and don't really want the expense of another app, nor to have to re-create a lot of projects yet again. I do all my audio syncing in Audacity, and I only need simple cross-fades so as I found the whole cross-fade thing in PD quite confusing and unreliable I just overlap my clips on different video tracks to get a smooth and reliable transition.
PD is miles better than Premiere and although it's not perfect, for a budget solution it does all I want apart from producing decent audio output.
Alan
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Is there any software that will allow me to substitute the audio later without losing video quality - i.e. without having to re-encode the video
I downloaded the trial version of Edius and it created a perfect sounding MP4, using the MP4 video file from PD15, and an uncompressed WAV file I created in post. But the trial only works for a month.
I don't think a month's trial will be of much use to me as I'm producing a 90-minute film from quite a number of different scenes and I expect to be working on it for at least another three months. But thanks for the suggestion. I'll try some of the other suggestions that have been made and report back on my success - or lack of it.
Alan
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I was pleased to find this thread because I've had exactly the same problem with PD14. In my case it seems to be particularly solo wind instruments that suffer the most distortion. Producing the video as WMV seems to cure it but I would prefer to use MP4 if I can.
Is there any software that will allow me to substitute the audio later without losing video quality - i.e. without having to re-encode the video?
Alan
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