Poor Reproduction Quality

AllenChicago

Senior Member Location: Chicago (USA) Joined: Jan 28, 2010 22:06 Messages: 151 Offline

Solved by

Feb 08, 2010 01:03

GREAT NEWS!

First a HUGE thanks to members JAMES and TONY for helping me out with
the rendering problem that was driving me up the wall today. Described
in this thread:

http://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/posts/list/10094.page

After following their advice by researching more of the forum entries
and the ATI 4350HD video card installed on this computer, I have
great news to report!

I went to the Director's Chair...EDIT...Preferences and Turned OFF:
(Unchecked the boxes)
1. Enable File Processing...
2. Enable ATI Stream Technology
3. Enable Hardware Encoding
4. Allow SVRT H.264 Video

Now, the ACVHD videos Produce beautiful files and Beautiful MPEG-2
HQ 16:9 DVD's! I'm so happy I could _________!!(fill in the blanK)

As I type this post, Power Director 8-Ultra is burning a truly top
quality MPEG-2 DVD of our school basketball game that was filmed
yesterday. The CPU useage is higher (around 55% to 60%), but
that's no biggie. The important thing is that there's NO QUALITY LOSS.

According to the Power Director-8 features page, my AMD-ATI
4350HD Graphics Card is NOT one of their supported GPU's.
Ref: http://www.cyberlink.com/products/powerdirector/faster-performance_en_US.html

Apparently, asking PowerDirector to utilize features on a
non-supported Graphics Card caused severe reproduction
degredation with my P.C.. By simply allowing PD-8 to do its
thing without any "outside" help, the final video product ends
up being almost identical to the source file.

---Break----

The project just finished burning (AVCHD file converted to MPEG-2 DVD).
It's 27 minutes long and took 16min14sec to burn. Watching it now and
the video/sound reproduction is perfect. Fast moving 10 year old's
basketball game with no loss of video or sound quality what-so-ever.

Thanks again to James, Tony, and to Cyberlink for this fantastic product!

-Allen in Chicago

James W

Senior Contributor Location: Lakeland, FL USA Joined: Aug 18, 2008 10:36 Messages: 911 Offline

Feb 08, 2010 14:28

I would go back and recheck the allow SVRT H.264 in preferences. If you ever make a H264 (mts) file you will find this option useful now that Cyberlink has improved SVRT with Canon AVCHD files. A warning message will appear when you check this box, but you can ignore it. It seems like ATI Stream was causing the problems. Now you can consider getting a better video card if you want to use ATI Stream for faster rendering. If you are not in a hurry then I would not bother with it. Q9300 2.5 GHz
4 GB Ram
Nvidia 9800 GT

AllenChicago

Senior Member Location: Chicago (USA) Joined: Jan 28, 2010 22:06 Messages: 151 Offline

Feb 09, 2010 00:09

OK JAMES..will do that right now and then render a clip to ensure that this
wasn't part of the problem. What I think you're saying is that forcing the
"hardware rendering" option was not a good thing to do with this
ATI 4350 graphics card? That's what I'm thinking as well. Disabling the
SVRT and the Advance Rendering technology check-boxes was probably
overkill.

I'll research the latest ATI Cards and see if there are any that are geared
to video conversion/production. Still don't understand what graphic card
specs to look for, but learning is half the fun. Thanks again for all the good
advice my friend. -Allen in Chicago

James W

Senior Contributor Location: Lakeland, FL USA Joined: Aug 18, 2008 10:36 Messages: 911 Offline

Feb 09, 2010 07:26

Do a search on SVRT and Canon and you'll find out what the SVRT 264 check box is all about. Over the past three weeks there has been an extensive discussion about this since the latest build of PD8 was released.

As for better video cards normally the more you spend the better. The more stream processors the video card has the faster the GPU rendering will be. I would check the ATI HD4800 series and HD4600 series video cards. ATI has also released the HD5000 series cards which may be worth looking into as well. The cards which are good for ATI Stream are the fast gaming cards. Be aware that if you were to choose an NVIDIA based video card then you would lose the accelerated rendering for MPEG2 but still be able to accelerate the rendering of MPEG4 using CUDA. There is a link at the top of the forum where others indicate that hardware they are using. That may get you started. Q9300 2.5 GHz
4 GB Ram
Nvidia 9800 GT

AllenChicago

Senior Member Location: Chicago (USA) Joined: Jan 28, 2010 22:06 Messages: 151 Offline

Feb 10, 2010 00:15

Hi James,

I re-enabled the SVRT, H.264 and ATI streaming capability and rendered
a short AVCHD clip to both MPEG-2 HQ and AVCHD. The rendering time
was no different than if I had both of these options turned off, but the
quality was still very good. So apparently, it was the "Hardware Decoding"
which caused the poor quality output.

It's disappointing that a brand new $800 computer would come with a
"weak" graphics card, but more than likely, most purchasers really don't
need a good one. Before attempting to burn videos, I had no clue that
the low "Windows Experience Index" of 4.2 for my ATI 4350 card was
something that would haunt me like this.

Anyway, I'll follow your advice and move up to a better ATI card, since
MPEG-2 is the most recommended format for making good quality
DVD's that are compatible with almost all DVD players. Thanks again
James for the valuable feedback. It's appreciated greatly!
-Allen in Chicago

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at Feb 10. 2010 00:17

James W

Senior Contributor Location: Lakeland, FL USA Joined: Aug 18, 2008 10:36 Messages: 911 Offline

Feb 10, 2010 06:55

Honestly, unless your not willing to wait the 45 minutes or whatever time it took you to render then I would not bother upgrading. If this is something that you will be doing a lot then it might be worth considing. I'm not sure how much faster the rendering is. There has been a few posts on this forum where someone tested an ATI card with Stream turned on and then off to compare the difference. The post was in the past three months. I would do a search to try to find it and check out their results. I think forum member "On the Web" posted these results.

Another option is to render your videos at night and have your computer automatically shut off when finished. You can do all your editing in the day and have PD do a batch render at night of all your projects. Then it doesn't matter how long it takes and you don't need to upgrade the video card. Once the projects are rendered you can burn your DVDs the next day. Q9300 2.5 GHz
4 GB Ram
Nvidia 9800 GT