My apologies to Dafydd and some others for I have not been really following this forum or participating in recent months, as they had been extremely helpful when I had questions or problems in the past. Now I thought it time to offer my experience with PD-9 to date which I am still using version 2330, for me I have to state has been extremely reliable and actually fun to use without the constant crashes and frustrations with prior versions of Power Director or PD-9 beta. Although I am sure much of my current success is also due to my new much more powerful computer and graphics card listed below.

Since about the 1st of December I have been producing and showing a one hour movie “The Wildlife of Moss Park” for the Orange County Florida Parks System to show to the park campers each Saturday evening at one of their parks not far from the Orlando International Airport. This movie is produced in HD Blu-ray from video I have taken with either my earlier Canon HG21 or my newer HFS21 camera which I might add although the quality is the same the features available are far superior versus the HG21. All clips are taken at 1080p (progressive) 1920 x1080 and the movie is projected onto a 150” (3.81 meter) diagonal screen to an audience ranging from 40 up to 160 people depending upon the weather and the number of campers and next year upon my return for the winter, the plans are to expand on this by enclosing the current open pavilion to allow for daytime shows of not more than 45 minutes and to attract more youth groups to attend.

My workflow is as follows for the type of movie I want to produce which certainly will not fit all on this forum:

1. In Power Director I have broken the movie into 10 shorter projects ranging from 4 minutes to 11 minutes and each week I edit several projects by removing older and adding newer clips taken and tweaking. I then PRODUCE and I am happy to state that I have NEVER had a failure in producing.
A. PRODUCE time ranges just slightly longer than the video length, for instance a 7:35 minute project requires 9:31 minutes or 4:52 requires 6:04 to PRODUCE to file.
B. With that said SVRT used to be a big deal to me and now since SVRT doesn’t work with my HFS21 camera I really don’t care as I can live with the present PRODUCE times and more important is the reliability.
C. With regards to Hardware Video Encoder I have seen posts that enabling reduces the quality; however I have not found this to be the case as I am extremely pleased with as whether viewed on my 24” monitor or the 150” screen it is extremely sharp. With HVE a 4.52 minute project requires only 6:04 minutes when enabled but requires 8:22 without HVE.
D. I have also seen some posts that Producing or Creating Disk in MPG gives slightly better quality versus m2ts but I have not found that to be the case so I stick with m2ts.

2. Each Saturday prior to showing I then add the 10 produced projects along with a beginning and ending as a new project and Burn to a Blu-ray disk and in all this time I have had only one failure to burn to disk which proved to be a BR rewritable disk that had become defective. Whereas I to with earlier versions used to use ImgBurn due to too many failures with PD to burn to disk and even another program for Producing for the same reason.
A. My latest disk was 1 hour 4 minutes and the time to burn was 22:07 minutes and 12.81 MB and I currently use no menu.

3. With regards to Editing the clips in my projects I having spent considerable hours in doing so I have become rather familiar with editing for my work and the use Power Director and its potential.
A. I seldom use Trim except to perhaps trim off the ends of my voice over which I now have the movie narrated to my satisfaction. For the video I simply expand the time line and use the split to get the clips I desire. I might add that most all my clips average only 7-9 seconds as anything longer unless it really adds to the movie is repetitious and boring to the audience of which I do include some such longer interesting clips.
B. Being near the Orlando airport, watercraft from the two lakes and auto traffic, etc. nearly all the original audio can’t be used, so I unlink, delete and then dub in new audio which is very time consuming. At first getting the exact moment or sequence was a challenge, but now I find not a problem for dubbing in audio. I generally use four or five audio tracks including Voice Over and Music.
C. With regards to Fix/Enhance and Power Tools prior to PD9 and my new more powerful computer I seldom used due to constant crashes and errors. Plus the fact that I normally use a tripod and have my camera set to give the results I desire while filming. However I have found that by going through each clip one by one that even very slight tweaking such as Stabilizer or Color Adjustment can make a great improvement and video crop or speed can at times be useful.
D. I keep it simple as when I first started using Power Director I kind of got carried away with all the Text, Transitions, etc. but for my work it made it look rather “gaudy” or overdone. Now I seldom use transitions except simple Fade between species and in most instances I now use only the default text and a specific text and color. For others I am sure Effects, PIP Objects and Particles are desired, which I now never use.
E. The selection of background music is very important to the movie as is the voice over narration which requires a good microphone and I use an Audio-technica AT2020 USB as last year I was pretty much standing in front and talking to the audience, whereas as now I simply stand in the rear and observe the audience reaction and how I can further improve next week.
F. I really like Wave Editor and use it constantly and will generally run all my voice captures through it for slight changes and I also use to create my own dubbed files to replace the original. Some which are taken from other clips not included in the movie or I may early on a Sunday when it is quieter take audio only or even create my only audio from other sources.
G. The tendency for most including my self is to want to include too much video footage that is redundant. By having to keep my movie to approximately 1 hour plus the comments obtained from the attendees, my audience has FORCED me along with my own observation each week to ask myself these four questions. (1) do I really need this species which is really not that interesting (2) do I need so much redundancy footage (3) can I shorten a clip even further and (4) can I adjust the dubbed audio, music or voice over to better fit the clip(s). By adhering to this I am now able to keep the attention of the audience much better than earlier in the season. If I can now keep the attention of smaller kids for an hour than I know I am on the right track. Also extremely important is showing not the usual, but scenes not normally seen by the average person. Kids must have excitement and gory details to keep their attention span such as close-ups of snakes, spiders or hawks eating snakes, etc.
H. At times I allow my educational narration, background sounds and music to carry the movie along, while at other times I want the selected music score for a particular scene to carry it alone at which point the kids or even the entire audience is clapping or swaying to the music and scene, thus I know I am on the right track or when a 4-1/2 year old boy asking his grandfather when can they see the movie again.
I. We have all seen to many home movies or slide shows that were simply too long and boring except to the person who took them, but we didn’t want to hurt their feelings. Thus I try to listen to the comments I obtain from the viewers to help guide me. For example my main species was the Sandhill Cranes on the nest and with the young chicks which many don’t see. However I had this project about 14 minutes and the suggestion was made to split this in half. Thus now after 7 minutes I state “Now let’s leave the Cranes for the time being and move on to other species and then return later to the Cranes” and which this change has been very well received.

In conclusion I for one have been extremely pleased with PD-9 and have found it to be very reliable. Yes there are some issues I would like to see changed in the next version which for my work would make it even better and faster. Yes my work of recent months has been only to produce to Blu-ray using only the AVCHD 1920 x 1080 (24 Mbps) so if I attempted other settings I might observe totally different results. Also this post really doesn’t allow me to post all my workflow, but I do hope some find it helpful.

Regards,
George Grant

Dell Studio XPS 9100
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 960 @ 3.20GHz
64 Bit Operating Sytem
12 GB DDR3 SDRAM
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 1248 MB Memory

Canon HF S21 & Canon HG21