A question is below for our gurus, but first I need to set up the problem I have:

I've spent like a week yesterday and again today entering and reentering changes to my project (about 45 minutes long) of many stills, transitions and video clips from VOB and MOV sources. It's from two people's cameras as we are going through three locks in Panama. Getting these sources interleaved in proper time sequence is a challenge as the locks look so much alike and the other source has no reliable time stamp for me to use. My first attempt resulted in showing 5 locks, when we only went through three that we went through! So I took groups of clips and stills at a time and moved them at to correct time on the tracks and created the 3-lock experience it really was. I carefully saved after each step in accomplishing the move of each of these changes, knowing that PD can get confused at times.

Well, then the trouble started. When previewing, the sound would appear elsewhere compared to what it showed on the track. Getting out and back in caused the rearrangement of sound tracks - separated from the video, some on top of each other, some gone altogether. Worse yet, after an hour or more of my editing work, the project file would cause PD to freeze and crash. AND coming back into that project would cause PD to crash just before it displayed the filled tracks of the project!

I started saving many backups with a date and time in the title after each significant edit to recover. Later going back to them, I found most of them too could not be opened as PD crashed before fully opened.

I think I may have re-entered 100s of changes each time nearly 10 times in a row, with the same results.

I just finished breaking up the 45-minute project into thirds and started over on the middle third that required most of the changes. I succeeded with less troubles. I conclude that my 8GB of RAM is limiting PD in handing the whole project at one time, so the shorter parts present less problems. Or what should my virtual memory be set - I think mine is currently 1.5 and 3 times RAM.

QUESTION: How does one determine ahead of time when a project has to be split up to avoid the above? This seems to have started with my upgrade to PD10. What has changed to create this mess in my projects? PowerDirector is still such an awesome product which has the potential of saving me like 50% of my past effort in creating these travelogs. But I keep running into problems like this that devour my time savings.

Bill Seifert

Bill Seifert
HP Pavilion Desktop TP01-2022
8 core
AMD Radeon
Windows 11, 16 GB RAM