Hello again... I am a semi-retired network geek and am stronger on the computer side than on the video side.

I looked for a newer driver. It seems TI "owns" the driver and their site says the latest driver has been provided to MS and Apple for their products and they don't offer any more recent drivers. I did delete the driver and the old (2006) one came back. I also ran a program that checks driver status and it reported the driver as current.

When I was on the TI site, they referenced a 3rd party company that is apparently doing whatever is current relative to the standard. They said the 3rd party company, Unibrain has been entrusted with the code and has done their own thing, apparently where TI left off.

Unibrain has a free version of their driver which I installed. It replaced the TI version, however, when I enabled my FW device, it didn't "enable" it, i.e. I didn't get the normal Windows pop-up asking what program to launch. At that point I backed it out and went back to the default driver that Windows once again put back.

As far as the edge "noise", if I look carefully at the bottom of the TV (not a monitor), I can see a part of it, so the "noise" goes beyond the TV Safe area in infringes on the viewable part of the image. Seems if this is an ever present issue, they should have the content stop "above" it such that the content is not impacted by the noise they expect or know will be there.

As far as a firewall issue, if it works "properly" in Adobe and in Windoze Movie Maker, then I am hesitant to suspect the firewall. The firewall shouldn't hamper one program more so than the other as I assume they only make a certain set of calls regarding the port. Perhaps PD is trying to do something the others aren't.

As an aside, do you think all the programs capture the data with equal quality? That the capture portion of the process doesn't benefit in one program over another?

If that is the case, and saving in WMM would be the same as the other programs, then I could use it to capture, and then edit as needed. You still like PD for that step, so I will take your recommendation and try it.

BTW, one of my best friends is heavy in video...done work for the networks, Fortune 100, etc., but he is a Mac guy and doesn't know a bit from a byte and relishes in that fact

Thanks again kind sir!

Lew,

I received your PM and am glad to see that the issue regarding this forum user privileges has been solved.

As regards the capture process, the hardware device is correctly characterized just as you said, as an analog to digital converter, taking video samples timed to agree with the format your content originates in, most likely NTSC standard definition 525 line interlaced, 29.97 frames per second.

With each sample being shipped over the Firewire interface, via the driver doing reads from the Canopus, the application program (in this case Power Director) uses an encoding codec to take the stream of sampled values and encode them into a compressed format. Simultaneously the audio content is sampled in hardware, encoded with another codec, and stored along with the video in a so-called "container" such as .avi, .mov, .mkv (the 3 most common) which are merely wrappers which contained time-multiplexed audio and video samples compressed using whatever codec the app has designated.

Noise encroaching on the "active lines" of the 525 line frame get digitized as if they were original content of the program, and the results are thus in need of cropping. I have never used PD8 or 9 for cropping, but the algorithms for doing it and preserving aspect ratio are pretty intuitive, essentially a zoom to magnify the entire frame.

I have no other suggestions to put forth regarding your specific problem, and it would appear your best solution would be to try some other program, perhaps one of the ones I have already suggested including freeware / shareware.

Capturing the video and then doing the crop in another app is a viable solution, but I will leave it up to you to figure it out from this point forward. Your expertise and interest in this should get you to a working solution, despite the Cyberlink lack of support. It is most unfortunate that they have such a weak support approach since their software is quite appealing in terms of price and performance, and (recently) not any more buggy than their competition.

Good luck Lew,


Larry

Thanks so much...it wouldn't have been the end of the world to have to do two steps, but I can't explain why the crop function didn't work as it should.

Appreciate all your help!