The problem has been addressed. They are aware that audio is degraded in this version of PowerDirector, and the problem has been sent up the chain for attention. If and when it is resolved remains in question. Meanwhile, I finished the editing in PowerDirector, but the used the 30-day trial version of Edius to marry the video and audio together in an mp4 file. I just uploaded that to YouTube.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=onuVjhZ_MWs&feature=youtu.be

Quote Hello,

Yes they did and I was told they responded back to you on the 14th, but you never replied. They need more than just the outputted video, i.e. the source video and audio, to assess the problem.

Please check your support ticket and respond.

Cheers

PowerDirector Moderator

Thanks for the heads up. I was expecting an email or something to tell me that they had responded. I just poked around on the CL site and found "support ticket" and saw the response.

Quote The problem has been addressed. They are aware that audio is degraded in this version of PowerDirector, and the problem has been sent up the chain for attention. If and when it is resolved remains in question. Meanwhile, I finished the editing in PowerDirector, but the used the 30-day trial version of Edius to marry the video and audio together in an mp4 file. I just uploaded that to YouTube. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=onuVjhZ_MWs&feature=youtu.be

Wow, that is good news that they admitted there is a problem.

I too have just bought PowerDirector 15 Ultimate. My application will be making videos of piano playing and this news about a reduction in sound quality will be a big problem for me.

I thought aac was an Apple codec used with iTunes? Is there a link to a summary chart of the version 15 audio quality options?

Hi,

I'm no expert but I've just done a quick and dirty collation of available audio output options for 264,265,mpeg2 and XAVCS from my PD15 ultimate 2309

Might be helpful.

Anyone else, if I've missed anything - let me know and I'll update this.

Cheers

Adrian Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated. (see below)
Confucius
AMD Phenom IIX6 1055T, win10, 5 internal drives, 7 usb drives, struggling power supply.

Have you heard anything more from Cyberlink?

BTW, awesome video. I can see (and hear) why the audio quality is so important to your productions!

Peace

Quote Have you heard anything more from Cyberlink?

BTW, awesome video. I can see (and hear) why the audio quality is so important to your productions!

Peace

Yes, they did reply and confirmed the audio was degraded significantly upon output. They have refunded my upgrade purchase, and they say they plan to look into it. Hopefully things will improve in the future.

I'm glad you liked the video. Indeed, any significant degradation not only results in less pleasing audio, but also skews the binaural imaging.

Fingers crossed for better audio in a future patch.

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

Quote 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

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 know if Edius re-encodes the video... It did take a long time, but it still looks fine. So I think it does not re-encode anything that's unchanged.

I did find some freeware which allows you to change the audio track in an MP4, file but never tried it. You can Google as I did, and please let us know if anything works.

Hopefully Cyberlink will improve their audio output in a future update.

Quote 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

You might check out this link:

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Video/Encoders-Converter-DIVX-Related/MP4Muxer.shtml

And this one too:

https://www.fosshub.com/MKVToolNix.html

I have been having the same issues and contacting tech support has been an expierence of them basically blaming me for issues and when it became obvious it was a problem with Power Director's AAC encoder, I haven't heard back from them in about two weeks now. I provied source files, the bad produced video, and a comparison produced video from Corel Video Studio that sounded good. For the one video I needed to complete, I had to output a .wav file from Power Director and import the video and audio into Corel Video Studio to produce a useable output. I don't like the usabiltiy of Corel, but I got an upgrade price of $15 that made it a little less painful. If Power Director doesn't fix the issue, they will loose me as a customer forever. This was never an issue until this latest version. Trying to use my older V13 Power Director, still on my computer, now has the same issue. I was thinking of trying to reload V13 to see if that fixes the issue for at least using V13. Or, maybe I will just have to srcap everything and go to another program entirely.

Quote

Quote 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

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 know if Edius re-encodes the video... It did take a long time, but it still looks fine. So I think it does not re-encode anything that's unchanged.

I did find some freeware which allows you to change the audio track in an MP4, file but never tried it. You can Google as I did, and please let us know if anything works.

Hopefully Cyberlink will improve their audio output in a future update.

Quote

Quote
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

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.

Quote 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

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

Quote 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

Interesting. Does ffmep compress the replaced audio also? If so, at what bit rate? Or does it somehow embed an uncompressed wav file?

Quote
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

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

Hey Alan,



Great news. Thanks so much for this info. It's indeed interesting ffmpeg's codec can manage such a compressed output bit rate with good results.

I am going to try one simple video editing project with Edius to see how the workflow feels. Because we produce a lot of educational videos, such as the one I had so much trouble with (https://youtu.be/onuVjhZ_MWs), and we work with a local training institute, we are able to purchase with the educational discount. That is certainly well worth the cost for the audio quality alone, but also for the caliber of editing I have experienced so far.

I do like PD, and hope they get their act together with this issue, and also the audio sync while editing problem... another serious shortcoming that makes OF a no-go for my kind of work.

Matthew

This is a known issue since version 14 that myself and another user which directed me to this forum post was having, unfortunetly the issue was never resolved. The only option was to use WMV output rather than MP4, I have a small music studio here and you can clearly view the rumple using an EQ. I believe it may be due to Powerdirector resampling the sound, who knows, I have version 15 now and yet to try it out but by the looks of your posts, still a problem...

Peace

Ryan Ryan Anthony
http://www.PhatMonkey.me

Quote
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

Dear Alan,

thank you so much for sharing your workaround. I had the same audio problems and was already thinking of throwing PD15 away but I was lucky to find your solution with works for me as well.

I even managed to get better audio bitrate by using the -b:a 384k option. Hope this helps.

Thank you one more time for this!

Mikhail