Hi everyone,

I'd appreciate hearing a bit of an insight into frame rates with respect to PowerDirector's inner workings.

PowerDirector shows videos as 25 or 30 frames per second for PAL and NTSC, respectively. I'm on PAL so I'm going to refer to this standard's conditions from here on (25 fps).

I've been so far mainly editing 720/50i videos; no principal issues. However, I have now started using 1080/50p videos and I've encountered a problem: I have been unable to correctly render a 6-minute video with 15 clips when I put transitions between the clips. I've tried different output formats but the production sometimes doesn't finish at all or there are some "frozen" clips or short sections in the resulting video, always following a transation (e.g. "Fade"). I've also tried a few different transations and their modes, with, where possible, our without Smart Video Rendering Technology; to no avail. Since the problem is rather irregular, I suspect my computer's performance could be the culprit as it's rather marginal so I have ordered a graphic card supporting nVidia CUDA technology; I'll get it next week.

Besides trying to render only three clips with two transations, which worked fine, I also tried to render the entire video without transitions as 1080/24p, cut up the output video to the clips again and insert the transitions: the same problem.

I'm not actually asking for help with this problem. I'm more wondering about how PowerDirector deals with the difference in the number of source frames, edit frames, and target frames.

If my source is 50 progressive frames, PowerDirector shows 25 frames, and the target frame rate rendered is 24 progressive frames (AVC), what are the relations between those? Also, are there any practical implications for the most convenient source format recorded with a camera if editing with PowerDirector is the intended use? Should I prefer shooting in 1080/50i to 1080/50p?

PowerDirector can also produce in 1080/50p. Again, how does this relate to 25 frames per second shown when editing? If the sourse is 1080/50p, is every other frame dropped when editing and then rendered by approximation between two consecutive frames or are the original source frames all preserved for rendition but only every other shown for the editing purposes?

My camera can also record in 1080/24p. I have somewhere (probably Vimeo.com) read a recommendation to shoot using 24 fps whenever possible (no reasoning in the immediate context though). Any thoughts on this format? I understand it's the original movie industry frame rate (actually ~ 23.976 fps) but I don't see any other applications.

Looking forward to your enlightening me. Thanks...