Templates, chapters and crashes...oh, my

Jim

Newbie Joined: Feb 28, 2008 16:39 Messages: 30 Offline

Solved by

Feb 29, 2008 00:58

First, thank you all for the forum. I have some problems that the Cyberlink help line seems little interested in helping me with. First, is it possible to delete Title Effect templates that I generated? The tech line told me to right click, but this operation is not possible for some reason. Does anyone know how to perform this operation?

Second, I have been having some goofy problems with chapters. I consistently get the error code that some chapters were removed as they were less than 2 seconds. PD then deletes one or more (quite often all) of my chapters. To make matters worse, when some chapters are left behind, they are all messed up and out of order. I had to retype seventeen chapters six times tonight before I could get them to stay. Further, once the chapters were in place, if I edited anything on the video track line, such as content of a particular clip or removing a clip or title, the 2 second chapter error would pop up and the chapters would go bonkers all over again. Am I doing something wrong?

Third, from reading the forum, I am thinking the Produce command is not necessary to create a disc. I found this to be true by making some movies both with and without the produce. My problem is I am recording TV programs where I am editing out the commercials for my movie clips. In some cases, my capture is several programs at a time, so I do not want to keep the captured raw video once I have cleaned and separated each episode. My problem is with chapters and such. If I put the chapters in before I produce, the chapters disappear with the final production. Would I be better off putting the chapters in after I make a production, then creating a disc off the edited production mpeg?

Last, I have been having a regular problem with PD 6 crashing and deleting my projects. There is no rhyme or reason to this so I have not seen a pattern. It just happens, and I lose whatever project I had open at the time. This complete wash happens even when the project was opened from a previously saved file. The whole project just dumps and I end up having to completely start over. This has happened several times now. Does PD have a know conflict with other software and is there a list somewhere so I can either turn off the offending software? I am not a video editing whiz or a computer genius, but I do know how to follow directions and ask for help when I am lost. I have PD6. I am not sure what build. How do I determine this? I am running Windows XP for OS.

Thank you for the help. I know I have asked a lot of questions, but the help in the software is light on answers and the tech line has proved near useless.

GB

Dafydd B

Senior Contributor Joined: Aug 26, 2006 08:20 Messages: 11973 Offline

Feb 29, 2008 15:30

Hi,

If I make any mistakes in my answers to you I apologise - I'm tired and yours will be the last one I do tonight.

Title templates to be deleted - Custom ones only.
Shut down PD
Go to
C:My Documents/CyberLink?PowerDirector/6.0/My Titles
All the template custom titles are located here.
Title_000 will be the first one and from then on etc etc 001
DO NOT delete TitleBK

Chapter issue.
Please apply the PD6 update patch v2319 it should correct the chapter problem - if not get back to me. Also you need to have a specific gap between chapter points. I use chapters sparingly.
http://www.cyberlink.com/multi/download/dl_patch_417_4_ENU.html

Produce - well it's what I would do - Produce a finished mpeg.

The last bit I'll answer when you've reported back - the patch might be a cure all.

Dafydd

Jim

Newbie Joined: Feb 28, 2008 16:39 Messages: 30 Offline

Mar 02, 2008 17:58

Thank you, Dafydd, for the direction. I downloaded the patch as instructed and successfully installed it. Regretfully, though, I now have a new problem that prevents me from finding out if the old dilemma is fixed. I am not able to produce anything. I have tried using several different files but the end is the same. When I press the final button to start rendering, the computer goes super sluggish and the produce movie indicator stays at 0%. I have made several attempts, but I have had to stop PD6 after 10 minutes of 0% movement. While all of this is going on, the computer is very sluggish and slow to respond to anything. The only thing that has changed in the last few days is the PD patch and some Windows XP updates. I will uninstall the updates to see if they are the problem. The only way I can abort the produce process is to go into the Task Manager and terminate PD6 manually. It just seems to be eating up everything by way of resources so nothing gets done and no other processes can run concurrently. Any ideas?

Also, I now have a quirky problem with accessing projects. Several of my projects now say they have problems reading the video clips that were used to make the projects, so when the projects load into the video track, they appear totally black with no video or audio. The base clips are still there and I can load them manually, but the PDS files are junk. This has happened several times to the same files that were on the same DVD disc. Each time I manually reload the mpegs to edit again, the PDS file works fine. When I come back to them after closing them, the PDS files often are black again. Any ideas there? Do I have a corrupted program now?

Jim

Dafydd B

Senior Contributor Joined: Aug 26, 2006 08:20 Messages: 11973 Offline

Mar 03, 2008 13:10

Jim,

I don't know the reason why you've got a sluggish PC, I can make a few suggestions to check and that's about it. The pds file not locating the media data is because "something" has changed in the root address to those files. You may have moved or renamed a folder and the data (it's only script instruction) in the pds is incorrect and this leads to a "black" file placement.

Suggestions.
Check you have sufficient room on your (Operating System = WinXP) OS "C" Drive of at least double the size of the data in the time-line and a minimum of 10gb.
Check you have sufficient room on the drives you're drawing the data from - USB hard drive or internal hard drives.
Check the speed of drive data - there was a report by someone on the forum that a IDE drive went really slow when a SATA was in the storage use render root. I cant confirm that.

I would consider:
http://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/posts/list/2405.page
PART C
Uninstall and reinstall of PowerDirector
Then Install PD, Install 2319 patch, Install Bonus bits.

PDS point:
In PD6 you can select,
File > Export > Pack Project Materials
This will place a duplicate of all the data used to create your project AND a pds into a new location. The information in the newly created pds which is stored with the media etc draws it's data from this export location.

I hope some of this helped.

Dafydd