Took about 3 sec. on my system. Dell Precision 7510 Laptop
Windows 7 Pro 64-bit | Intel(R) XEON(R) CPU E3-1505M v5 @2.80 GHz
RAM: 32 GB
Windows Experience Index 7.5

That's about what I expected. Thanks very much for your help

As has become pretty clear on multiple threads, it seems like PD and 8.1 aren't the best fit, but Win7 is a solid choice.

Is anyone else up for trying? It would be great to hear from anyone with Win8, or with 8.1 that doesn't have any obvious delays.

YouTube/optodata

DS365 | Win11 Pro | Ryzen 9 3950X | RTX 4070 Ti | 32GB RAM | 10TB SSDs | 5K+4K HDR monitors

Canon Vixia GX10 (4K 60p) | HF G30 (HD 60p) | Yi Action+ 4K | 360Fly 4K 360°

Mine came up instantly. and I run 8.1 windows on Ivy bridge PC specs :
OS Windows 10.0 Pro
MB - AS rock Z77 extreme 11
Intel 3770K @ 4.0 Ghz OC
Gskill 32 GB RAM 1800 Mhz
6 TB HDD, SSD bootable
nVidia ASUS GTX 660 Ti
BenQ 22" LCD monitor 1920x1080

Thanks, BabIndia! It's good to know that you're able to run Win8.1 without this issue

This is fascinating. I wonder if all the people affected by this issue are running Win 8.1 with Gen4 (Haswell) Core i7 CPUs. That would imply that there's an issue with how PD interacts with the Gen4 vs. Gen3 and other processors, and that maybe it's not a Windows 8 or 8.1 issue. For example, the latest patch (2706) states the following changes:

"Improves program stability when editing in Magic Motion Designer or video cropping then playback on timeline on 4th Generation Intel Core Processor (Haswell) platforms.

Improves program stability when applying GPU acceleration on particle effect on 3rd Generation Intel Core Processor (IvyBridge) platforms."

Is anybody running a Gen4/Haswell chip on Win7 or even Win8.0? It seems like a Gen3/Ivy Bridge system running Win8.1 works as expected, and if we could narrow down the suspects to OS+CPU or just the CPU then we could really help point our friends at Cyberlink in the right direction...

YouTube/optodata

DS365 | Win11 Pro | Ryzen 9 3950X | RTX 4070 Ti | 32GB RAM | 10TB SSDs | 5K+4K HDR monitors

Canon Vixia GX10 (4K 60p) | HF G30 (HD 60p) | Yi Action+ 4K | 360Fly 4K 360°

Do not know if even in the ball park here but mine took 13secs.
Have 4Gb RAM at moment as awaiting replacement 8Gb under warranty. PD Ultra 16.0.2524.0 ~ Windows 10 Pro Intel(R)Core(TM)i7-4770 CPU @3.40GHz ~ AMD HD-7800 Series APU with Radeon(tm) HD Graphics ~ 16GB RAM ~ WD 1Gb Primary HD ~ Hitachi 500Gb ~ Buffalo 8Gb DriveStation ~ WD 1Gb ~ Medion 500Gb ~ Canon Legria HFS10 ~ W/ FH

Pettros1 - Thanks very much for your results!

That seems like a very long delay, but I don't know if that's related to your CPU's speed/power or the problem with displaying the window.

Here's one way to tell: In that same project, remove the Fade2 transition and click on the bare Nature.wmv in the timeline. Now click on the Modify button. How long does it take that window to appear (including displaying the single video frame)?

On my system, it's ready 2-3 seconds, so there's a big lag in PD's response with the Fade2 menu window. If you see the Modify window fairly quickly, then the "lagging display" issue affects AMD processors as well. On the other hand, if displaying the Modify window also takes a long time, say 7 to 9+ seconds, then maybe your A8 is working really hard to run PD in general and isn't actually affected by the issue.

Can you run that test and see what happens?

YouTube/optodata

DS365 | Win11 Pro | Ryzen 9 3950X | RTX 4070 Ti | 32GB RAM | 10TB SSDs | 5K+4K HDR monitors

Canon Vixia GX10 (4K 60p) | HF G30 (HD 60p) | Yi Action+ 4K | 360Fly 4K 360°

Optodata

Not much attracted to Haswell. It runs hot, draws more power and is difficult to overclock. PC specs :
OS Windows 10.0 Pro
MB - AS rock Z77 extreme 11
Intel 3770K @ 4.0 Ghz OC
Gskill 32 GB RAM 1800 Mhz
6 TB HDD, SSD bootable
nVidia ASUS GTX 660 Ti
BenQ 22" LCD monitor 1920x1080

BabIndia - I think you certainly made the right choice with your Ivy Bridge CPU, as you seem to have the fast system I was trying to build

I had seen something about how dramatically the Gen4's AVX2 instruction sped up some video operations and thought that would be the way to go. I do see some incredible producing speeds when using SVRT, but the fastest settings result in glitches in the output stream on several players and on YouTube, so I mostly use the hardware encoder.

As for overclocking, it's actually very easy to get my 3.5Ghz K chip to run at almost 4.3GHz using the ASUS windows utility. I had to add big water-cooled heatsink to do get 4.2GHz with my last system's Core i5 3550K, but the Haswell runs perfectly when overclocked, even though I'm using the stock cooler.

In any event, I hope to join you in achieving a fast and enjoyable editing experience at some point

YouTube/optodata

DS365 | Win11 Pro | Ryzen 9 3950X | RTX 4070 Ti | 32GB RAM | 10TB SSDs | 5K+4K HDR monitors

Canon Vixia GX10 (4K 60p) | HF G30 (HD 60p) | Yi Action+ 4K | 360Fly 4K 360°

Optodata

If you look at performance per dollar Ivy bridge beats Haswell on many counts. CHeck Anandtech, Primelabs geek bench, tom's hardware and many more sites. PC specs :
OS Windows 10.0 Pro
MB - AS rock Z77 extreme 11
Intel 3770K @ 4.0 Ghz OC
Gskill 32 GB RAM 1800 Mhz
6 TB HDD, SSD bootable
nVidia ASUS GTX 660 Ti
BenQ 22" LCD monitor 1920x1080

3 secs for me.

i7-4770R (Intel Iris Pro 5200)
& Win 8.1 Pro x64

I even threw the Fade 2 transition into a current 7 min project I am working on with lots of fades and other transitions and effects. Still able to open and modify at or under the 3 second mark.

Same with opening / modify times with all my Pixelan plugins- I am using the entire Pixelan Ultra Bundle suite for PD.

Rob
PD 14 Ultimate Suite / Win10 Pro x64
1. Gigabyte Brix PRO / i7-4770R Intel Iris Pro 5200 / 16 GB / 1 TB SSD
2. Lenovo X230T / 8GB / Intel HD4000 + ViDock 4 Plus & ASUS Nvidia 660 Ti / Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIZw3GPwKMo&feature=youtu.be

RobAC - wow. There goes my Haswell theory

It sounds like we have very similar systems yet you don't see any delays. If you aren't stuck waiting for 13+ seconds for a Pixelan control panel to appear, what's different about my system?

I didn't see the motherboard specs listed for your superbox, and I wonder if there's something about the chipsets our individual boards use that might be causing some kind of bottleneck.

Here are the specs for my ASUS Z87 QUAD/DELUXE motherboard, but I don't see anything that doesn't scream "Ferrari" there...

YouTube/optodata

DS365 | Win11 Pro | Ryzen 9 3950X | RTX 4070 Ti | 32GB RAM | 10TB SSDs | 5K+4K HDR monitors

Canon Vixia GX10 (4K 60p) | HF G30 (HD 60p) | Yi Action+ 4K | 360Fly 4K 360°

Opt,

Check here and scroll down for some tests I did with my little "super" box -haha- : http://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/posts/list/32454.page

I am salivating over your Thunderbolt 2 ports ! The ASUS Deluxe line was on the top of my list to build a new system until Gigabyte came out with their NUC as shown in the link above. I am looking at 4k for the future and am waiting for Intel to release their newer 6 / 8 core Haswells. But at this point I am seriously looking at a Xeon workstation (costly though!)

I am sure at this point you have already played with the on board settings on your the motherboard. You have a faster clock rate and over clocking ability than my CPU 3.2 (turbo up to 3.9 which I have only seen 3.6Ghz so far. In the thread above you will note a lower WMV time than my slower laptop. Heat and stress causes the i7-4770R CPU to throttle in such a small package. I'll cool it down with a mod eventually.)

Btw- this chip is only for BGA motherboards. Also it has a dedicated 128mb eDram.

So I would not dwell on my system specs to your i7-4770K - similar but different. Your overall system build has much more room for expansion and ways to squeeze out faster performance than I do.

Post up your DXdiag (I think I saw it on another thread but can't remember where.) Something is throttling your system.

Are you running any CPU / GPU or any software to see what is happening when you experience these slow downs? Does ASUS have a diagnostics of some sort for the motherboard you can get into like a debug mode? All drivers up to date and so on?

Rob
PD 14 Ultimate Suite / Win10 Pro x64
1. Gigabyte Brix PRO / i7-4770R Intel Iris Pro 5200 / 16 GB / 1 TB SSD
2. Lenovo X230T / 8GB / Intel HD4000 + ViDock 4 Plus & ASUS Nvidia 660 Ti / Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIZw3GPwKMo&feature=youtu.be

Rob

I had been following that thread, but didn't see the final posts where you tested your new box. It sounds like it does pretty much everything I'd be looking for in a dedicated video system, and it apparently cost less than 30% of what I spent on my new rig. Ouch!

Overall, my system is great and all the benchmarks I throw at it show it to be about the fastest desktop around, so that's why this stuff with PD12 is killing me. The OS and all other apps load and run flawlessly, and even in PD, the editor itself loads quickly and probably 80% of the things I want to do happen smoothly and quickly.

Like you, I'm disappointed at the choppiness of the preview in HD. One of the main reasons I bought this system was to run the preview in full HD on 2 monitors - but it hasn't worked out that way. I realize that some FX and edits will always be unavailable in real time because there's too much processing to do (especially at 60fps and/or 2k/4k), and at this point I'd settle for a uniformly responsive editing experience and smooth playback of bare clips on 2 monitors in HD.

My latest DXDiag reults are attached. Thanks again for your help and insight

YouTube/optodata

DS365 | Win11 Pro | Ryzen 9 3950X | RTX 4070 Ti | 32GB RAM | 10TB SSDs | 5K+4K HDR monitors

Canon Vixia GX10 (4K 60p) | HF G30 (HD 60p) | Yi Action+ 4K | 360Fly 4K 360°

Sorry - I can contribute very little to the tech talk, but I can share the results of OD's test.

Tested on 3 PCs, each running PDR12.0.2706.0 & each with current Nvidia driver (335.23)

Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
i7-3930K @ 3.20GHz
16GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680
------------------------------ Window opening ~2 secs

Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
i7-920 @ 2.67GHz
8GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260
------------------------------ Window opening ~2.5 secs

Windows 8.1 64-bit
i7-3537U @ 2.0GHz
4GB RAM
HD4000 + NVIDIA GeForce GT 740M
------------------------------- Window opening ~8 secs

Looks like I'm "affected".

Cheers - Tony



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Guys;

while I have been asleep up here in the north, you have been trying out stuff.
Even though I have, through the years, gotten a better grip on what is going on
in a computer and how it’s put together; in the deeper tech stuff I can’t follow you.

Being a PD user for years, however, I do know that what we are discussing here is
kinda important, because I very well know that the way PD12 is performing on my
system here is not the right way.
I can use the automated stuff, produce unedited material, but
at this time, it’s pretty much impossible to actually edit.

It’s a wilderness of computers out there in the shops and many people have their new
computers built from scratch. You get all kinds of systems.
But in the end, to have a decent pc, it will be a matter of power, cores, graphics, RAM, OS and
space , SSD / HD – yes?
So what can people do, other than follow the specs requirements – and then some more ?

So many, many times over the years I have seen people post on this forum:
“ Computers don’t last longer than 3-4 years”
“ You don’t have enough space on C”
“ You have to have more / upgrade your RAM”
“ Your computer can’t cope”
“ PD demands a lot of resources”
“ One has to keep up!”
Well, it seems optodata and I (at least) have similar significant problem(s) with PD12 on
new, strong,spaceful,multi-cores,high graphics and sufficient RAM computers.
I am not that concerned about how fast a program opens, I am concerned about
how things work when you are in the program.

PD12 is on my new laptop, specs of it is in other threads.
On this laptop (Win8.1) are 3 other NLE’s – behaving as expected,
Color Director – behaving as expected,
2 photo editors – behaving as expected
Sonicfire Pro – behaving as expected

PowerDirector 12: not behaving as expected.
And this is status quo.

Nina







Just something.
https://www.petitpoisvideo.com

I agree - as much as I love using PD none of the other NLEs I have tested are this quirky. But I persistent and find work arounds and when it does work it's a joy to use.

Anyway- right now I am under the working assumption that their is something going on with the combination of ASUS hardware / Nvidia graphics cards and PD.

1.) So to test this out and eliminate things, can you physically pull your Nvidia 780 Ti and allow your system to fall back to the CPUs Intel HD4600 GPU.

Run your tests again with only one monitor attached and see what happens.

2.) The next thing I would try is reinstalling the 780 Ti and use an older Nvidia graphics driver- I would suggest version 332.21
See link: http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/71704/en-us

Run tests again.

Off topic- I notice your "iSCTAgent.exe" is causing a lot of faults. You have issues with your Intel Smart Connect? I never bothered to install the drivers on my systems. Never did find it useful- but that's just me. See link: http://www.intel.com/support/services/smartconnect/sb/CS-033108.htm

(Btw- are you using the Samsung Magician software to put your 120 GB main drive into RAPID mode? It speeds up the SSD. It's too bad only one of the EVO SSDs at a time can use RAPID mode. I personally use my larger 1 TB SSD as my main drive that I also have a dedicated Video edit partition on for PD to use when editing. I find the speed increases night and day from my older mechanical drives. Then once done editing, File>Pack Project Materials. Saving the pack project files to my two 4 TB and one 2 TB mechanical HDs for backups. I use a prgm called Allwaysync to automate things with my quad backups. The fourth HD is a 1 TB USB 3.0 external for when I am traveling with my laptop. Yes I am paranoid.. or very careful take your pick

Rob
PD 14 Ultimate Suite / Win10 Pro x64
1. Gigabyte Brix PRO / i7-4770R Intel Iris Pro 5200 / 16 GB / 1 TB SSD
2. Lenovo X230T / 8GB / Intel HD4000 + ViDock 4 Plus & ASUS Nvidia 660 Ti / Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIZw3GPwKMo&feature=youtu.be

optodata- I tried your test above and the window took <2 sec to pop up. I have the 4770k at stock speed with the ATI HD7870 graphic card. Intel i7 4770k, 16GB, GTX1060 3GB, Two 240GB SSD, 4TB HD, Sony HDR-TD20V 3D camcorder, Sony SLT-A65VK for still images, Windows 10 Pro, 64bit
Gary Russell -- TN USA

Honestly I love PD as this has never failed me so far. My editing is few and far between but PD has lived to my needs brilliantly.
I also have VS X7 which when encoded as MPEG-2 does not play on my TV, while PD-12 does. I can only use MP4 in VSX7 which is a trifle disappointing.

Again PD-12 is hard to beat as far as rendering speed goes. VSX7 lags while PD-12 blazes ahead

PC specs :
OS Windows 10.0 Pro
MB - AS rock Z77 extreme 11
Intel 3770K @ 4.0 Ghz OC
Gskill 32 GB RAM 1800 Mhz
6 TB HDD, SSD bootable
nVidia ASUS GTX 660 Ti
BenQ 22" LCD monitor 1920x1080

BabIndia, I'm glad PD12 is working for you. Ynotfish/Tony, RobAC and GGRussell, thank you all very much for your inputs on this.

Rather than it being a Win8.1 or Haswell issue, it now appears that this is an issue between PD12 and the nVidia GTX 7xx cards on Win8.1.

Per RobAC's brilliant suggestion, I physically removed my $800 GTX780 card and used the i7 4770's built in HD4600 video.

**** Bingo! ****

The Fade2 window opened in 1.2 seconds, and my Pixelan control window that was taking 15 seconds to open in a more complex project now took 3.5 seconds. Now we're getting somewhere!

When I physically reinstalled the GTX card and enabled it in the BIOS, but left a single monitor connected to the HD4600/motherboard graphics port, the delay was back - but "only" about 4.3 seconds, or about halfway between the no GTX (no delay) setup and the GTX with 1 or 2 monitors attached (big delay).

I'm in the middle of testing various combinations and settings, and so far I can say using 1 vs. 2 monitors; using 30fps vs. 60fps vs. various HW acceleration settings in PD; and using NVidia drivers 332.21 vs. 335.23 drivers have very little effect on the delay when using the GTX card. The Fade2 window delay is always around 7 seconds. It also doesn't matter if the HD4600 display adapter is enabled or disabled in the BIOS. As long as the GTX 7xx video card is driving the monitor(s), the big delay is present.

I can also say that it doesn't look like a card vendor issue. I tried my older EVGA GTX 770 card, and it had the same long delays as my ASUS GTX 780Ti - that's why I think it's a GTX 7xx chipset/driver+PD issue, which has bitten us before.

Look back at this thread at the people who had new/fast CPUs and no delay problems: BillyR, BabIndia, and 2 of Tony/ynotfish's machines all are running GTX 6xx or earlier. GGRussell and RobAC are running AMD and Intel video chips. Now look at the people with the problem: me (GTX 780 and GTX 770), 1Nina (GTX770M) and Tony's machine with the GT(X?) 740M. ALL 7xx series, ALL running Win8.1, ALL affected.

Cyberlink - there's your focus!

YouTube/optodata

DS365 | Win11 Pro | Ryzen 9 3950X | RTX 4070 Ti | 32GB RAM | 10TB SSDs | 5K+4K HDR monitors

Canon Vixia GX10 (4K 60p) | HF G30 (HD 60p) | Yi Action+ 4K | 360Fly 4K 360°