Why Are PD Developers Punishing Powerful Computers?

ChristopherDeanHoward

Newbie Location: England Joined: Oct 06, 2015 00:30 Messages: 16 Offline

Solved by

Apr 30, 2016 07:54

Hello, guys and Cyberlink mods.

So, after a lot of checking and double-checking, it's clear that the developers of Power Director have optimised the software for low-end hardware. Those of us with decent PC's are being bottlenecked, big time.

I have relatively powerful hardware specs (specs in my sig), and I'm having to wait several seconds in between making moderately complex edits and title modifications. And, after thoroughly testing for any bottlenecks via Task Manager, it's clear that it's Power Director itself that is the bottleneck. And yes, all of my drivers etc are utterly up-to-date. And, I regularly maintain my system. In fact, I kinda have OCD when it comes to keeping things updated and so on and so forth.

Now, we all give a lot of money to Cyberlink, and I for one have been loyal to them, and I will continue to be so. But the fact I'm being bottlenecked by my editing software whilst I have plenty of hardware power to utilise is very, very frustrating. And it's starting to ruin my enjoyment of making videos.

I'm not a person who likes to complain. But, I just had to put this out there. Power Director really, really should not be optimised for low-end hardware only. It should be utilising at least 90% of CPU, GPU and RAM ability.

Thank you. FX 8350 Black Edition
R9 270X 4GB
Hyper X Fury, 8GB
Western Digital, 1T Caviar Blue, 2T Green

kmjk333

Member Joined: Feb 16, 2016 02:23 Messages: 93 Offline

Apr 30, 2016 16:17

My spec are much higher than yours in all categories (nothing against your system) and I find Powerdirector 14 smooth as butter at encoding 4K gaming video's.

I did a lot of testing on my machine during the first 30 days and came to a very workable setting to compliment my hardware.

Since your hardware is very good, it may come down to your setting selections. But you really didn't provide any information other than this:
"It should be utilising at least 90% of CPU, GPU and RAM ability".

I don't want to have my system maxed out during encoding if you have the right selection of hardware. The more stress (at 90%) you have = potential of errors. Here is an example of my hardware, temps, speeds, settings and they work very nicely with my system.

edit: with improper settings, my RAM usage shot up to 10.5GB. The PD14 exe alone uses about 3GB RAM. Normally I use very close or at 7-8GB/ It it was me, 8GB is not enough RAM for big time encoding. I see you are at 8GB. RAM is very cheap today

This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at Apr 30. 2016 16:25

ChristopherDeanHoward

Newbie Location: England Joined: Oct 06, 2015 00:30 Messages: 16 Offline

May 01, 2016 01:05

Quote: My spec are much higher than yours in all categories (nothing against your system) and I find Powerdirector 14 smooth as butter at encoding 4K gaming video's.

I did a lot of testing on my machine during the first 30 days and came to a very workable setting to compliment my hardware.

Since your hardware is very good, it may come down to your setting selections. But you really didn't provide any information other than this:
"It should be utilising at least 90% of CPU, GPU and RAM ability".

I don't want to have my system maxed out during encoding if you have the right selection of hardware. The more stress (at 90%) you have = potential of errors. Here is an example of my hardware, temps, speeds, settings and they work very nicely with my system.

edit: with improper settings, my RAM usage shot up to 10.5GB. The PD14 exe alone uses about 3GB RAM. Normally I use very close or at 7-8GB/ It it was me, 8GB is not enough RAM for big time encoding. I see you are at 8GB. RAM is very cheap today

Thank you very much for that detailed response, mate.

Yeah, you definitely have a more powerful system than me (though my overclocked FX equals many I7's in benchmarks

)

I'm on basically the exact same settings as you, except I use 24Fps (Film) as I'm in England and I'm still not sure whether the PAL/NTSC thing matters when not making DVD's.

I actually think you're correct. My RAM usage does get pushed in PD14. I only have 8 GB, but in the Task Manager it actually shows I'm using closer to 12 GB, as I think my system is compressing it, or something, for some reason. Maybe that has something to do with it as well.

But yeah. I think I probably should get an extra 8 GB.

Thanks again, man.

EDIT: I work with 1920 by 1080. So not exactly the same settings, as I first said.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at May 01. 2016 01:12

FX 8350 Black Edition
R9 270X 4GB
Hyper X Fury, 8GB
Western Digital, 1T Caviar Blue, 2T Green

Anonymous

May 02, 2016 00:35

Hello, ChristopherDeanHoward!

I'm a long way from being an expert(X = unknown quantity, spert[spurt] = a drip under pressure) but even I would know that perhaps 8GB of RAM might not be enough to handle video editing. The computer would be "working its guts out" trying to process all that content and that RAM chip might turn into a EWE(sorry, sheepish computer humour there, I'll take it baa-aa-aa-ck, shall I?) Seriously though, a word with your computer tech support could advise you of what you need for editing videos. Your computer may very well be a "muscle machine" in some aspects, but video editing with any so-designed software, let alone Power Director, could be pushing that RAM drive toward shear... er.... sheer exhaustion!

Cheers!... Sorry for the excruciating puns!

Neil.

Dafydd B

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

May 02, 2016 03:34

Seriously Neil, your addition to this thread's topic added nothing of real worth. kmjk333 had already given a superb answer and pointed out the deficiency of only having 8gb of ram.
Dafydd

Carl312

Senior Contributor Location: Texas, USA Joined: Mar 16, 2010 20:11 Messages: 9090 Offline

May 02, 2016 10:58

Quote: I actually think you're correct. My RAM usage does get pushed in PD14. I only have 8 GB, but in the Task Manager it actually shows I'm using closer to 12 GB, as I think my system is compressing it, or something, for some reason. Maybe that has something to do with it as well.

Computers that do not have enough RAM for the Task, will use virtual memory (Hard drive) to make up the difference.

Hard Drive is much slower than RAM. If you have a SSD drive that is less noticeable. I suspect, that may be your slow response in PD, Memory is being swapped out to the hard drive.

As somebody said, RAM is cheap. 16 GB or more is not out of the question. Carl312: Windows 10 64-bit 8 GB RAM,AMD Phenom II X4 965 3.4 GHz,ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB,240GB SSD,two 1TB HDs.

ChristopherDeanHoward

Newbie Location: England Joined: Oct 06, 2015 00:30 Messages: 16 Offline

May 02, 2016 11:14

Yep. I think you're right, Carl. I've just checked my Page File/Virtual Memory, and my system is allocating a huge 7756 MB for Paging File - which is basically all of my RAM. I have it set to 'Automatically manage paging file size for all drives', by the way.

I'll definitely be getting more RAM. Thanks, Carl.

Dear Cyberlink: My apologies for presuming my issues were due to PD14 being optimised only for lower-end hardware.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at May 02. 2016 11:16

FX 8350 Black Edition
R9 270X 4GB
Hyper X Fury, 8GB
Western Digital, 1T Caviar Blue, 2T Green

JL_JL

Senior Contributor Location: Arizona, USA Joined: Oct 01, 2006 20:01 Messages: 6091 Offline

May 02, 2016 18:44

Quote: Yep. I think you're right, Carl. I've just checked my Page File/Virtual Memory, and my system is allocating a huge 7756 MB for Paging File - which is basically all of my RAM. I have it set to 'Automatically manage paging file size for all drives'

Not sure what you mean by this statement. That's essentially correct with any recent WIN OS, post XP! MS has a lot of rules for “Automatically manage..” and some smart sizing based on crash history and ability to map a memory dump during a crash but basically for most system it boils down to 1xRAM for the "Automatic.." setting up to 32GB max. So your observation that yours is ~1xRAM is totally normal and no reason to say that means one needs more RAM or that it’s huge.

No issue with adding more RAM, it benefits certain aspects, however, with time, you will see your automatic setting will simply allocate 16GB for page file, don’t be alarmed, it’s not huge, just normal.

Very unlikely PD with 1920x1080 source video footage would ever use 16GB RAM so be forewarned, don't post back PD is only using a small fraction of the 16GB RAM I just purchased and my 16GB is underutilized. Yes, multiple 4K PIP’s and a complex timeline will require a much larger RAM footprint vs the same 1920x1080.

Simply monitor your RAM with any suitable tool and see what your usuage is for your typical timelines. PD14 usage and total usage as that depends heavily on your added utlities you have running and see if you have head room on your 8GB.

Jeff

kmjk333

Member Joined: Feb 16, 2016 02:23 Messages: 93 Offline

May 02, 2016 18:53

ChristopherDeanHoward,
After reading and posting in this thread along with another thread of 5 hours or encoding, I thought, can my system get pushed to the limits?

So for fun. Only fun, of course....I recorded with BandiCam a Fallout 4 game video at 4K resolution. About 52 min project in total of which 36 of those mins were the gaming video.

Bandicam (game recorder) is set to MP4, so the compressed final output raw file was a massive +45.5GB !! Can PD14 handle this, or can my hardware handle the entire process from beginning to end? When will I crash?

No crash, no locking up my system, no errors, 4K results, nothing that is out of the norm. I am surprised and very impressed with PowerDirector 14. Just wow!

13.1GB "produced file" in 1:28 hours. To me this is just plain fast and effective. My hardware has not reached its limits with PD14.

I did this test just for fun. In the future to try and crash my system using PD14 is just silly. I will never have a project with a 45GB file.

Now I need to clean up some hard drive space

Thanks for listening.

This message was edited 3 times. Last update was at May 02. 2016 19:11

Anonymous

May 02, 2016 23:20

Quote: Seriously Neil, your addition to this thread's topic added nothing of real worth. kmjk333 had already given a superb answer and pointed out the deficiency of only having 8gb of ram.
Dafydd

Dafydd,

You really do need to "lighten up"! I was trying to inject a little humour into an otherwise dull subject. It seems to me this forum is often very "dry", devoid of any humour. My attempt may or may not be welcome and some of them may not be as funny as hoped, but at least I am trying to "brighten up" an otherwise overly-serious forum. As to 8 gigabytes of RAM(Random Access Memory), I think it might be more than what my computer has but I rather leave that side of my computer to those who are more skilful than me to manage such things.

Neil.

Dafydd B

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

May 03, 2016 04:18

Neil, As you've been told before about humour, it is often lost in translation (this is an international forum with multi-lingual users and those that translate forum pages) and what you wrote might appear humorous but it's not. If it's part of a reparte between friends it's ok of course. Banter is fine if you know the participants wont be offended. Just don't try to be humorous when you're answering a newbie, ok.

Yeah, I probably do need to lighten up.
Dafydd

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at May 03. 2016 04:30

AlS

Senior Member Location: South Africa Joined: Sep 23, 2014 18:07 Messages: 290 Offline

May 04, 2016 03:11

"You really do need to "lighten up"! I was trying to inject a little humour into an otherwise dull subject. It seems to me this forum is often very "dry", devoid of any humour."

Dafydd is inundated with moans and groans from users and I think you threw him off balance - or maybe it was our Newbie's avatar.

Go for it Neil!!!!
I'm with you

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at May 04. 2016 03:18

Power Director 13&14 Ultimate, Photo Director 6, Audio Dir, Pwr2Go 10
Win 10 64, Intel MB DH87MC, Intel i5-4670 CPU @ 3.40GHz, 16Gb DDR3 1600, 128Gb SSD, 2x1Tb WDBlue 7200rpmSATA6, Intel 4600 GPU, Gigabyte G1 GTX960 4GB, LG BluRay Writer

Anonymous

May 04, 2016 21:58

Hi, AIS!

Yeah... that newbie's avatar is a bit on the gory side! Spooky! But I just thought this forum needed a bit of "perking up". The topic of video editing can get like the topic of finance and stock markets.... very dry and dull! So if anyone can drop a bit of humour in on occasion to lift the mood.... so much the better. Dafydd himself even admitted that he needs to lighten up a bit. We can't all be, as the Americans used to call it, "Sad Sacks"!

On the topic of how much RAM my computer has, I'm not exactly sure, to be honest. I bought this computer a couple of years back, "off the shelf" and never really bothered to check out its specs. I'm guessing now that I mght have more than 8 gigs of RAM, but tech issues with this computer are best left with those who know their way around the innards of a computer. My abilities lie with the use of, rather than the building of computers.

Cheers!

Neil.

AlS

Senior Member Location: South Africa Joined: Sep 23, 2014 18:07 Messages: 290 Offline

May 05, 2016 01:38

Neil
Go to Control Panel > System and it will display your PC's info. Or right-click on "My Computer" (or "This PC" in Win 10) and click on Properties at the bottom. Add info to your profile too.

Al

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at May 05. 2016 01:40

Power Director 13&14 Ultimate, Photo Director 6, Audio Dir, Pwr2Go 10
Win 10 64, Intel MB DH87MC, Intel i5-4670 CPU @ 3.40GHz, 16Gb DDR3 1600, 128Gb SSD, 2x1Tb WDBlue 7200rpmSATA6, Intel 4600 GPU, Gigabyte G1 GTX960 4GB, LG BluRay Writer

Dafydd B

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

May 05, 2016 02:27

OP has been answered, the thread has started to wander off to Neil's (thoughts and ram) issue, thread closed.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at May 05. 2016 02:30