So...should I take the lack of responses to mean that nobody knows? --
-Mark
Cable Solutions

Hi MrMark -

You could take the lack of response as...

1. Not many members have experience of the same issues you're describing, or are working with the same sort of source material


2. Multiple complexities & questions may be a bit daunting - where to begin?

e.g. if I were to make any comment about deinterlacing, I'd be talking through me hat - aside from pointing you at software like this From the little I know, it may take hours to process a video of only minutes duration. If PDR is unable to deinterlace convincingly, the "extra" step may be completely necessary.

With Fix/Enhance, it is only available if one clip is selected but using "Apply to All" overcomes that (assuming you need to make the same adjustments to all clips). The same thing applies with CDR - select clip, adjust in CDR, back to PDR > Apply to All.

That's a start anyway.

Cheers - Tony
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This is posted in the PD15 and not in the ColorDirector forum.

You are expecting too much. Never heard of PowerBrake. I have used Handbrake and the avi files have miceteeth artifacts when converted to mp4. Haven’t tried the deinterlacing featues in the newer builds. See this article: http://www.100fps.com/ . Every deinterlacing method has problems. I convert DV to mpeg-2 bff. Leave the field alone. Most people accept DV which is made for viewing on the old crt tv. I do not deinterlace any original video.

Are you trying to burn a DVD Disc? I don't think that PD has a setting for 480p whe creating a disc. Preprocessing using Handbrake would make no difference. The final disc would still be 480i especially if any part of the project needed to be rendered.

Camera in/out points: When importing, you should have had an option to 'detect scenes'.

Stablizer: Every video editor I've ever used that had stablizer feature works by zooming in slighty so it can crop. 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

Quote This is posted in the PD15 and not in the ColorDirector forum.

Thanks for the reply. It is posted in the PowerDirector forum because I am concerned with the functionally of ColorDirector from within the workflow of PowerDirector, and specifically, how it affects the videos that I am editing with PowerDirector. Does that not make sense?

Quote You are expecting too much.

I'm not sure what you mean...PowerDirector has many features that are arguably more complicated than proper de-interlacing. Or did you mean something else?

Quote Never heard of PowerBrake.

I meant to type HandBrake. Sorry about that.

Quote I have used Handbrake and the avi files have miceteeth artifacts when converted to mp4. Haven’t tried the deinterlacing featues in the newer builds.

I have been using version 1.0.3 and it looks pretty good to me...way better than what I have been able to get out of PD15.

Quote See this article: http://www.100fps.com/ . Every deinterlacing method has problems.

I read that article some time ago. I am well aware that there are a lot of trade-offs, but I'm not expecting 480i to look like HD. I just want it to look similar to playing the VHS tape. In order to achieve that, I need to keep all of the spatial and temporal resolution that I possibly can. That means that I can't afford to throw away half of the fields instead of lacing them back together...or whatever PD15 is doing that produces such disappointing results.

Quote I convert DV to mpeg-2 bff.

I’m sorry, but I don’t know what “bff” means in this context.

Quote Leave the field alone. Most people accept DV which is made for viewing on the old crt tv. I do not deinterlace any original video.

I captured to DV format as well. The captures look pretty good when viewed raw because the video card or TV does a decent job of de-interlacing them at playback time. The trouble is that PowerDirector 15 seems to have a lot of issues when editing or rendering interlaced video. Ultimately, they must be de-interlaced because nobody's going to be watching them on a CRT. If I upload an interlaced video to YouTube, they will de-interlace it however they see fit. If someone plays it on a TV, computer or mobile device, it will get de-interlaced in some manner at that time. So it's just a question of where the de-interlacing should be done. Reasonably, it should be possible to do a better job of deinterlacing in software than in real time. The software has plenty of time to analyze the video and figure out how to put the fields back together again in the most advantageous way. It is always more technically challenging to do something in real time. If it is done in software, then all of the power of a modern processor and powerful GPU is on tap - all the software has to do is to use it.

And with all of that said, even though HandBrake's de-interlacing is not perfect, I think its good enough, whereas PowerDirector's is not. As a work-around, I have already pre-processed a number of videos with HandBrake, using the highest quality MP4 settings. But there's just no getting around some amount of quality loss associated with an additional lossy encoding step. That's why it would be so much better if PD15 could de-interlace (at least) as well as the free HandBrake software...it would eliminate a lossy encoding step. --
-Mark
Cable Solutions

Quote Are you trying to burn a DVD Disc? I don't think that PD has a setting for 480p whe creating a disc. Preprocessing using Handbrake would make no difference. The final disc would still be 480i especially if any part of the project needed to be rendered.

Camera in/out points: When importing, you should have had an option to 'detect scenes'.

Stablizer: Every video editor I've ever used that had stablizer feature works by zooming in slighty so it can crop.

I appreciate the reply. Years ago, I had intended to transfer to DVD, but even that seems like an outdated format these days. At this point, I just want streamable files that I can upload to YouTube, or whatever.

PowerDirector does not support my Pinnacle capture device, so I have little choice but to find the scenes manually.

I understand that stabilizers typically crop the video. The problem is that PowerDirector 15's stabilizer really gets wacked out with certain scenes. To the point that it would be much better to live with a little camera shake than to live with what PD15's stabilizer did to the video. It works fine most of the time, so I'm willing to do without it on the clips that give it fits, but the problem that comes with that idea is that splitting the timeline at the point where the trouble starts and then removing stabilization from that particular clip causes a jarring change in the crop, so I would like to know how to smoothly transition from stabilized clips to non-stabilized, and back again. --
-Mark
Cable Solutions

Quote Hi MrMark -

You could take the lack of response as...

Tony, I really appreciate your reply and I answered your post first, but I just noticed that the forum seems to have lost it somehow. I'll try again later today. --
-Mark
Cable Solutions

Your statement about converting interlaced video to progressive loses half of the vertical resolution is something I had always believed. I used a mpeg-2 interlaced 720 x 480 video produced from a dv camcorder many years ago for this test. Attached are screenshots taken from the timeline of PD. The horizontal resolution is between 500-600 lines. The vertical resolution is about 350 and 370 lines on both wedges which is 480 x 0.7 (kell factor) = 336 lines expected. Higher than expected. See the screenshots.

The produced mp4 using PD shows 240 and 290 lines of vertical resolution on the same wedges. This is about a 110 and 80 lines vertical line reduction when the original interlaced mpeg-2 file is produced as a progressive mp4. Not as bad as I thought.

Downloaded the latest HandBrake and another file converter to test moving dv video instead of a video resolution test chart. Converted a 20 sec. dance video using handbrake. The latest version does not have a filter deinterlace on/off but a decomb or yadif that serves the same purpose. Tried the default which is relatively fast when compared to the other converters. Tried the Bob and then the EED12Bob and took a few minutes to convert that small file. Could not say that it is worth it using the last setting. That is trading converting speed for the best possible deinterlace.

My old YouTube videos uploaded as interlaced looks just fine as it changes to a progressive mp4 for downloaders. A good deinterlace software conversion does take time and won’t be better than an original non converted progressive video.

You did say your originals are from a vhs recorder. This is analog and has a 240 horizontal lines of resolution for a 3 mhz bandwidth and you can’t do anything about it. You can however increase the vertical resolution to the maximum that can be achieved when converting to a progressive video.

My old interlaced video will stay interlaced as my pc media players such as PDVD seem to do a terrific job on my monitor and my standalone BD and DVD players work well with interlaced video connected to my HD widescreen TV. Pause as far as I know gives a choice of frame or field to display in which field is the default in my dvd recorder playback menu settings. I see no reason to convert the old stuff. My new videos are all captured as progressive, edited, and produced as progressive. Your equipment is different from mine.

Good luck on your interlaced video conversion to progressive!!

Continued with the tests with HandBrake using Deinterlace off – 375/360, Decomb Default Default -325/360, Decomb EED12Bob Default -340/360 on the resolution charts for vertical lines of resolution.

It looks like that HandBrake indeed is a good alternative to convert interlaced video to progressive.

In your initial post you mentioned out of sync video after conversion. Years ago, I recall using the passthru setting for audio. That is no recompression for audio because I needed 5.1 not stereo audio. You may want to try that passthru.

This is not a Handbrake forum but hope that users who use it will not hesitate to convert interlaced video to progressive if they desire to do so and have in sync audio with video from the start.

I'm not sure what you mean tomasc, but I do like your samples. I wish I had some test patterns in my original vidieos, but sadly I do not. To be clear, I know that it's customary to refer to TV resolution in "lines", but I was speaking of vertical resolution, which is pretty much the opposite of vertical lines. I have done some testing after the fact with my S-VHS machines, and they can manage around 400 vertical lines. My DV camcorder can do a little better. But that resolution certainly doesn't survive a PowerDirector "produce".

Lacking any technical explanation from CyberPower, it looks to me like PD15 is just doubling every other scan line. In other words, throwing away half of the scan lines. It is particularly noticeable any time that there is any horizontal movement, at which point I can see stair-steps that are two pixels high - not one pixel, as you might expect with interlaced video. I start out with VHS video that was pretty low resolution to start with, then capture to 720x480 DVI format. The resulting digital captures are almost indistinguishable from just playing the original VHS tape with the VCR connected directly to the display.

Rendering in PowerDirector makes them look significantly worse. I could be wrong, but I get the impression that PD never works in true interlaced mode. I get the impression that even when I set it to render an interlaced file, it first converts to progressive, throwing away half of the resolution, and then renders whatever's left back to interlaced, with half of the resolution still missing, resulting in rendered videos that are worse than the originals in multiple ways. By pre-processing in HandBrake, all of the PD15 interlaced weirdness is avoided, albiet at the expense of an extra rendering step. I render in Handbrake at the highest possible quality, so it's not fast. About one-fourth of real-time speed on my Sandy Bridge i7 machines. So it's time-consuming, and it harms the quality, but not as much as PowerDirector alone harms it.

You know, there is, and always has been, an awful lot of interlaced video in the world. It seems like decent de-interlacing should be built in to all video editing software. Even now, most ATSC broadcast TV is 1080i. And for those of us trying to do justice to a lifetime of home movies, they're virtually all interaced. I have a one-year-old camcorder that has a default setting of 1080i. Those videos give PowerDirector a fit too. I have home movies in VHS, S-VHS, DV, and multiple flavors of digital 1080i. They're all interlaced. The ability to deal elegantly with interlaced video seems like a big deal to me.

I know this isn't a HandBrake forum. But in a more ideal world, there would be no need to discuss HandBrake because PowerDirector would have built-in de-interlacing that out-performs a piece of free software. It is the lack of that import capabillity that induced me to look for a work-around. So far, HandBrake is the best work-around that I've found, short of buying different NLE software. --
-Mark
Cable Solutions

Quote Hi MrMark -

You could take the lack of response as...

1. Not many members have experience of the same issues you're describing, or are working with the same sort of source material


2. Multiple complexities & questions may be a bit daunting - where to begin?

e.g. if I were to make any comment about deinterlacing, I'd be talking through me hat - aside from pointing you at software like this From the little I know, it may take hours to process a video of only minutes duration. If PDR is unable to deinterlace convincingly, the "extra" step may be completely necessary.

With Fix/Enhance, it is only available if one clip is selected but using "Apply to All" overcomes that (assuming you need to make the same adjustments to all clips). The same thing applies with CDR - select clip, adjust in CDR, back to PDR > Apply to All.

That's a start anyway.

Cheers - Tony

I wish I could remember what I wrote the first time. I spent some time on it, so it was frustrating to see that it wound up in the bit bucket. Anyway...I'm starting to get the impression that there aren't that many people using ColorDirector from within PowerDirector. That's the only way I have ever used it, so in my mind, it's just a kind of awkward plug-in. I didn't even know that it was possible to use ColorDIrector outside of PowerDirector. Sorry if I'm Naïve.

I inititially became intersted in CD for the simple reason that I wanted a better interface for adjusting white balance. White balance is native in PD15, but only within a tiny window. Very difficult to select something that should be white in that interface. CD has a bigger window. It also has some sharpening options beyond "enhance", which I thought would be useful, but it seems like what I see in the CD interface is not what I get back to PD, so I'm starting to doubt the usefulness of CD.

The weakness of the built-in deinterlacing is frustrating. HandBrake does a pretty good job, but it doesn't use my GPU, so its pretty slow, espeailly on the highest quality settings. Even so, the extra rendering step is my main concern.

But as you pointed out, I'm facing too many problems for anyone to help me with all of them at the same time, so if I have to get it down to just one, then I guess it would have to be the fact that there is no way to fix/enhance after unlink/relink video and audio tracks. Apparently this is an issue that spans multiple versions of PowerDirector, including PD15. Is there no work-around? Some perfect sequence of steps perhaps? --
-Mark
Cable Solutions

Quote I have done some testing after the fact with my S-VHS machines, and they can manage around 400 vertical lines. My DV camcorder can do a little better. But that resolution certainly doesn't survive a PowerDirector "produce".

S-vhs has about 400 lines of horizontal resolution for a 5 Mhz bandwidth That is the 400 vertical lines on the top and bottom of a wedge test chart.

The vertical resolution are the horizontal lines or wedges on the resolution test chart. It is the same as vhs.

I did test another video converter for deinterlacing and the result is lower vertical resolution than HandBrake so I won’t publish it here. HandBrakes has it’s own peculiarities. Dv or mpeg-2 conversions are default at 720 x 478 for a 720 x 480 source original. That however is explained in the respective forums.

I don’t see any of the problems you have with my videos on my pc. Users have reported in the forums that hardware acceleration and hardware encoding can cause quality problems on their particular computer. You imply that not using hardware acceleration like in handbrake makes things slow. I doubt it. Your particular computer and insistence on using hardware acceleration may be the problem.

A DxDiag can help others diagnose what you have and whether hardware acceleration may me a cause for your problems.

Quote

S-vhs has about 400 lines of horizontal resolution for a 5 Mhz bandwidth That is the 400 vertical lines on the top and bottom of a wedge test chart.

The vertical resolution are the horizontal lines or wedges on the resolution test chart. It is the same as vhs.

I did test another video converter for deinterlacing and the result is lower vertical resolution than HandBrake so I won’t publish it here. HandBrakes has it’s own peculiarities. Dv or mpeg-2 conversions are default at 720 x 478 for a 720 x 480 source original. That however is explained in the respective forums.

I don’t see any of the problems you have with my videos on my pc. Users have reported in the forums that hardware acceleration and hardware encoding can cause quality problems on their particular computer. You imply that not using hardware acceleration like in handbrake makes things slow. I doubt it. Your particular computer and insistence on using hardware acceleration may be the problem.

A DxDiag can help others diagnose what you have and whether hardware acceleration may me a cause for your problems.

I'm not sure what you are trying to tell me. I already told you the results of my own testing, so you would have to know that I am seeing real-world results that are close to the theoretical maximums. I also don't understnd your comment abut VHS being the same as S-VHS. VHS tops out at about 250 lines while S-VHS can reach 400 or more lines of resolution. I'm not sure what you were trying to point out there...maybe you were saying that the number of scan lines were the same...(?) That's certainly true.

I also know that HandBrake is good, relative to a lot of what's out there, apparently including PowerDirector.

I don't know why you think I have a unique problem. The only "problem" I have is that PD15 doesn't handle interlaced video very well, and that would be true for anyone using the program, not just me. You yourself have proven that HandBrake out-preforms PD, so why would you expect my PD to work better than your own?

You say that you doubt that the lack of GPU hardware assist makes HandBrake slower, but I find that to be a very strange thing to say. I can certainly tell when the GPU is being used, and when software offers a choice, the difference is quite dramatic. Even in PowerDirector, turning on GPU assist can make rendering orders of magnitude faster.

For what it's worth, I have been testing on three different i7 machines. All different brands and each with its own unique graphics system. My main desktop machine has an NVIDIA card, the second AMD, and the third integrated Intel graphics. All three are within a few percent of the same rendering speed with HandBrake because HandBrake doesn't leverage the GPUs. Results vary more with PowerDirector, because each GPU has certain advantages with certain rendering options, but in general, it is safe to say that when hardware rendering is applicable, it is always much faster than letting the CPU try to crunch it alone. And why wouldn't it be? After all, GPUs are often more powerful than the main processor, in addition to the fact that they are purpose-made to process graphics.

I feel like the point of my original post is getting lost here. Obviously I tried to cover too much in a single post and for that, I apologize. But the goal is not to decide whether GPU assist improves rendering speed. I believe that is a given. I was looking for a way to get rendering from PD15 that is equal to or better than the free HandBrake software. It was only when I found that to be impossible that I consideried using HandBrake as a work-around. If that's not true, then I would very much appreciate it someone would tell me how to get better results out of PD15. --
-Mark
Cable Solutions

Quote
For what it's worth, I have been testing on three different i7 machines. All different brands and each with its own unique graphics system. My main desktop machine has an NVIDIA card, the second AMD, and the third integrated Intel graphics. All three are within a few percent of the same rendering speed with HandBrake because HandBrake doesn't leverage the GPUs.

Handbrake can leverage Intel QS of an iGPU if it's of any help to you for video conversion to edit in PD, pic attached. Faster or slower than CPU encoding really depends on which CPU you have and the iGPU. Decoding also supported.

It works pretty good with H.264 and/or H.265 encoding and can often be 2-4x faster than CPU encoding.

But yes, no Nvidia or AMD encode support.

Jeff

Quote Handbrake can leverage Intel QS of an iGPU if it's of any help to you for video conversion to edit in PD, pic attached. Faster or slower than CPU encoding really depends on which CPU you have and the iGPU. Decoding also supported.

It works pretty good with H.264 and/or H.265 encoding and can often be 2-4x faster than CPU encoding.

But yes, no Nvidia or AMD encode support.

Jeff

Thanks Jeff. The only Intel graphics I have is on a laptop, and it has a dual graphics system, using either intel or AMD graphics as it sees fit. Sometimes it’s kind of wonky...which might explain why it seemed to be rendering at CPU speed on that machine. But I'll definitely keep that in mind if I can't find a way to avoid the extra encode step...maybe I can find a way to coerce it into using the intel chipset.

EDIT: Actually, I just noticed the Intel QSV option in your screen shot. Machines without Intel graphics don't include that option in the drop-down list, but I just went and looked at my laptop, and sure enough it was there. It is not selected by default, and I had missed the fact that it was different than what I had been seeing on my desktop machine. And indeed it is about four times faster. So I just wanted to thank you for showing me that. --
-Mark
Cable Solutions