Another interesting and well-assembled collection of good stuff for PDR users. Congratulations and thank you to all involved in publication, especially Adrian.

Even though I've spent lots of hours hacking into PDR's secret folders over the years, it had never occurred to me to mess with the Blend Effects folder... so thanks for the pointers on making customised blend effects available in PDR.

I followed the instructions in PDNews Issue 5 & was partially successful. They each showed up in PDR & worked as expected, except one.



As you can see "Light Leak 02" displays with no thumbnail & has no impact on the video when applied. I'm hoping someone might be able to point me to the error of my ways.

DOH! I just went to zip the folder to post here and realised the problem. It was an extra space in the file name in the XML file.

Oh well - my blunder may help anyone else is attempting this. I'll attach a couple I made.

Cheers - Tony
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Quote Another interesting and well-assembled collection of good stuff for PDR users. Congratulations and thank you to all involved in publication, especially Adrian.

Even though I've spent lots of hours hacking into PDR's secret folders over the years, it had never occurred to me to mess with the Blend Effects folder... so thanks for the pointers on making customised blend effects available in PDR.

I followed the instructions in PDNews Issue 5 & was partially successful. They each showed up in PDR & worked as expected, except one.



As you can see "Light Leak 02" displays with no thumbnail & has no impact on the video when applied. I'm hoping someone might be able to point me to the error of my ways.

DOH! I just went to zip the folder to post here and realised the problem. It was an extra space in the file name in the XML file.

Oh well - my blunder may help anyone else is attempting this. I'll attach a couple I made.

Cheers - Tony

Just keeping in the loop Panny TM10, GH2, GH4,

Thanks for the info on the Blend effect. Something I hadn't explored all that much. But now after reading the article in this issue 5 of PD News, I see that this is a feature that warrants some further exploration on my part.

Thank you PD News contributors!





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I'm afraid I got a bit carried away making custom blend effects, but it may be of some interest.

Since these can't be shared via DirectorZone, I zipped up the ones I've made. You can download them here. Just drop the set of sub-folders into the BlendEffect folder at C:\Program Files (x86)\CyberLink\templates\PowerDirector Content Pack Premium 2\BlendEffect

Here's a short sampler. Each blend is set at 50% opacity. There's no way I'm suggesting this is an appropriate thing to do to The Great Escape!



Cheers - Tony
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I tried to add multiple videos to the blending effect, but it was a real hassle to make it work. Because each file took me half an our to get it to work, I made a (Windows batch) script that prepares each video file in the same folder to be used in Powerproducer.

Instructions:

• copy/paste the script in a new text file, give it any name you like but make sure the file extension is .bat


• put every desired new blending effect videos together in one folder together with the script(file)


• run the script (double click the file)


• the script will make a new subfolder for each video. Move all these subfolders to the BlendEffect folder

Remarks:

• The script will prepare all files found in the same folder including non-video files. It doesn't have any verification or error handling. Be sure you run the script in a folder with blending movies solely annd copy only the associated subfolders


• The type of blending, opacity, etc. are static in the script, but you can always edit the .XML file afterwards if you like.


• It took quite some time to figure it out, but Powerdirector only reads the blending videos when the .XML file is Unicode encoded.


• You can find quite a few well quality (free) blending videos if you search for (free) overlay videos

The script:
@echo off chcp 65001 setlocal EnableDelayedExpansion FOR %%F IN (*) DO ( echo "%%~nF". MD "%%~nF" Copy "%%~nxF" ".\%%~nF\%%~nxF" >nul ( echo ^<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?^> echo ^<TEMPLATE_MGR VERSION="1.0"^> echo ^<TEMPLATE_LIST^> echo ^<TEMPLATE TYPE="PRESET" ASPECTRATIO="16:9" CATEGORY="Lens Flare" BLENDMODE="4" OPACITY="200" FILENAME="%%~nxF" ALIAS="%%~nF" TEMPLATEKEY="f604df34-16d6-4d07-92bf-344bd714f20c" /^> echo ^</TEMPLATE_LIST^> echo ^</TEMPLATE_MGR^> ) >"%%~nF"\BlendEffectTemplate.tmp CALL :MakeItUnicode "%%~nF" DEL "%%~nF"\BlendEffectTemplate.tmp ) PAUSE GOTO :EOF :MakeItUnicode Powershell -Command "& { Get-Content \"%~1\BlendEffectTemplate.tmp\" | Set-Content -Encoding Unicode \"%~1\BlendEffectTemplate.xml\"" }" EXIT /B 0