Just an FYI that this forum is full of users and volunteers, so it's not "our" product even though we all use it

The easiest things to do are to set the preview resolution to HD or High, like this:


Another easy option is to enable shadow (proxy) files. You were probably prompted to turn on that feature when you imported your 4k clips, but if you declined you can still enable them by clicking on the "gear" icon at the top and checking this box:


You'll see a small yellow tag near the lower left corner of each of your clips in the media room while PD renders a lower-res "working" clip. It's best to wait until the tags turn green before working with the clips in the timeline to see the full benefit.

This only needs to be done once for each clip, and PD will always use the full resolution clips when producing so there's no loss in quality.

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°

Thank you very much for your kind help.

Indeed when the shadow file was created the things were better. But the Power Directore needs a lot of time to create the shadow file. When the PD was creating the shadow file it was using only 16% of the resources of the workstation.

I have the same problem with the rendering. There is no fully exploitation of the resources available from the hardware. Only 56% of the available coputational power is being used.

How can I remedy this?
Thank you very much agan.

Dear Sirs,

I have made all the necessary settings proposed above and I tried to edit a 4K clip with the new Power Director 17. The process was very slow. With the new keys now to change the opacity using ctrl key and the keyframes the whole process was horroble. It was very slow and when I was trying to change the opacity I tried it two and more times because the keyframe was dissapearing.

There was not synchronisation between the sound and the picture and this problem created a lot of troubles because it was very difficult to put the right frame in the right sound.

I have been disappointed with the new editor. I was so happy with the HD editing but with the 4K there is a long way to cover to have a reliable editor.

Yours

You bring up some very valid points, and those topics have been long-running discussions here on the forum. Everyone wants all of their computer's resources to be fully utilized to speed up any bottlenecks, but there are sometimes technical (and sometimes harder to understand) reasons why PD doesn't do that.

I agree that if you decide to use shadow files, that PD should generate those ASAP. However it seems like the programmers also want you to be able to do editing while they process in the background, and there's no way to force it to prioritize that.

One way to get somewhat faster editing and producing performance is to ensure that PD has the highest priority in Windows. To do that, open Windows' Task Manager and go to the Details tab. Scroll down until you find PDR.exe, then right-click and set the priority to High:

You may also want to do this for PDHanumanSvr.exe and PDStyleAgent.exe, as PD requires both to run. You can also choose to run one of these 3 processes in Realtime mode, so try that setting and do some editing to see if one of those running at the highest possible priority will speed up that project more than the others.

Note that these settings must be set manually every time you start PD.

There is another approach to speed up PD by having it use lossless (basically unencoded) video clips. All camera videos are highly encoded to get as much A/V information and quality into the smallest possible file size. It's pretty straightforward to play everything back, especially since the encoded clips are all optimized to do just that.

However, working with an editor requires the program to continually decode the source clip frame by frame, which often means it has to go back many frames to get the "B frame" (which has most of the detail for that section) and then read every successive frame from there to the current location just to fill in all the details, which can really slow things down - especially if you have edits like lighting corrections or FX applied. This Wikipedia article may help explain the issue.

So, if you first convert your clips into a lossless format (like MagicYUV, HuffYUV or Lagareth, for example), they will contain nothing but I-frames, which are perfect individual pictures that don't require any additional processing to display or edit. This will allow you to work on the full resolution clips easily, but for some UHD clips (4k, 5.2k), it still may be useful to turn on shadow files (I need to on my 4 year old i7-4770k machine, at least).

The only downside (besides initially converting) is that the files can be 3-10x larger than the source clips, and you absolutely need large and fast SSDs to use this method. Obviously, your system is ideal for this, though

I have more details on the steps in this thread. Hopefully, some combination of these tips will get you the fully powered editing experience you're after!

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°