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It could be worse.
If you buy a lifetime license and lose the install file, you lose the license & have to buy a new one. They sent me some lies about "purchasing an extended download". I don't see it. I had to open yet another ticket.
Don't buy the lifetime licenses. Buy the subscription & save yourself the headache.
Speaking just for myself, I backup all my data and programs in multiple places. I still have every installer file and key going back to PowerDirector 6 . But my most recent key is for PowerDirector 16. I have been backing up data for 34 years going back to my first PC with a 20MB hard drive and a stack a 360KB floppies. I still have all that data, and much more of course.
Anyway, I am currently facing a nasty bug in PD16 where Dual Preview has stopped working. PD crashes instantly when importing a video. The PC is unchanged for the last 6 years. Same CPU, motherboard and GPU. I can only guess with PD stopped working. Probably something in the various Windows 10 upgraddes or nVidia drivers caused PD to break. I don't know which. But even 10 year old videos are crashing it. The point is, with the lifetime license, I now have a case open with Cyberlink about this. Their engineers have to spend time supporting PD16, looking at all my crash logs. I don't know if the bug would also happen with more recent versions of PD. But certainly, if they offered reasonable upgrade terms for lifetime licenses, I would have upgraded my PD16 at least once, and probably twice. Instead, they ask for full price, so they have zero revenue to cover their sustaining expense on this 4 year-old version. That's just not very smart. Being a software engineer myself, I know companies would rather not spend money supporting old versions. I suppose the subscription model is a way for them to avoid having supporting old versions, but that only works if people buy into it. My need for PowerDirector is too occasional for me to justify the subscription. I would have had to spend $500 on lifetime licenses to upgrade each year all the way to PD20. Or about $250 for a PD365 subscription. Under the old model, I would have paid about $160 for 4 upgrades. Instead, I stuck with the old version, paid $0, and now Cyberlink is stuck with the support cost. Just silliness.
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I sent the following to Cyberlink sales. Hopefully I'm not alone feeling this way. If so, I hope others contact Cyberlink and give them a piece of their mind.
I used to upgrade my PowerDirector almost every year. I purchased lifetime licenses for PD6, PD8, PD9, PD10, PD11, PD12, PD13, PD14, and PD16. Each upgrade used to only cost about $35 to $50 during your best sales, usually around black friday. Even though the feature improvement was relatively small, and often it was just bug fixes I needed, I thought this was fair to upgrade one application.
I didn't buy an upgrade to PD17 because you didn't offer such sales. The best upgrade price I found was closer to $90. Same thing happened with PD18. Now, with PD19, my PD16 license is no longer eligible for an upgrade. The full price for PD19 is $139. If history is any indication, you won't offer any discount on the full license again.
The result is that over the last 3 years, I spent $0 in Cyberlink software, when I could have spent $100 - $160 otherwise if you offered reasonable upgrade prices for PD lifetime license each year. Please understand that I'm not going to buy a subscription license. You need to bring back discounts on lifetime licenses if you ever want to have me as a customer again.
Julien
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Double-clicking icon does nothing at all.
Attached dxdiag info.
I'm not able to attach the dxdiag info. I just get a 403 forbidden.
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Double-clicking icon does nothing at all.
Attached dxdiag info.
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DisplayFusion will let you place any window from any app onto whichever monitor you want, and you can set it to remember that location, size and orientation and automatically place the window there the next time you run the app.
With that functionality, I don't see a need to "combine" physical monitors. Note that you may have to get the paid version for that feature, but they never charge for updates and their support desk is always quick and helpful.
Thanks. The need to combine two monitors is not for PowerDirector. It is for my day job. I found a way to do it on my work laptop with the Intel iGPU's "collate" function. It is slow as molasses at 7680x2160, though, so I think I won't use it. It looks like I can do this on my personal computer also with nVidia drivers "surround" features, but if I do so, I lose the third display which has a different resolution. Anyway, this is not useful for PD regardless.
I downloaded DisplayFusion on my personal PC. I created a new "Windows position profile" and then clicked edit. PowerDirector is running full-screen and with dual-preview enabled. But it is showing as a single window in DisplayFusion, even though Dual Preview is enabled. It doesn't appear to be possible to move the preview area separately from the editing area, unless I'm missing something, which I probably am. Am I looking in the right place in the software ?
Edit: I wasn't. I clicked settings/functions. I see that Ctrl-Win-X will move a window to a specific monitor. And it works correctly with the preview window, separately from the editor. This is great ! Looks like this is part of the free version, also, Pretty cool.
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No fix in PD, best option is probably use a multi-monitor managing software, several available. I've used both DisplayFusion and MultiMonitor with success, maybe try that option to see if it fits your needs.
Jeff
Thanks. Looking at the feature set for DisplayFusion, I'm not sure how it would solve the problem. Does it allow monitors in Windows to be renumbered so that I can choose which one is "secondary" ? By default, the monitor number is dictated by the hardware apparently.
BTW, since you have played around with those, I have another (not PD-related) need - to combine multiple monitors (of identical size) into a single logical one. Do you know if any software supports that ?
Thanks,
Julien
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I posted about this years ago. When selecting Dual Preview, PowerDirector chooses the wrong monitor for my preview - my portrait monitor, which is useless when working with horizontal video. The only way I found to make PD chose the right monitor was to turn off the 3rd in Windows. Has this been fixed yet ? I'm still holding off upgrading from PD16 but might upgrade if this was fixed.
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They might ask for technical support after approximately 3~5 years because the OS has been upgraded to Windows 10 and The old software didn't work well on the new OS. And, they think they are entitled to the free technical support because a software isn't like a hardware that would get physically broken. Software won't die actually as they are digital products.
Hardware dies too - witness all the security bugs in Intel CPUs.
In any case, solving this does not require a subscription. Cyberlink can simply state that they will only provide support for full-versions for a certain duration of time, and only for the operating systems they had originally designed/tested the software with. This is done all the time in the enterprise software world, without require a subscription. You can buy support contracts if you want for additional years. At that point, the subscription does make sense.
However, if all you do is keep using your software to edit videos shot in years prior with old cameras and on an old OS, the subscription should most definitely not be required. That is where I have an issue.
I have upgraded my PD almost every year at the black friday upgrade price. No more. I'll definitely be looking somewhere else when I need new camera/OS support.
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David,
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Most likely because the Screen Recorder 4 upgrade was mostly focused on game and live streaming, and most of the video streaming platforms (Twitch, FB, YouTube, etc) only support up to 1080p at the moment. Also, I don't think any of the main competitors support 4K capture yet, do they?
Maybe in the next version, whenever that will be.
David
Thanks for the reply. Just because competitors don't do it doesn't mean you shouldn't, IMO :
I use the screen recorder to make captures of problematic scenarios with various software, ie. bugs.
In some cases, I can reduce the desktop resolution prior to capture, but in others, when the bugs specifically happen at 4K, this is not possible.
I look forward to an upgrade to screen recorder in the future to allow more resolutions. Ideally, it should be possible to match the captured monitor's resolution for encoding. It shouldn't really have to be specified by the user at all by default, unless one explicitly wants to scale it down.
Julien
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I'm trying to do screen captures of my desktop which is running at 3840x2160 .
Screen recorder, both from PowerDirector 16, and the version 4 free trial which I just tried, only allow encoding the final video in 1080p. I'm able to capture the whole 3840x2160 screen area, but 3/4th of the information is lost. The many windows that I have open are very hard to hard to read as a result. I don't need a high frame rate, but I really do need the full resolution.
Why are 480p / 720p / 1080p the only encoding resolutions offered ? Does Cyberlink plan to fix this ?
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Unfortunately, VLC player has similar problems with vertical footage, though not quite as bad.
By going into tools/effects and filters/video effects/geometry, I can play back the clip vertically.
However, at that point; I have black bars on all 4 sides. And if I take a snapshot; it is 3348x2496, ie. horizontal format. Better than PowerDirector, but still quite wrong. And of course there is no "back" frame function in VLC which makes it very hard to get the right frame.. Sigh. Guess one is supposed to use the tiny camera screen to save the snapshot for 4K photos...
Looks like Photofunstudio, which came with the camera, does what's intended (well, almost).
After copying the video to the SDD (opening directly on the SD card is not allowed)I, went to edit/edit video / still image capture.
I hit the rotate button. I can then playback the video, get to the right frame, and record it.
This outputs a 4:3 JPEG about 2MB in size at 3348x2496 . Still 4:3 format. But it's at full resolution, with no black bars, at least.
And should be suitable for photo editing or printing, unlike what comes out of PowerDirector or VLC in this case.
Wish I could use PowerDirector for this instead. I guess this may be the the only feature I will ever use Photofunstudio for.
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Looks like the even "Free frame" feature does not work in certain cases, and still produces 1080p snapshots.
Case in point. I shot some 3:4 vertical video with my DMC-GX85 at 2496x3328 resolution . This is from the "4K photo" mode, so the only purpose is to extract frames.
PowerDirector does not recognize the clip as vertical, so it shows it as 4:3 3328x2496 .
I set my project to 9:16, which is the only vertical format that PD supports.
Pasted the clip on track 1, set "crop and zoom" to 270 degrees (why not 90 ? mystery) and zoomed enough to avoid black bars on the sides - I still had some black bars on top and bottom, unfortunately.
Got to the right frame, and then did edit/freeze frame . I got a 1080x1920 snapshot.
I guess the lack of 3:4 support in PD is really problematic here. But also, the fact that the clip is not recognized as vertical is a problem.
The other problem is the dual preview.
I have 3 monitors. Two are 16:9 4K .
One is in portrait mode to the right and 1080p - ie 1080x1920.
Dual Preview always shows the preview on the portrait monitor, which is wrong 90% of the time - though not for this project.
PD really needs to support setups with more than 2 monitors, and let you select the secondary monitor for preview. I have complaind about this for years, and it has never gotten fixed 
Unfortunately, VLC player has similar problems with vertical footage, though not quite as bad.
By going into tools/effects and filters/video effects/geometry, I can play back the clip vertically.
However, at that point; I have black bars on all 4 sides. And if I take a snapshot; it is 3348x2496, ie. horizontal format. Better than PowerDirector, but still quite wrong. And of course there is no "back" frame function in VLC which makes it very hard to get the right frame.. Sigh. Guess one is supposed to use the tiny camera screen to save the snapshot for 4K photos...
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Looks like the even "Free frame" feature does not work in certain cases, and still produces 1080p snapshots.
Case in point. I shot some 3:4 vertical video with my DMC-GX85 at 2496x3328 resolution . This is from the "4K photo" mode, so the only purpose is to extract frames.
PowerDirector does not recognize the clip as vertical, so it shows it as 4:3 3328x2496 .
I set my project to 9:16, which is the only vertical format that PD supports.
Pasted the clip on track 1, set "crop and zoom" to 270 degrees (why not 90 ? mystery) and zoomed enough to avoid black bars on the sides - I still had some black bars on top and bottom, unfortunately.
Got to the right frame, and then did edit/freeze frame . I got a 1080x1920 snapshot.
I guess the lack of 3:4 support in PD is really problematic here. But also, the fact that the clip is not recognized as vertical is a problem.
The other problem is the dual preview.
I have 3 monitors. Two are 16:9 4K .
One is in portrait mode to the right and 1080p - ie 1080x1920.
Dual Preview always shows the preview on the portrait monitor, which is wrong 90% of the time - though not for this project.
PD really needs to support setups with more than 2 monitors, and let you select the secondary monitor for preview. I have complaind about this for years, and it has never gotten fixed
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I took a bunch of videos on my cell but i held the phone sideways. now all my videos need to be rotated 90 degrees to the left. I was able to rotate them in power media player but wasn't able to save them.
If you place your video clips on the timeline, highlight them, and select "Tools", and then select "Power Tools", you will see an option to rotate video. Tick the rotate option, and type 90 in the small box. Or you can just click on the rotate 90 option next to the box.
Thanks. I have the same problem as the OP.
This does not really solve the problem for me, though, as it results in black bars on the side for the video I rotated. This will mean a loss of quality when producing.
I have vertical videos shot in 3:4 format with my Panasonic DMC-GX85.
And others shot in 10:18.9 format with my Samsung Galaxy Note 8 .
The clip from my DMC-GX85 is not recognized as vertical by PowerDirector. It shows with the wrong angle.
How can I set the PowerDirector project's aspect ratio / resolution to either of these formats ?
I believe PowerDirector supports 9:16 format at least, but I couldn't figure out how to even set that.
Never mind, found aspect ratio icon at the top. Looks like 9:16 is the only vertical format supported
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Hi Julien Pierre -
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As far as the difference in size between "freeze frame" and "media library" in PDR, it is because the former is at full resolution (4K) and the later is HD only
That's not the case - both Freeze Frame & Media Library snapshots are full resolution, in this case 3840x2160.
Oops - you are right, snapshots from timeline are the ones in HD only, who knows why ?
I had a bit of a dig into JPG compression ratios, which explains the very low file sizes. I used JPEGsnoop to analyse various JPG snapshots.
BTW - your Pana GX85 uses a compression ratio of ~11.46:1
Anyway, aside from the issue with timeline snapshots, it's eneough to convince you NOT to set file preferences to JPG snapshots in PDR.
Absolutely. I hadn't realized that there was an option for taking the snapshots in PNG instead of JPG. I have that on now.
However, I have had problems where PDR actually is recording the following frame when using "freeze frame", and not the frame currently selected. And it is sufficiently different given it was a cat moving, that the snapshot captured ends up being blurred, and not the intended one. This is a really annoying bug.
As far as the file size, capturing the identical frame in both PDR freeze frame (by going back one frame) and in VLC, both in PNG, I got different results resterday. The 4K PNG from PDR was 11MB. And the 4K PNG from VLC was 9MB.
But the one from VLC looked noticeably sharper. The snapshot from PDR was not good enough quality to print in this case. I was using a zoom lens at the long end and in low light conditions.
The snapshot from VLC was sharper and good enough to print. Didn't look at great enlarged at 10x17" (on 10x20" cut of roll paper) though. I don't think I will end up framing that one, but it will go in one my large size photo albums.
I have since been told that the 4K photo mode on the camera generates MP4 at 4:3 aspect ratio, ie. using the full sensor area, and the clips are 3328x2496, which is over 8 MP, but not traditional 4K or UHD. Whereas doing a movie recording in 4K, the camera captures frames in 16:9 at 3840x2160, but the top and bottom parts of the image are cropped.
4:3 paper and frames is much easier to find than 16:9. At least there is 8.5x11 which is close to 4:3 and universally available.
16:9 snapshots are a pain to print and even more pain to mat and frame.
I'm now finding myself longing for the 6K photo mode of the GH5  But at the same time, I wanted the higher ISO of the GH5s. And I like the built-in flash on my GX85 also, and its compact size. Why can't all the features be in a single body ? I'm guessing they can't shrink the electronics just enough yet. GH5 or GH5s are not in my budget yet anyway, let alone both.
GH5/GH5s also have a 400 Mbit recording mode in 10-bit color/4:2:2, which would be even more suitable for frame captures to do prints, in that there would be enough headroom to adjust the picture before printing.
I'm wondering if the codec would work with PowerDirector or not.
Google search shows that PD16 cannot yet ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2smRf3C-wx8
Hope that will change in PD17.
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Hi Julien Pierre -
Apples & oranges... comparing a JPG to PNG. Still, what used to be an excellent feature in PDR is now a bit of a pain.
VLC Player does do excellent snapshots. PDR can too. In the timeline, with the timeline marker where you want, right click > Edit video/image > Freeze Frame will give you a full resolution snapshot.
Snapshot from UHD video (.png format)
VLC - 16.1MB
PDR Freeze Frame - 16.2MB
PDR Media Library - 5.98MB (??? go figure)
Snapshot from UHD video (.jpg format)
VLC - 2.11MB
PDR Freeze Frame - 708KB
PDR Media Library - 671KB
Clearly PDR uses maximum compression for .JPGs!
Cheers - Tony
Thanks, that was helpful ! But it's a lot of steps to do this in the timeline. And it inserts an unwanted object on the track, which then needs to be deleted subsequently (actually, just hitting CTRL-Z for undo).
As far as the difference in size between "freeze frame" and "media library" in PDR, it is because the former is at full resolution (4K) and the later is HD only. That really makes no sense. I can understand that as an option, but not the default. And there should be a way to get a full resolution snapshot in both the timeline and media library. I hope Cyberlink is listening. Did this work at some point and get broken ?
Re: the difference in size for PNGs between PDR and VLC,, that's much less clear. PNG is supposed to be lossless,. Were you encoding the exact same frame ? Even if so, there is often more than one way to encode the same data in any given compression format. It is possible that PDR is just more efficient at compressing than VLC. A good test would be to export both of them to uncompressed BMP from the same application (say, Windows Paint), and then compare the output BMP files. That would require that no meta-data gets encoded into each BMP, though, like timestamps, names, etc.
And yes, PDR really uses very high compression on the JPEG also. But that's less relevant now that I found the preference to turn on JPG. For purpose of doing prints, I will be using PNG. It is really amazing what a 4K camera can do. OTOH my 17 minute cat video took 11GB. But there are so many expressions I can extract and print, it is just amazing. Like having a 30fps 8 MP camera..
I just need to up the shutter speed when shooting, as there was a lot of motion blur on many frames, which I am guessing is not just due to compression. This will have to be compensated by larger aperture and/or higher ISO. Not sure how to find what the shutter speed was in my video and how to find out in the MP4 file. Maybe it was 1/30th to match FPS in the video.
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Yes, but the solution is so idiotic, that you will sit and cry.
Don't select the clip in the timeline. Select the clip in the media library. The result is the same, the video appears in the preview window. Now the difference:
If you select the clip in the timeline: snapshot is 1920x1080
If you select the clip in the media library: snapshot is of clip resolution.
Why? I really don't know.
Hatti.
Thank you very much for the quick reply ! That worked.
I noticed the resulting JPEG even in 4K is highly compressed - only about 600KB.
I downloaded VLC and it extracted some PNG frames that are lossless and were 7MB each.
Both look good on my 30" 4K screen and are probably good enough to print around that size.
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I recently acquired a 4K camera, a Panasonic DMC-GX85 .
It captures beautiful 30p video at 100 Mbps in H.264 MP3, up to 3 hours continuous or 96GB.
I would like to extract 4K frames from the video.
Unfortunately, when I click the camera icon in PD to take a snapshot, the resulting JPEG file is only 1920x1080 .
Is there a way to get a snapshot at the full resolution ?
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Personally, I decided to upgrade from PD14 based on performance alone.
I tried my largest project, which is just under 12 minutes, and has a number of effects and many separate clips. Rendering time with PD16 was 35% shorter, just under 5 minutes with PD16 vs over 7.5 minutes with PD14 (did not write down the exact times).
And this was using the hardware H.264 encoding on my GTX960. The main difference appears to be that the effects are faster, and that is welcome. I did not see any compelling new features for me in PD15, which is why I skipped it last year, and I'm not sure that there are any either in PD16, but time will tell. The upgrade deal on cyberweek was very inexpensive so it was a no-brainer.
Now if I can only find the money to buy a decent 4K camera. Was hoping for a Lumix GH5 price drop on Black friday/Cyber monday. Unfortunately, couldn't find any, except bundles with unnecessary accessories.
Cheers Julien, I had Director Suite 4 and decided to move to Director Suite 5 because of improvements in all of the software in the package, all that is except the lame duck called Audio Director, it's not really designed to be properly included in video production, it's just really a stand alone tool !
I was actually thinking of upgrading to Director Suite 6 again BUT I've just downloaded Davinci 14 and it's just blown ColorDirector out of the water for me, it's a superb tool for colour correcting!
I don't need Audio Director even though the fit audio/music to your project duration is interesting. PhotoDirector is really good value, but only when I can get it to work again!
So I think I'll save myself some money and just upgrade PowerDirector as an increase in production speed would get me out of jam right now.
Hope you manage to find the 4K camera of your dreams, GH5 + sounds great 
Happy editing
Dave F.
FYI, my upgrade to PowerDirector 16 does not include AudioDirector, but it does include ColorDirector, albeit version 5, not the latest version. This was the cyberweek deal that Cyberlink emailed me. $54.99 for upgrade. Less 20% EXTRA20P coupon, net $43.99 . Was hard not to bite at this price. Have not played with ColorDirector 5 yet, but I do plan to use it. I played with an older version before and it was slow.
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Wow thats quite the research. I like canon myself I do not make anything past 15 min. You should like your making film for the big time.
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There is word that cannon 90d is coming out in the spring and it might have 4K. Canon duel focus is amazing. I have the canon 80d and its so nice. When they do put 4k in the duel focus thats the one you want.
I don't produce anything >15 either, but I do need to record that long or much longer when I practice my classical music takes.
Constantly stopping and restarting the camera, even with a remote, is a PITA. I end up with tons of video files to deal with later on if I do that.
If I don't manually stop it, then the camera stops by itself in the middle of a take and the take is lost.
The only thing that's suitable for me is really a camcorder or a DSLR without recording limit like the GH5. AFAIK, it is unique in that sense. There have been some firmware hacks for some Sony A7S II cameras to do >30 min, though. Those cameras are reported to overheat, though. They also cost more, no 60 fps, and no 10-bit color. They do have larger APS-C sensor.
For me the GH5 is a lot closer to my needs, I think. I tried a Sony FDR-AX33 camcorder and hated it. Not a sharp picture, and low-light sucked. Not surprising with that size sensor.
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