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DD 5.1 BluRay support was removed, you'll have to stick with your PD17.
You could let them know your dissatisfaction for such action at File > Rate Us & Provide Suggestions.
Jeff
Gotta be kidding me.
Ok, what was the last version that supported Dolby 5.1?
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Hey Everyone,
I recently upgraded to PD20 from PD17.
I make BluRays with Dolby 5.1, which is also the sound embedded in my video clips from a Panasonic camcorder with 5.1.
I have 5.1 sound set as default in PD settings, and I am using 5.1 sound clips. Right-cliking on file properties in PD20 shows that even PD sees the files as Dolby 5.1.
But when I go to create a BluRay disc, the only sound option being displayed is LCPM Stereo - no other option is listed inthe menu. It doesn't matter if I'm choosing MPEG-2 or H.264, neither have any other audio options than LCPM Stereo.
PD17 allowed me to select multiple different sound formats, such as DTS, LCPM, Dolbny 5.1, etc. I really need to use Dolby 5.1, and I'll go back to PD17 if I have to over this. This is a deal-breaker.
Any ideas?
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Actually I think I figured out the problem, though I have no idea why this is happening:
1. Start PD17.
2. Click the "Capture" tab.
3. LET POWERDIRECTOR SIT FOR A WHILE BEFORE MAKING ANY CHANGES - PowerDirector is still trying to figure things out. Though PD will allow you to go right in and make camera settings changes, once you click "OK" to save them, PD will crash. You must let PowerDirector "figure things out" for a while, and when it finally does, you will see a colorful camera image on the screen when it's ready for you to make your changes. If all you see is a black box where the camera image should be, it's not done yet, so don't attempt to make any camera settings changes or PD will crash. It can take PD quite a while to get this figured out, so be patient.
4. Once you see the colorful camera image on the screen, make any camera changes you want. Once you do, you will then see the live feed from your webcam displayed in PowerDirector and you can make settings changes and start recording.
5. Now that PD has figured everything out, every time you start PowerDirector from here on out, if your webcam is hooked up, PD will automatically bring it up whn you click on the "Capture" tab and it's ready to go.
So to be fair, it wasn't a video driver issue, thankfully. But I do still point out that $30 YouCam 9 brings the camera up instantly with no issues on the first try and had none of these issues and didn't waste half my day.
Thanks, hope this helps someone else.
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I have a Logitech C920 webcam that works just great. It's a well-established, respected webcam. The problem is that it works just great in CyberLink's YouCam 9 but not PowerDirector.
YouCam 9 works just great but I'd much rather be using PowerDirector because YouCam feels like little kiddie toyware.
When I fire up PD17, and click on the "Capture" tab, and then select the camera I'm using and set it for 1080/1920 (the default for the camera), PD hard-crashes with the "oops" message popping up.
I suppose I'm going to get another one of those "its your video driver" responses, like it always seems to be for everyone, but if that's the case, I have never seen a product with so many crash-prone behaviors because a video driver wasn't perfect. I mean, NOBODY ELSE's software ever has video driver problem like this. Seriously. The sad thing is that a CyberLink product of arguably little relevance uses the camera great while the app that crashes is CyberLink's flagship product.
Anybody got anything for this?
Thanks
Bob
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I am a newbie with 2 questions and this is not the correct place to post this.
- Can some body please point me to the instructions on how to post a question to this user group correctly.
- Looking for a reccomendation list on Blu Ray burner hardware most compatible with PowerDirector 17
Thank you
I'll answer the second:
Pretty much any BluRay burner will work with PD. I recommend the LG brand, such as the WP50NB40, which is a USB external model (awfully handy as opposed to an internal model, which I use).
But remember this: There is more to what kind of discs you 8use and what speeds you burn at compared to the brand of drive you use:
1. Use "HTL" (high-to-low) discs as opposed to "LTH" (low-to-high) bluray discs. This is a reference to the type of dye used in the dye layer of the disc, meaning that that once the laser hits the dye, it transforms it from high-to-low refelctivity or vice versa. LTH discs have a very short data retention lifespan and they go bad quickly, even within months - they are a failed product and should never have been released to the market, and have caused nothing but pain, frustreation, and surprise catastrophic data loss. The HTL discs, howver, last many years. These are the types of discs Hollywood uses to release movies. I use Optical Quantum brand discs and my blurays are in pristine condition with zero loss or degredation after 9 years. Out of my now 253-disc archive, not one single disc has ever gone bad.
2. Never burn at the disc's highest burn rating. If you have "6X" discs, never burn faster than 4X. If the discs are 4X, never burn faster than 2X. This will guarentee good strong burns that will last (if you're using HTL discs). The burn rating of the disc is the highest speed that the manufacturer was able to pull off before experiencing burn errors. Play it safe and kick it down a bit. There's a lot of morons out there complaining on Amazon that even good HTL bluray brands are somehow bad and that the discs didn't last. In fact, they simply burned their discs too fast and as a result, the dye layer wasn't hit hard enough by the laser. The next thing I speak about below solves this issue entirely.
3. Just an FYI, I am very serious about home movie archiving for long term storage. As such, I have shifted from using standard blurays to M-DISC blurays, made by Verbatim. I am also copying all my old DVDs and Blurays over to M-DISC as well. I have had conversations with the two inventors of M-DISC, both professors of chemical engineering at BYU. Playback-compatible in all bluray players, MDISCs are a different type of bluray disc in that your burner is not making weak and arguably perishable changes to a perishable dye layer in the typical bluray, but actually kicking up the power to a hotter beam and actually engraving holes in an embedded layer of carbon on the disc. This requires an M-DISC-compatible bluray burner, which most burners are today. LG makes the best and msot compatible drives in my opinion. if you go this route, make sure it says "M-DISC Compatible" somewhere in the details of the drive and make sure you buy M-DISC blurays. The cost of the discs are about a buck each as opposed to the standard $0.50c each. And well worth it in my opinion. My 80-year archive of home movies is precious to me and I don't trust anything else. Note that M-DISCs hav a max burn speed of 4X, so never exceed that no matter if your drive or even the disc itself allows you to burn faster.
Hope this helps.
Bob
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Will blueray burner work with PD 16.
Thanks I advance.
Al
Yes, I've been burning BluRays with PD since v9.
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The latest version of 365
The only way to use PowerDirector in any way that remains predictable and stable is to buy a perpetual license for a solid version. Dump 360. v16 (fully patched with HA turned off) is rock solid on every system I've ever installed it on. 17 mysteriously got notably slower, but still solid. I purchased v18 but I have absolutely no reason whatsoever to install it, and the last thing in the world I want is for it to automatically install itself through 365.
Bonus: Once you pay for a solid version with perpetual license, you don't keep having to pay for it. Nor are you "getting charged to be a perpetual beta tester" for the new versions they push out through 365.
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I have now upgraded to a desktop computer with benchmarks below
UserBenchmarks: Game 109%, Desk 133%, Work 120%
CPU: Intel Core i7-9700K - 106.3%
GPU: Nvidia RTX 2070 - 104.9%
SSD: WD Black NVMe PCIe M.2 250GB (201 - 223%
HDD: WD Blue 2TB (2015) - 85.2%
USB: SanDisk Cruzer Blade 32GB - 14.2%
RAM: HyperX Fury 2666 C16 2x8GB - 85.1%
PD18 installed and it is STILL CRASHING. Not every 5 minutes like it was before, but it is still doing it. This is a beast of a machine capable of playing the very top games at high frame rates. My poor laptop got the brunt of the blame, but it is clear that it wasn't all to blame. As I said before it worked well with PD17 for months.
PowerDirector 18 should NOT be crashing with such a powerful machine and 16GB of DDR4 ram. Still no word from Tech Support. They must realize there's a problem. I can't be the only one (and I'm not). I'm going to post this in the new PD18 thread as well (there was no PD18 thread when I first posted). Please help.
I hate to tell you this, but the only way to stabilize PowerDirector (any version, really) is to disable all hardware acceleration. Instantly fixes any crash problem I've ever had. And with today's ultra-powerful CPUs, using the graphics card for rendering is really kind of pointless anymore. Even with effects and transitions, my old 6-core CPU from AMD (Phenom II X6 1100T) can render 1080 in realtime with HA totally disabled.
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Sorry I didn't see this sooner. After looking at your green screen image, I have some suggestions:
1. Your subjects (kids) are too close to the green screen and refelcting way too much light.
2. Your subjects are not lit brightly enough from the front/top with regular white light.
and/or
3. Your greenscreen is lit up too brightly. This is the most common error I see in green screening, and it's usually because of bad advice found online. Modern chroma keying is now so simple that you can kill any solid background - there is no longer any need to light up greenscreens so bright anymore. Most modern green screening is done in rather dimly lit green screen studios. This is specifically to prevent the green glow you are now dealing with.
4. For total control over chromakeying to a near Hollywood level, NewBlue Video Essentials VI (6) has Chroma Key Pro. It can be purchased here for $99. I can tell you that it is worth the money if you really have the need, but it also requires a bit of a learning curve to master it. if you get your lighting right, Chroma Key Pro will give you Hollywood results. But read the rest of this post before you spend any money - you may not need Chroma Key Pro at all.
Fact is, even with Chroma Key Pro, you still may have to re-shoot your green screen content if your lighting was just too far off.
My advice: Just use the lighting advice mentioned above. Read web articles on proper subject lighting for green screening, but ignore any advice that tells you to light the green screen up like daylight - it will create problems you can't fix. With green screening, proper lighting is everything.
To be honest, PowerDirector 17's new chroma keying feature is actually better and easier to use than previous versions once you get the hang of how to use it. It's incredible how effective PD17's chroma keying is with how simplistic they made it, I'm actually quite impressed. Good tutorial here. Particularly, start watching at 4:25.
Hope this helps. :
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Looks like v18 is just released. "Media Suite" development on the other hand seems to be killed. Still on v16, whereas it usually bumps a version prior to a new PD release.
I looked at all the "New Features" of v18. Nothing there that I can identify as being big enough to warrant a new version title. They are all very minor enhancements (17.1"). Sticking with 16. I installed 17 and it crashed when I went to create blurays. I also found it to be strangely sluggish - sluggish enough to warrant turning on shadow files to keep the timeline from skipping, which 16 doesn't do on my system. So I went right back to 16 and turned shadow files back off. 16 is the best version released to date. Solid as a rock, no problems of any kind on my system.
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If CyberLink ever goes subscription-only, that will be the end of me using the product. NO software product will ever be allowed to sink any hooks into my paycheck. CyberLink is really flirting with disaster here.
The biggest part of the problem, other than the software becoming more expensive to use (do the math), is that once a company shifts a product over to the subscription model, there is no longer any incentive for the company to actually fix anything - the customer is already paying the money if any thing improves or not. It means constant income for the company regardless of product quality.
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Hello, im trying to compile numerous video files on to a blu-ray as well as create a custom root menu and chapter screens. The tech support on here has been useless and wasted weeks of emailing. If any PD15 jedi master can help me, i will gladly pay something for the help. I prefer phone over multiple days/weeks of email exchanging though.
Creating custom menus for Blurays and DVDs in PowerDirector is challenging and a little archaic, and your menus won't end up looking much different than the majority of the menus you can download from DirectorZone (I highly recommend browsing, there are a gazzillion user-uploaded menus to choose from for FREE). You will notice that only slight variations exist between menus, really, particularly in how they most always use the same buttons and controls and have limitations in title space and thumbnail space. However, with patience, I was able to make my own custo menu for my old 8mm home movies that I digitized. So if I can do it, anybody can do it, because I totally fumbled my way through it.
I myself create Blurays exclusively for family video archives (bluray is the only media that exists for long term storage, everything else is perishable, including dvds, USB sticks, hard drives, etc). I usually use one of the downloaded or default menu styles (like "spotlight"). Adding chapters and menus is not only esy in PowerDirector, it's also one of the most enjoyable parts in my opinion.
There is a major bug in PowerDirector's DVD/bluray authoring process to steer around however, a persistent bug that has existed for many versions: Once you get your files arranged and edited on the timeline with all the effects and transitions you want, save that project file and then SAVE IT AS ANOTHER PROJECT FILE FOR BACKUP PURPOSES. Because once chapters and menus are added to the project and saved, the project file becomes corrupted (or PD itself can't properly load saved projects) and you will never be able to get back into the "Create Disc" room in that project ever again - if you try, PowerDirector will start loading the project and will lock up and will start maxing out your CPU and your hard drive will start thrashing itself, forcing you to do a hard reset on your PC. This is why you want to save a backup of the project file after all your editing is done but BEFORE you add chapters and menus to your project. Once you've added chapters and menus, make sure you burn your disc (or ISO disc image) before closing the project, because you're never going to get back into the "Create Disc" room again for that specific disc project if you save it. This is extremely annoying, but the only workaround I've ever managed to come up for this bug that is VERY old and goes back many versions. Because of this, I save my project files as multiple files with different names depending on what stage of creation I'm at.
If you download a menu from DirectorZone, take note of the menu specs, particularly the ratio (4:3 or 16:9). A lot of old 4:3 ratio menus are still online and have never been removed. Make sure any menu you download matches your project screen size/ratio. Most original 4:3 dvd menus have been updated with 16:9 versions for dvd/bluray by the original creators. Also, even if the menu says "DVD", it can still be used for Bluray.
PD has not changed the menu structure in PowerDirector for many years/versions, and so any video on YouTube or any post in this forum going back many versions of PowerDirector should be relevant today. For example, creating a menu on PD13 will be the same in PD17. Here's an instructional video to get you started (this guy's videos are a lot of fun):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRYhQw-RJgk
I hope this helps
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In December 2018 i got a 2700x + EVGA 1080Ti
What i can say: MUCH FASTER than 4790k+290x... I think it's 2 or 3 times faster, the powerdirector timeline is much smoother...
i really recommend that kind of upgrade...
This is the closest thing I've seen to an actual AMD hardware review for PowerDirector.
However, the real question still remains: Was it the video card or the CPU that made the most difference?
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I get it.
Honestly, I haven't produced to Blu-Ray since 2015 and all my content is on YouTube or flash drives. No interlacing or resolution or distribution worries online, and there aren't any limitations on resolution or bitrate with Flash/SSD media.
As long as you can connect a flash drive or wifi to your big screen, I really don't see any reason to suffer with optical disc limitations.
Yeah, the video quality is better for those purposes, and those are good reasons. I wish it were that easy for me. I personally generate lots of family home movies, and because my main interest is long-termn storage, BluRay is the only medium made for it while still producing an easily-playable manner that family can use without being technically savvy. If you can believe it, BluRay is the only form of long term storage media that exists. All other forms of storage are succeptible to decay and failure, so it's all there is. Sounds stupid, but I consider myself stuck with it if archiving is a main goal.
But yes, if only producing files and not playable media discs, the video quality is much better.
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Yeah, that's what I'm thinking too. And my troubles don't stop there:
Though PD cheats by allowing someone to create a "60P" bluray, and though the file on the authored bluray is indeed 59fps, watching playback of the bluray itself reveals that PD is quietly chopping the source 60fps footage down to 30fps for some baffling reason and then creating "60P" discs that are actually 30P discs with each frame being played twice to produce 60fps. In other words, a "60P" bluray that still plays no better or differently than plain old 30P/60i. The same interlaced blurred/dual-image look is still present and all that "60P" hype got me absolutely nowhere. 60P source, "60P" bluray option in PD, and still I wind up with a blurry 60i bluray. I mean, what the heck, CyberLink?
Bottom line is that my original 60P files look amazing and PD's "60P" blurays don't look any smoother or clearer than a standard 60i bluray. I have created both a 60p and 60i version of the same bluray and they literally have zero playback difference between them in quality, smoothness, or clarity. They are identical in every way othe than the disc files showing 59fps and the other 29fps. What you see on screen is identical nonetheless. This is a HUGE disappointment to anyone trying to preserve their camera's native 60P output on blurays without having to downshift to crappy interlaced video after dumping half of the frames your camera recorded.
I just can't win. This is why I'm wanting to kick up the quality of my blurays - if "60P" is just a hoax, then I want 60i looking as good as it can.
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I appreciate the answer. Yes, I'm using the disc burning function of PowerDirector, not just trying to producing a video file, which is what it appears you're suggesting above. I'm very familiar with the settings you describe above, but they have no bearing on actual bluray authoring.
My source video is 60P, not 60i/30p. And if I can get away with it, I'm actually not interested in using interlaced at all, I think interlaced video technology is a heinous crime for which someone should be held accountable (even 16mm film is crystal-clear "progressive"). My source video is 60p and I'm trying to preserve 60p on player-compatible BluRays. PowerDirector is the only software that lets me "cheat the system" by using the "60P bluray" option, which I know is just hacked AVCHD 2.0, but it works great on all modern bluray players (please don't lecture me on how it's not compliant bluray standards, I've gone toe-to-toe with those religious zealots - it truly just doesn't matter and again, it works great). There is still room for improvement, however.
At the very least, i want control over my bit rate for bluray authoring, and PD seems not have a setting for this. Most all other bluray authoring products do, so I find it odd that PD would leave that out, especially since focusing on 360 seems to be such a waste of development resources. Seriously, nobody is using 360 in the same way that nobody went out and bought 3D camcorders.
Attached is the BluRay authoring customization settings for Corel VideoStudio so you can see what I'm talking about/looking for. Note that these are specifically for bluray authoring, not just producing a file. I'l looking for this wonderfull level of control in PD, even if it takes a config or registry hack.
thanks
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I absolutely love creating BluRays with PD, and H264 is amazing, but I can still spot notable pixelationin that I know would be cleared up by allowing the user to increase quality/decrease compression of bluray discs. For example, the default bitrate for a 60i bluray in PowerDirector is only 24mbps, when most bluray players can handle up to 40mbps. Corel VideoStudio allows this custom adjustment when you go to create BluRays, and 35mbps blurays look dazzling with no pixelation anywhere, crystal clear. Does PowerDirector have such an adjustment? If so, I can't find it.
Do I have to hack some registry entries or config files somewhere? I have no problems with doing that. Anybody?
Thanks
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Yes, I was afraid of these issues. This is why I still always use the original version of PD to open an older PD project. Upgrading a project to a newer version of PD is a gamble, so I never delete my installation media for older versions of PD.
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Highwinder, I can't speak specifically for PD17, but my previous experience in nearly all versions of PD updates has been no. They always open, that has not been a problem, your specific wording is "properly". What I've experienced is some subtlety in some feature, for instance, a different picture assortment in a slideshow so some title you may have added for a particular scene is no longer correct as the pic in the canned slideshow sequence was changed. Just minor stuff like that, when noticed, can often be corrected easily.
I have also had to revert back some pds files as it was simply easier than edit fixing. So yes, it's often possible with a little manual pds file editing. A case of doing it successfully for a fellow editor was here, PD15 back to PD14 as he had invested a significant amount of editing time: https://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/posts/list/49811.page#post_box_262060
Creating a duplicate pds file is always a good idea. Most users pds files are much smaller than 50MB, yes MB, so if you've got storage problems for duplicates of that you've got much larger editing problems. Probably not a issue for most, but I often have to work in the present with stuff I created several yrs ago so I've been in the habit of adding PD version to my file names so I have a quick visual clue, example1_PD15.pds as I reopen in different PD versions and potentially edit/save again.
Jeff
Thanks, I appreciate it. I do in fact create copies of my project files as I proceed through a project. i don't just keep hititng "save". I make 4 copies of each of my projects as I proceed due to the time I invest in editing:
1. Copy that just contains all video clips and images
2. Copy with just the edits.
3. Copy with transitions and effects added.
4. Finalized copy ready to render to BluRay image.
I have been burned badly too many times, which is why I now follow this very rigid project saving process. It needs to be said that PD16 appears to have the project corruption problem fixed. Previous versions were horrible though. I know that's a different issue than compatibility, but relies on project file backup copies nonetheless.
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Will PD16 projects load properly in PD17?
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