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Perhaps I didn't make clear what I meant. I was suggesting you use the Showbiz capture utility only to get the footage into your PC then import the files into Power Director. If they're MPEG2, which they likely will be, you should have no difficulty doing that.
I've done much the same in the past using a Climax Digital VCAP 302 USB capture device and it worked fine.
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Assuming your software captures files in MPEG2 you can simply import them into Power Director.
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I'm not sure what tomasc means by creating a AVCHD disk on DVD. I'd have thought those options would involve copying the produced video to the DVD and/or flash drive as a data file, so there would be no menu structure as there would be in a normal DVD. If you're just distributing the video as a data file you can produce to any resolution you like subject, as I said earlier, to the resolution of your original material. Producing to higher than that won't gain you resolution. However assuming your photos are higher resolution than your videos you might prefer to produce to that. Bear in mind a data DVD won't be playable on a normal standalone player.
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If you want to make multiple copies on DVD or Blu-Ray I would suggest using the facility in Create Disk to burn to a .iso disk image file, then use a third-party program such as imgburn to burn your disks from that. This ensures identical copies and is also probably quicker.
Blu-Ray is potentially much better resolution than DVD although it obviously depends on the quality of your source material.
I'll leave your other questions to the expert contributors on here.
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Finally I've managed to capture the footage I need. I eventually chose the HDMI-USB capture device in the link provided by tomasc. Many thanks for that. I found the same one in the UK branch of Amazon.
Needless to say it wasn't straightforward. The first problem was that the USB plug on the device was so loose in the socket on my PC that it disconnected whilst Windows was loading the driver so it didn't install properly. I had to wedge it in with a strip of paper and then remove and re-install the driver.
I then found the Power Director Capture module couldn't see it so I had to try to install an open-source program, OSB Studio, cited in the device instruction sheet, only to find the current version only works on Windows 10 and 11. So I then had to get the device driver and OBS Studio installed on my laptop, then finally I was able to capture the video. It took a further couple of tries before I found the correct settings in OBS Studio.
Thanks again to tomasc for the assistance. It's been a frustrating journey but success at last.
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That was a bit of a disaster. I set it copying and left it. when I returned the image on the TV was frozen and I could hear the DVD drive cycling. The unit wouldn't respond to the remote control or the buttons on the front. I turned it off at the wall overnight and this morning when I powered it up it sat with "Pleae Wait" flashing on the display and it still wouldn't respond to the front panel buttons. I've ended up having to dismantle it to get my disc out.
Back to the drawing board . . . . . .
Edit: I should have been more patient. After I reassembled the drive I powered it up again and eventually the flashing message went away.
I decided to see what, if anything, had been recorded on the hard drive. It turned out that it had recorded right up to the point of failure. At a particular point the recording started to break up and freeze. When I played the DVD in the Samsung player I found the exact place at which the TV image had frozen and this was several minutes further on so the Panasonic had been struggling to read the disc for some time before it finally threw it's wobbly.
It's obvious the disc is degraded, either due to age or perhaps to using too high a burn speed originally. Unfortunately the footage that I particularly need to recover is beyond the point at which the Panasonic failed so it now looks as though I'm going to have to try some way of recording the output of the Samsung.
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It's a DMR-EX89EB. I agree it's potentially a very good solution - providing it still works and can read my disc and that a disc burned on it can be read on my PC. There's many a slip . . . . . 
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Thank you for that information tomasc. The HDMI capture device looks interesting although the description doesn't seem to make clear exactly how it works. Does it contain a microSD card?. At the moment I have another possible solution. I have an old Panasonic DVD recorder with a hard drive and it appears to be possible to copy a DVD to the HD. If it can read my DVD I should be able to copy to the hd then burn a new one from that which will hopefully be readable on at least one of my PCs. It's a bit long-winded but uses assets I already have to hand. The only problem is after 9 years I have to re-learn how to use it.
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As expected the clean made no difference. I suppose I could try getting a cleaning kit for the optical drives but I don't have any great hope for that either.
I'm really hoping someone can suggest a way of accessing the files using the Samsung player.
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You can archive the VIDEO_TS folder for win 7 use or create an image that can be mounted in win10 later without an extra disc utility.
I have been archiving the VIDEO_TS folders from all my old DVDs but, of course, can't with this one unless or until I can get the PC to read it.
I'll try a clean but to my eye the surface looks pristine.
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My apologies that this question is not related to Power Director but I can't think where else to ask it.
I have a standard DVD of home video footage that was burned in 2005. It plays perfectly in my stand-alone Samsung Blu-ray player but both our desktop PCs detect it as a blank disc, even though one of them is using the drive it was burnt on. The other is a newer Blu-ray burner.
Having discovered that some of my older DVDs seem to be getting flaky I've been trying to archive them to a hard drive so that copies can be burnt if any become unreadable in the future. This one has me stumped because I can't find any way to read it or record it off the Samsung player. Any ideas or siggestions would be very welcome.
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Ok so this is what I've done. I figured that since it was only recording so much of the tape that I would capture what I could, save that and start another capture process. By doing that I was able to record the whole vhs but now how can I splice those captured sections together to make one complete video that I can burn to a dvd.
That's not a problem. You just import all the sections into the media library, assemble them on the timeline, edit as necessary and produce.
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Commercial VHS tapes have a signal pattern inserted (between the frames I think) that players can detect as copyright protection. What has happened is the signal from your tape has some noise on it that has been interpreted as this protection.
Are you using PD to do the capture? If you have purchased a hardware converter to connect the player to your PC that should have come with it's own capture utility. If so I would suggest you try that as it may be more tolerant. Alternatively I think there are free third party programs that can be used which some of the more experienced forum members may be able to suggest.
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Frankly, I'm old, cheap, and I dislike the subscription model!
I'm 100% with you there.
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For your first question, right-click on the clip you've made all the adjustments to and choose Copy Keyframe Attributes. Next, select one or more other timeline clips then right click on them and choose Paste Keyframe Attributes.
To use the same settings in a different project, open the original project first, then copy one of the adjusted clips. Next, open or create the new project and paste the copied clip somewhere on the timeline so you can copy the keyframe attributes to your other clips.
In fact keyframe attributes can be copied and pasted directly between projects. Unless there are other attributes that need to be copied it's not necessary to copy a clip to the destination project.
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I take it you mean you don't notice the frames when you play the timeline in the preview window. Have you expanded the timeline to see if they are actually present? You will need to expand it to the maximum amount to see individual frames.
If the frames really are not present in the timeline clips there is obviously nothing wrong with the scene detection. In that case I don't have an explanation for why they appear in the produced video.
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Have you checked to see if these unwanted frames are present in the clips you've placed on the timeline? Your description suggests this is just a slight inaccuracy in the original scene detection. You may just need to trim your clips accordingly.
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Well, I've given up trying to find a way to get this to display correctly and have reverted to my earlier fix which involves excluding the root menu and editing the scenes/chapters menu. It took me a long time to remember even how to do that after such a long time not editing. It has strengthened my opinion that the menu designer interface is exceedingly clunky and non-intuitive. I also can't see why the aspect ratio of the monitor should cause any problem with constructing a menu. The project aspect ratio is set to 16:9 and the menu designer should simply be able to letterbox the preview display.
Just for comparison the third-party DVD authoring program I use is a powerful yet simple and intuitive graphical editor. It offers a library of objects that can be placed on the screen. Also text can be placed as an object as can images and any object can be designated as a button and linked to a video, a chapter within a video or to another scenes page. The order in which the button objects are accessed by up/dowm and left/right keys can be freely selected by simply drawing lines between them. There are other powerful features, some of which I've not scratched the surface of.
What's more, this program was created by a single individual based, if I remember correctly, in Canada. It was a pity that he didn't go on to develop it to work with high definition video, his interest switched to image processing. I hadn't used it for at least as long as PD13 but picked it up again quite quickly and easily recently which confirms to me that the PD system is very poorly thought out. I think Cyberlink started out with the wrong design philosophy but that's just my opinion. Others will no doubt disagree.
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My apologies Tomasc, I had completely forgotten that I, and others, had raised this before. I can only try to excuse myself on the basis I don't edit many videos (and none at all for the last 3 years or so) and Anno Domini is not doing my memory any favours.
The reason I didn't update to confirm if any of the workarounds worked for me was that I'd found my own workable though sub-optimal solution. This was only an issue when I wanted to produce Blu-Ray discs as I didn't, and still don't, use PD for DVD authoring. I probably wouldn't have worked on any more Blu-Ray projects for many months, possibly up to a year.
Re-reading the links you posted made me aware of what a talented group of people inhabit the forum. I'm currently away from base but will check out the various workarounds as soon as I can. As a last resort I can always use the fudge that I used last time.
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The silence is deafening! 47 views but no replies. I guess this just confirms my opinion of the menu designer interface.
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