Messages posted by Granddaddy

I'm reporting my experience with PowerDirector 10 and ImgBurn 2.5.7 running under Windows 7 Pro x64.

When you use PowerDirector to burn to an AVCHD folder you will get the folder structure

NameYouGiveToBurnedVideo
---My Video
------BDMV
---------BACKUP
---------CLIPINF
---------PLAYLIST
---------STREAM

Note that Powerdirector inserts the intermediary folder My Video under whatever name you told it to use for your output folder.

Point ImgBurn at the My Video folder, not at the NameYouGiveToBurnedVideo. ImgBurn only looks one level down for the content folders.

If ImgBurn is set to burn a DVD when you point it to an AVCHD or Blu-Ray folder output by PowerDirector, then ImgBurn will display a message "Your image contains a 'BDMV' folder in the root directory so I'm going to assume it's a Blu-ray Video disc.
...
Would you like me to adjust the setting for you?

Click Yes and ImgBurn will proceed in an obvious way.

You then burn an AVCHD DVD disc.

Note that the AVCHD DVD disc will play only in a Blu-Ray player, not in a standard DVD player.

Note that you do not need to tell ImgBurn what kind of disc you are burning. It figures that out from the folder structure. If your next project is a standard DVD and you point ImgBurn at a standard DVD folder created by PowerDirector and ImgBurn is set to burn a Blu-Ray or AVCHD, then ImgBurn will warn you about that situation and offer to change its settings back to DVD. ImgBurn is very forgiving, which is what makes it possible for me to use it.

Quote: Phil and Steve - that's very clear. Thank you. I'm OK with the time limit of AVCHD on standard DVD in this case. However I didn't realize AVCHD could only be played on Blu-ray players. Which I do not have. Sounds like I need to get one if I want to watch my HD home video in HD.

-Kevin

I have made several discs, both DVD and AVCHD, from the same HiDef video clips using Power Director 10 to create the disc folder structures on my desktop computer. Using the AVCHD output folder created by PD10, I burn an AVCHD disc on a standard DVD that will play in a Blu-Ray player. For relatives who don't yet have Blu-Ray, I burn a standard DVD from the DVD folder created by PD10. I burn the physical disc from these folders using ImgBurn, a widely used disc burner that is much easier to use than its somewhat technical user interface might indicate. ImgBurn will recognize whether the folder on your computer is using a DVD structure or a Blu-Ray structure and it will prompt you and adjust its settings accordingly. ImgBurn is available at http://www.imgburn.com/. There you will also find support forums and guides to walk you through the processes involved.

Thank you so much for your investigation. I spent a morning with Minitools Partition Wizard Home Edition (free partition editing software) migrating 80 GB from my H:\ drive devoted to video to my C:\ drive to bring it up to the minimum 100 GB that was claimed as being absolutely necessary. Increasing the free space on C:\ made no apparent difference in how PD10 works on my computer, which is satisfactorily. All my work is with m2ts files that I use to make either AVCHD DVDs or Blu-Ray discs. It's a pleasure to see someone actually testing the 100 GB claim and even more gratifying to find that it is indeed false.

To make a custom menu, I clicked Create Disc/Menu Preferences/Create Menu. This opened Menu Designer. I then simply saved that default design as TestMenu1. I then applied it to my project. Unfortunately, this causes Sports.mp3 to be set as background music on all menu pages.

How can I create and save a template that defaults to having no background music at all?

I don't see any way in Menu Designer to specify anything about the background music in a saved template.

PD10's menu system is a huge disappointment, and that includes the issue of the number of buttons. Here's my experience with this one issue.

The PD10 Help file claims that up to 14 menu buttons can be placed on a menu page. Elsewhere I saw that 6 menu buttons could be on a page, and that seemed reasonable for my purposes. So I created a custom menu with 6 buttons per page. All seemed well until I clicked the Burn button to burn my movie to a folder. Then I got an error message saying some of the buttons were overlapping. PD10 cannot tell you which buttons are overlapping, so you have to go back to the menu designer and play with the buttons and just keep trying until the error message on Burn no longer appears. I do not understand why Menu Designer cannot make this determination during the design process.

After getting rid of overlap by much trial and error and reducing button sizes and moving buttons around, I tried again to Burn to a folder. This time I got an error message saying that only 4 buttons are allowed on each menu page. So I had to delete two buttons from the page and rearrange the remaining 4 buttons again.

I eventually got a custom menu that was accepted by PD10 when I clicked the Burn button. I did burn to a folder and then used ImgBurn to write an AVCHD disc for my 18 minute video.

But PD10 cries out for a decent menu designer. I bought the product to make discs, and the existing Menu Designer is a serious impediment because of this and many other problems that you can find discussed in the forums for PD10 and earlier versions.

I'm a new user of PowerDirector and I'm making my first disc. I had expected that the chapter thumbnails I set while editing my video would be used as thumbnails on the menu buttons for each of the chapters. Instead, a video is displaying on the button. That video appears to begin with the frame I chose as my chapter thumbnail. This causes several different problems. In somce cases scrolling text from the video clip appears on the button. In other cases, the button image fades into another scence because my thumbnail was near the end of a clip.

Is there a way to prevent the thumbnail button from displaying a video and just have it display the single frame that I selected as the chapter thumbnail image?