Messages posted by TurnerBurn

Hi Carl312,

I do understand that PD needs space, however, It was working just fine with a much, much larger project AND I only had about 8 GIG of free space on drive C at one point.

That said, I did (as I was planning on doing anyway) changed the cache location to my e Drive which has 221 GIG free. Still no go. It is crashing when the program scans up to the 79% mark each and every time. At this point, PD is not using any cache location, it is simply reading the media files. If I were hitting the wall on disk during the scan process then I would expect to see my disk space dwindle as it was opening; it does not move.

I'm pretty sure I have ample drive space. It just seems to be dying on this project and I fear the worst as the project is hosed.

Thanks,

Karl

All my media files and the project file are on my E drive which has 220Gig free. The autosave data is on my C drive which was installed by default to this location. I do want to change it but I wanted to finish this project before changing anything and thus break something. I would think that 34 gig would be more than enough for the project auto save, no?

My project had a finished slideshow file, and then I was creating an additional Slide Show with about 160 photos. Each photo is between 1 and 2 meg in size with a few in the 3 and 4 meg range. Before the project had issues, everything imported into PD fine when I added additional media. (i.e. pictures) I was expermenting with the different slideshow options and all was good. No issues. Only after I closed PD completely and tried to reopen the project did the problem start.

As for space, I would think I have more that ample room on my e drive. The previous project I did which was my main, 2.5 hr video project was much, much larger and disk space was not an issue.

Any other ideas? Thanks for the help.

Karl.

Hi Dafydd,

Thanks for the reply. Below is the requested information:

PD version: PD Ultra version: 10.0.0.1129b

Attached are two DxDiag files. One is the 64bit version.

BTW, I have updated my video driver. Quick time seemed to be current so no update there. PD seems to always crash at 79% no matter what when opening any of the autosaved project files or the main project file.

Thanks for any help you can provide. Don't want to have to redo this project.

Karl

*SIGH*

Ok, so I'm trying to open a project and PD starts to open and begins scanning all my content (pictures, music) from the working directory I have set up will all my media files. It gets about 80% done and then hangs for a moment on a picture then gives the oh-so-familiar message: "PowerDirector 10 has stopped working" (Yes, I know this is a Windows 7 message.) Thinking I have a corrupt picture file, I rename that file and try again. PD does the same thing but simply dies on the next picture in the chain. (It did, btw, give the error that it could not find the picure which I expected and I simply hit Ignore)

I then renamed the folder that the pictures are in and again, it simply dies when scanning other files. Undeterred, I went to the trusty autosave folder (I seems I go to this folder quite often) to get the last save of the project file. No go on that as well or any of the saved files for this project.

So what's up? Any guesses? Am I screwed? The project was not complicated, but I did have a lot of picures in it. (I was creating a slide show)

Thanks for the help in advance!

Karl

Machine info:
Win 7 64bit
Quad core Q6600 6GIG Ram
Plenty of Disk space free.

Hal,

Really appreciate your response! (Happy New Year, BTW) So, in a nutshell what you are saying is that all of the "Modules" i.e. Capture, Edit, Produce and Create Disc are seperate, fully independent areas? OK, I'll go with that. Seems somewhat unintuitive to me. I guess I was looking at it all as the steps one goes through to create a DVD in that you Capture your video (should you need to), edit it, Produce/render the file, and then finally burn that to disk. I guess I was assuming the produce area was one of the steps to the final result. But you are saying that I can simply go from "Edit" to "Create Disk" thus compleatly bypassing the "Produce" step?

If I think of it like that I guess I can understand somewhat the issues. I'll have to go back through my project with that mindset to see what happens. From what you are saying when I added my "Produced move .mpg file" and then removed the default, it wiped out my timeline. What was confusing to me was that I thought the "video" in the Content tab in the Create Disc menu was my newly created move file. Not the case I guess. You are saying it is the Project data from my timeline?

That clears it up for me. (I think) I'll work with it in that mindset and see how it goes. Again, thanks for clearing it up. I really want PD to work for me. Just getting used to the different things can be trickey.

Karl.

Hi Jim and Hal,

Thanks for taking the time to respond and thanks for letting me rant. (Yes Hal, I do feel better

)

So here's my steps:

On the "Edit" menu, I created my project with all my edits, text, etc. I then click on the "Chapter Room" to create all my chapter points. I go through my project adding a title/chapter at the various points along my timeline. Once complete, I do a final save and then head to the "Produce" menu. Here, I create my move file and I choose the MPEG-2 option. I choose my Output folder location and hit "Start" So far all is well and good.

It completes my 2 1/2 hour move in a little over an hour. (This is why I purchased PD over Adobe because of the quick speed!)
From here things get a little dicey. I then click on the "Create Disk" menu and on the "Content" tab I see my freshly rendered/created move file. Great, no problem so far. I click the "Menu Preferences" tab and choose a DVD menu. clicked the menu structure and saw my chapters. At this point I realized I needed to make a change to my project and re-render/produce a new video file. I went back to the "edit" menu, made my change and then went to "produce" and proceded to create a new file. Here's where I think PD got confused (I'm guessing): Instead of overwriting the old file, I created a new file with a different name. It created the file; I went to "Create Disk" My new file was present in the "Content" tab, but no chapters other than the default one. I removed the old file from the list, clicked save, clicked the "Show Chapters" link on the new file and still no chapters. I then went to the "Edit" menu and alas, my project time line is empty except for the complete video file.

After almost loosing it (or perhaps I did) I went to the autosave and retreaved an older version. Whew! Got my project back. (It had saved over the main project and my project file size went from 13Meg to 120k or so.) I then tried many different times of re-rendering, as the old file name, new file name etc. Probably did this at least 4 or 5 times, each time not getting my chapters to show up after the video file is produced.

I finally resorted to simply creating a new movie file and then let it "save over" my project file (after taking a backup of course) and then added the chapters to the movie file directly in the Chapters tab in the edit menu.

If PD lets you create chapters at the time when you are working in your project, then I would think that if you then render a move file, change something, go back a render that file even under a new name then the chapters should still show up once at the Create Disk area. I know that the move file is independent of the chapters per-se, however it is confusing. It seems that the project and the move file are mutually exclusive. I just confuses the heck out of me.

So I don't know, I guess going forward I will not make chaptes in the project itself but create a move file and then go back and add chapters under a new project. Does not add up to me, but if it works then ok.

Hope that makes sense as to what I tried. Again, I want to give PD a chance but I've been pretty unhappy up to this point. Let's see what the end result will be.

Thanks guys,

Karl

Ok, Sorry for the upcoming rant but I've just about had it with this @&#*$ software!!!

Using PowerDirector v10 64bit. I've created my project and have gone to the Produce section and let it create an MPEG2 file. I then go to the Create Disk section and add a DVD Menu. All is good so far. I then want to re-edit my project and re-produce a new move file. I do that and just for versioning reasons I have it create the file under a different name. I then go back to Create Disk, remove the OLD move file under the Content tab and add my newly generated file.

When I click to view all the chapters I only get the default one. I created 18 chapters in the project. If I go back to the Edit tab to look at my project ALL THE TIMELINE ITEMS ARE GONE!!! and I only have the move file I created. WTF! If I save the file I screw myself and it blasts over the project thus killing all the work I have done! Thank GOD for the auto-save area. I then go back and pull up the latest save (I do save often) and I have my project back. BUT I CAN'T GET MY BLOODY CREATED MOVE FILE INTO THE CREATE DISK AREA WITH ALL MY CHAPTERS AND REMOVE THE OLD ONE WITHOUT F-ING UP MY PROJECT!!!!

What the heck is up with this? It seems that if you render/produce a move file and then go back and do it again with a different name or just do it again it hoses up the chapters AND you can't go back to your project after removing the old file without it dropping all the items on the timeline and replacing it with your move file and no chapters.

I really REALLY want to like PD. But I can't tell you how high my blood pressure has gotten and all the time I have spent fighting with this buggy, crappy, badly written POS software!!!! Yes, it is fast, (which was the main reason I bought it) yes you can do cool things WHEN IT WORKS!! But I have just about had it with this thing. I have a wedding video I MUST finish and I am 99% there but fighting with this section.

Has ANYONE had this issue? Please feel free to tell me what the hell I am doing wrong. I'm about to go postal on this software.

Ok, thank you...rant over. Please, anyone...Any ideas? help?

Karl.

Hi Carl312,

Thanks for the reply. I'm pretty sure I did. I just re-rendered it again and this time they are there! (Yay!) However, the default title/chapter is not showing the thumbnail that I wanted. I renamed the default chapter to what I wanted and moved the scrubber to the part where I wanted that frame to be viewed as the thumbnail shot on the menu. It is correct in the "Scenes" section of the menu structure, but the one on the main page is not what I wanted.

Any ideas???

Thanks,

Karl

Hi all,

I've created my video using PD Ver 10 64 bit, and added 18 chapters in the timeline. I then rendered (i.e. created a .MPG file using MPEG2) the project. When I did it the first time, the chapters all came up and all was good. I then went back to my project and made a change, re-rendered the file and alas, no chapters except for the default one at the start. I went back and added a few more chapters, re-rendered, and again, no joy.

I'm at a loss here. I don't want to have to redo my chapter markers in the project and I don't know if that will make a difference. Has anyone else had this issue? Any help would be much appreciated. Below are my system specs.

- Quad core Q6600 with 6 GIG ram
- Windows 7 home 64bit
- Nvidia Video card 1GIG RAM
- Plenty of disk space (750Gig 7200RPM)

Thanks,

Karl