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Sorry to hear that. It leaves prior Cycberlink customers with quite a dilemma:
Install the trial / PD9 retail and lose the stability and integrity of the PD8 prdocut which took many updates and many nearly a year to (finally) fix properly
or
Do not install the trial / new PD9 and wait for Cyberlink to get its act together
or
Deal with having a dual boot / backup strategy to install and try PD9 and then revert back to PD8.
For whatever it is worth, as an owner of Vegas (7,8,9, and now 10), they made a much better decision to allow both old and new to coexist. I wish Cyberlink had done the same.
My current thought would be to hold off buying or trying PD9 since it is extremely clear that the quality control and beta testing are still in their infancy.
Thanks Jeff and Nicholas for your replies.
Larry
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Do I effectively disable / uninstall PD8 when I download / install the trial version of PD9? If so, is there any way to evaluate 9 without screwing up my production PD8 installation
Thanks for any info.
Larry
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Excellent summary and very informative. Thanks for posting it Dafydd!
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Very glad to help!
My card is an 8800 Geforce but apparently nVidia offers a so-called Unified Driver for all Cuda compliant cards. The driver is the latest from nVidia, called:
178.24_geforce_winvista_32bit_english_whql.exe.
It (and other nVidia drivers) can be found at:
http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us
Once installed, the Power Director program can be started, the Preferences chosen under the Edit Menu, and the box checked to enable CUDA GPU Acceleration.
The very disappointing news I have discovered is that the new Cuda upgrade only offers acceleration for certain, non-useful filters. I can't think of a time when I ever deliberately wanted to blur an image or make a kaleidiscope.
I would have REALLY appreciated a way to speed up rendering..........!!!
Hope these instructions prove useful to others.
Sony, Nero, and other professional NLE vendors provide Release Notes to give the user a hint of how to install these updates. Maybe someday Cyberlink will get a clue..... Their ReadMe is old and unrelated to this update entirely.
Larry
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I have updated my nVidia driver for my video card and have now located a Prefence setting to enable to Cuda accelerator.
I'm very pleased to locate this, and wish that Cyberlink had provided some instructions / guidabce regarding the driver and setting.
I wonder if Cyberlink will eventually publish some Help information to make this easier for others, and avoid the problem I encountered?
Larry
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I have downloaded and installed the latest Power Director 7 Ultimate update, using compatible nVida hardware, but do not see any evidence of Cuda running.
I do not see any mention of Cuda in the Help System and searching for it in any of the PD7 menus / Preferences / or other settings does not give any indication it is present or running.
Is there any way to be sure that Cuda is present and running?
Thanks for any information,
Larry
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Kai,
The 2 programs I use most for AVCHD which both do smart rendering are Movie Factory 6 Plus from Ulead and Nero Vision 5. Both can import the Cyberlink stream files 00000X.m2ts, assuming that they are completely formed before Cyberlink crashes.
In my experiments here, both programs willmake virtually identical looking AVCHD disks using the Cyberlink files as input, but only the Ulead Movie Factory 6 Plus does so without the need to transcode, using its smart rendering. For reasons unknown tome. Nero wants to re-render the file before burning it.
Hope this helps until Cyberlink fixes the PD7 code.
Larry
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PD7 crashes and hangs, I am beginning to discover, are not always crashes and hangs. The program merely takes a long time to do whatever it is doing, and the programmer never thought to show any type of progress bar. I have found on several occasions that the program is merely transcoding, making a proxy, doing an import, or whatever it has to do, and will, for a long time appear dead. This is a very serious fault in programming, but atleast one which is easily fixed with a simple thermometer display, and also by a very patient user until it is fixed.
For whatever it is worth, I have the fastest quadcore being made, the Extreme QX9650, and some PD7 activities still take a very long time. I just wanted to point out that they will, in some cases, eventually complete, and not to immediately assume a hang or crash when the program appears to be dead / not repsonding.
Like many things in PD7, the people who designed and built it have an extremely hard time communicating what they are doing.
Hope this may be of some help.
Larry
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Kai,
The burn folder which PD7 creates can be used directly with other programs to make AVCHD disks which do not require any additional processing or transcoding. All is you need is a DVD burning program such as Nero Burning ROM, and you have to do 2 things:
1. Be sure to burn your DVD as a UDF 2.5 format disk, and do not use ISO since the BluRay players are expecting UDG 2.5. In Nedro you have to also set Manual Partition and Physical Partition type rather than let the program make an automatic choice.
2. Take the folder called BDMV and copy it completely intact to your DVD in the root directory, so that opening your disk immediately shows the BDMV foler. This is what your set-top player or computer PC-based player is expecting as the root directory contents.
You will be able to play them with no problems on your AVCHD-capable BluRay player.
Be advised that prior to Vista, XP machines mostly could not open and see UDF 2.5 disks, since this is a newer partitioning and formating method. You will need extra software on an XP machine if you want to open and see the disk, but this will not be an issue if you only want to burn UDF 2.5 with Nero or some other program.
Good luck and hope this helps. Let us know what your results are.
Larry
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I sympathize with the frustration and time wasting and disappoint, but must offer some points worth considering. I too have had a lot of problems with PD7, and actually removed PD6 from my prior computer since it never worked in any useful way. Much to the credit of Cyberlink and Dafydd Bevan however, there has been extremely prompt and very helpful assistance, solving entirely one of my biggest problems, burning AVCHD disks. It also says a great deal positive that threads such as this one remain on the forum, since I can tell you from my own very direct and personal experience that such has NOT been the case for very similar and very legitimate complaint threads posted on the forums of 2 other major suppliers of AVCHD editing and burning software. These threads strongly resemble this "Letting off Steam" thread, and one of the more vocal ones was titled "I Give Up!!!" which only lasted a few days on a competitor's forum since their product is truly pathetic.
PD7 has alot to recommend it, and can work very well. It still needs some debugging and hopefully will eventually get these matters resolved, so I would urge you to stay with it. I intend to, despite recent build 1915 issues which have set me back, but I do see very encouraging light at the end of the tunnel.
Larry
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Guess I should have not been so anxious to get the new build. I installed it, hoping that maybe PowerDirector 7 might become a usable product, since I have been unable to use it due to extreme slowness for AVCHD.
I installed the new patch for Build 1915, and now I have a program which absolutely crashes / hangs every time I attempt to go to the Create Disk tab. Thankfully the Task Manager lets me quit the program without rebooting.
I went to the Vista control panel for adding and rfemoving software, hoping the patch was removable. Of course it isn't....
Rather than go back and re-install the prior build which was too slow to be considered a real program, I guess I now need to wait for yet another release to see if the superb software developers have figured out how to fix something without breaking other things......
Thankfully I have Nero Vision, Ulead Video Studio 11.5, Sony Vegas 8 Pro, and Ulead Movie Factory 6, all of which make super fast and very good AVCHD disks with smart rendering and run swiftly on this ultrafast Intel Extreme QX9650 quadcore. PD7 only does one thing very quickly, and that is crash.....
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Thanks so very much Jeff !!
Larry
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Dafydd / Cindy,
Where can I download the new Build 1915? Thanks for the info in advance.
Larry
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Hello Kai!
I'm anxious to get a version of PD 7 Ultra which allows me to use my HF100 with smart rendering, since it is currently extremely slow, even on my quadcore Extreme QX9650 workstation. How did you get the version number you are using to SmartRender. Have you been able to find a method to work around the crash yet?
Thanks very much,
Larry
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My burning problem was ultimately resolved with replacement dll files for the burning manager. The temporary workaround was to burn the output folder using Nero, and now the updated files eliminate this extra step.
I can only assume that an updated PD7 or patch will be released incorporating this and other fixes.
Larry
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One more thought.....
Many programs maintain a "Burn Log" someplace, and perhaps Cyberlink PD7 does as well. If so, this should be a very useful starting point for debugging this problem,
Is there such a log? If so, can I send it to Cyberlink for their analysis? It could save a lot of time, particularly if they (Cyberlink) have difficulty reproducing this problem which most of us here are having.
Larry
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I requested, received, downloaded, installed, and ran the very latest rev of PD7, version 1829 (newer than 1819 previously mentioned) and it fails in exactly the same manner as the prior build 1714 I originally used. 3 hours of wasted time with removing, downloading, installing, and testing, with exactly the same outcome..... another coaster.
I wanted to report this for the benefit of others trying to solve this same problem.
Larry
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thanks very much!
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I find it extremely hard to believe that my burners or media are at fault here. Both of my burners and Verbatim media produce perfect disks with all of the other authoring programs I have installed here, including Vegas, Pinnacle, Ulead, Nero, and ArcSoft. Only PowerDirector 7 Ultra craps out with errors, something the trial did not do.
Cyberlink has to fix this......... and rolling back to earlier versions of Windows is a crappy solution, since no other authoring/burning programs have any issues whatsoever.
Larry
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