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Uh oh. This doesn't sound good. The broken file message that you're seeing is probably due to changing something in the pds file when you opened it and saved it with your text editor.
Since we don't know what you changed, this is going to be difficult to figure out. But let's assume that whatever you did happened at the beginning of the the pds text file. This is where your cursor would naturally land on.
In the first few lines a healthy pds file would look like this:
Content-Type: multipart/related
--- partseparator
Content-Type: text/AEFF
Content-ID: movie-layout
--- separator
You might have added or deleted a line or character when you opened the file. If the beginning of your file differs a lot from this example, the pds file is probably corrupted beyond repair.
I tend to like to open files with notepad just to see what's in them out of curiosity, but I never save the file, but you already know that now. ![]()
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That's a pretty interesting question...a question that I don't have an answer to, but I can make an educated guess. ![]()
If you are speaking purely about rendering your videos in PD7, the power of your CPU and amount and type of RAM are the crucial elements here. A Core 2 Duo CPU will be better in rendering than a Pent 4. A quad core will render better and faster than a Core 2 Duo. If you have DDR2 DRAM, this will help rendering times as well.
How much faster you want rendering times will differ according to your processor of course. I decided that a duo core cpu was slower than a quad, but that minimal savings in render time and the inability to overclock the quad cores effectively weren't worth it for me.
As far as playback from your hard drives, it seems RPM speed isn't as important as data rate per second, according to some. If you've got SATA drives, you'll be getting average transfer rates of around 168MB per second or more.
The basic way, and probably the simplest way of optimizing your system is to turn off all unnecessary programs in the background, defrag your disk drives, keep your registry clean, and remove all spyware from your system.
I'm not sure if placing your video sources, temp files, and program on different drives will help significantly speed up the rendering process. If anything, this approach may actually slow things down, (albeit in fractions of a second) since your computer must access different drives in order to access files. Some users on here report that their systems are more stable when they put all the clips and project resources onto one folder on one drive.
In any event, my guess is that the separation of your files to different drives will give you minimal increases in rendering efficiency at best, and not at all at worse.
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Hi Collette,
What you are describing is a message that says you have run out of disk space for any more files.
Think of it this way, when you go shopping, you can only put so many items in your shopping bag. If you wanted to fit more items, you would need to get a bigger bag. This is essentially what has happened on your computer. The size or quantity of data of your video clips have exceeded what your disk drive can hold.
In short, you have run out of bag space for your items. In order to solve this, you can do two things. Delete things off of your hard drive to make space for other files, (not such a good idea because you'll run out of space again,) or have a computer savvy person add a larger capacity disk drive to your computer or swap out your old one for a new one.
Adding a new drive is the easiest way. External disk drives are readily available for sale now and you can purchase a 250GB drive for less than $120 in most cases. If you know a computer geek, he/she can add an internal disk drive to your computer if you don't want an external disk next to your computer.
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Hi Justin,
I'm not sure what an "Intel 2.0" is unless you are referring to the Core 2 Duo processors, in which, you should have enough fire power to run PD7.
There are many reasons why PD7 can't burn your DVD. The simplest explanation may be PD7 not being compatible with your DVD burners. Others have suggested that software conflicts is the problem. You can also update the firmware for you DVD to make sure it is up to specs. Visit the manufacturer's site to download this.
So far, people have success with LiteOn, Pioneer, LG, HP and a few others, while Samsung and Toshiba burners don't seem to work. If you can't swap out your DVD burner, you might try installing PD7 on a friend's machine, which has a DVD burner on the "success" list. Just don't forget to uninstall the program on your bud's machine after you finish.
If you can burn your project on the other DVD burner, than you've found the problem.
A temporary solution that many have found successful until a fix is available is to check the "create DVD folder" option in the burn menu. You'll have to access this folder later so make sure you know where this file ends up. Uncheck the burn to DVD box.
Start the "burn." After PD7 finishes, use a burning software program like Nero, DVD Shrink, or some other program to access the vts video file to burn to a DVD. That should work.
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Just a quick question for you Matthew. What burning software are you using at the moment? I'm guessing that this may be part of the problem.
As far as clips not looking as good while you are previewing them in PD7, that's just a function of the playback, it would seem. Even when you adjust the quality to "high," they still won't look as good even for high quality clips. The only sure fire way to actually tell how good your project will look like on DVD is to just burn it to a RW DVD disc. This saves tons of money and will keep you from making unnecessary "drink coasters"...something that I learned the hard way. lol.
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Quote:
Frank beat me to it ![]() ![]() ![]()
Sorry mate. At least we both had the same answer. ![]()
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This either sounds like a slow computer or a lot of programs running in the background of your machine.
Try turning off everything that is running in the background of your computer by shutting down everything that isn't critical in your "system tray." What I am referring to is all the little icons in the lower right hand corner. These programs start when you turn on your computer. Right click on each icon and shut it down.
The other thing could have to do with how much and what type of RAM you are using. Spitting video should be almost instantaneous, and if you have to wait 20 seconds for this to happen, you may not have enough memory, your computer may be slow, or you may have lots of spyware on your machine that needs to be cleared out.
What sort of computer setup do you have?
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Hi Alex,
Sounds like you have a TV format problem with your clips. Generally, there are two big TV signal standards in the world...NTSC and PAL. NTSC TV signal formats are used in the U.S. and Japan while most of the rest of the world uses PAL.
To change the default setting for the clip you are using, hit the director chair icon located in the upper left hand corner. Select preferences, and then hit the general tab. You'll see two settings, one for NTSC and one for PAL.
Change this setting to match your TV format. If you are in a European country, most likely this will be PAL. If you are in the US or Japan, you'll be using NTSC.
When converting PAL to NTSC, the signal will always be of less quality as the PAL system offers more resolution then NTSC.
Whatever clips you are using, whether they be PAL or NTSC, the format selection in PD7 must match your clip formats.
Hope this helps.
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I've read some posts on here that while PD7 burns your DVDs, it really isn't set up to be a really good burner. You may need another burning software to accomplish this...PD7 will use whatever is your designated burning software. I've been using Nero 6 without any problems. If you are a registered PD7 user, you can also try out cyberlink's burning software via download.
The other thing, and I hope it isn't what is causing your status errors, is the PD7 software, which may not be compatible with your brand of DVD burner. I couldn't burn DVDs with PD7 either until I switched from the Samsung burners I had to HP DVD burners.
If you or someone has the expertise to swap one of your burners out for another brand to see if this fixes your problem, you might want to try this out. But before you do this, see if you can update the firmware of your DVD burners. You can usually download these at the manufacturer's site. After updating your firmware, try again. If this doesn't work, try the swap technique.
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Quote:
today i have tried to edit some media 7 times and within a couple of minutes it crashed every single time!
All i'm doing is tring to sync media from 2 cameras so nothing too difficult so why does this make it crash?
Hi Lev. What you're experiencing could be due to a bunch of things so let's break this down to a few things.
If you are using the PIP feature to cut your second video clips over the main video, PD7 will sometimes crash when you are using the split function while cutting up your clips. This will happen especially when you switch from the movie mode view to the clip mode view. When the program crashes, hit ctrl--alt--delete to bring up the windows task manager window. Look at PD7 in the applications tab. If it says PD7 is "not responding" the cause of your problems is this crash bug.
To "fix" the bug, Shut down PD7. Restart your computer by powering down and restarting. Close as many programs in the task manager as possible. (It's all those little icons at the lower right hand corner. Right click on each one to turn them off.) Start PD7 again.
When you start editing, don't click too quickly while you are editing your PIP sources. PD7 is actually doing stuff in the background but since it doesn't show you a "timer" icon while it's doing this, the program will crash if you try to do another function too quickly after your last one. If you are using color correction, or light balance, this sometimes crashes the program while splitting your videos too.
The second reason may be due to what sort of computer system you have. Doing PIP operations on a computer system that isn't up to spec may also crash the program.
And of course, make sure you have the latest update for your software.
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Quote:
I have just downloaded Powerdirector 7 and all looks good however my timeline is squeezed to the bottom of the page to the point where I can hardly see it to do any editing. What am I doing or what have I done wrong?? Thanks
Hi Brian, you're not doing a thing wrong. You're a new user getting familiar with how PD7 works.
The way to "expand" your project so that you can see it is to adjust the way the timeline looks. If you look at the very bottom left hand corner of your project window, you'll see a small little slider with two clock faces at either end. If you click on the one to the right, it will expand the elements in the timeline. Clicking on the left clock will compress everything.
A lot of us are new comers to PD7, so don't feel badly; most of us are still learning around here.
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According to Cyberlink's advertising about the benefits of CUDA:
"Encode HD Videos Faster Than Ever
PowerDirector 7's support for NVIDIA® CUDA™ technology delivers huge gains in encoding speeds for high-definition H.264 video. Offering speeds up to 270% faster for encoding H.264 video with NVIDIA CUDA technology than without, PowerDirector 7 leverages the power of the GPU to deliver its faster results."
The link to the full article is here:
http://www.cyberlink.com/multi/products/item_4_5_2.html
Regardless, I turn on the CUDA option just in case it does something good. ![]()
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If your Nvidia graphics card supports Cuda, that's supposed to speed up rendering for your game graphics, as well as stuff for PD7 effects. Here's the link that shows what cards are supported by Nvidia's Cuda technology:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_learn_products.html
And here's the link where you can download the Cuda software for your compatible card:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_get.html?CMP=KNC-CUD-K-GOOG&gclid=CNnQ6MHP1ZcCFQv7agodb2D_Dw
And best of all, you don't need to "reinstall the software" to get it to work. ![]()
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Transfering all your online shows to a thumb drive is nice. Tech is great, isn't it?
As far as the degradation of your mts files being burned over to a DVD, I played my test video on a regluar DVD player with upscaling and didn't see the quality go down as you mentioned. So if your settings on PD7 are ok, it must be either the burning software or the other equipment it's being played on.
Maybe you can start tweaking your DVD player/TV settings to see if that helps out any. Could be something as simple as a bad or loose cable, or interference with another device. When you mentioned you had blocky graphics, it sounded as though it had something to do with the playback on a machine.
Of course, if you're comparing the PS3 output with a plan jane DVD player, there's going to be some difference. I think the later PS3s had the more advanced codecs to make the unit shine. I'm not much into HT, but if I were, the PS3 would do it for me.
Anyway, when you figure out what's going on, let us know.
The last game I bought for the PS3 was GTA4. Don't really have much in games for it, but I had to get the PS3 because I was writing for the game industry at the time. If it wasn't for that, I probably would have never purchased it.
My "man room" used to be in the bedroom where I had all my game machines set up. But my wife made me take them all out and now my office is my "man room." Too bad, it was nice playing games from bed...you get tired, you're right there and go right to sleep. lol
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Hey Walker, I've got a PS3 too...the original 60GB version. Now I know that there are at least two of us who bought it at the launch date. lol
Ok, to tell you the truth, I have never opened the door to the card reader on my PS3, that is, until I saw your question. I appreciate the PS3 a lot more now...way ahead of its time.
Anyway, I've got a AVCHD camera too; the Panasonic HDC-SD1. I shot some test footage to see if I could duplicate your quality issues with PD7 and I think I've got the answer.
First off, I assume your camera shoots in 16:9. If true, then all you have to do *before* you import your clips to PD7 is to set your aspect ratio for the program to 16:9 and not 4:3. If you burn your project in 4:3 ratio, when your footage is really 16:9, you'll end up trying to fill up the screen by adjusting the controls on your TV. That's when you get the artifacts and bad quality.
You have to change this aspect ratio to match whatever video you are pulling into PD7 before putting anything into your project. You do this by clicking on the the little director's chair in the upper left hand corner, select "edit," and then select "aspect ratio" to the proper setting.
When you play back your burned DVDs on the PS3, they'll look a lot better because the aspect ratios now match up with your footage. One more thing...if you hit triangle during playback of your DVD on the PS3, you can adjust the AV setting so that your machine will have a higher playback quality. Make all the settings "3" and the quality will improve even more on playback.
Soooo, have you played Resistance 2 yet? I'm still on the fence on that one. I thought the first one was really fun, and I'm not even into shooters. First one had a really great plot, imo.
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Let's all hope that our wish lists for fixes comes true Cranston. In spite of having to pull some hair out because of the burning bug, the more I use PD7, the more I am impressed and awed. This is really a fine program.
Now, if Power Director 7 can be *easily* accessible to everyone from PC geeks to your everyday Joe and Jane on the street, Cyberlink will have their hands full trying to make enough to meet demand. ![]()
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Hi Nathan,
According to PD7 specs, it's supposed to handle MOV files. There are a couple of things you can do to figure out if it's PD7 or the files you are trying to work with.
If your MOV files are corrupt, try loading another MOV file from another source. If it works in PD7, then your first clip was probably corrupted. If the second MOV source file still doesn't play on PD7, then it might be the software and you'll have to convert the MOV file to another format.
Check PD7's suggested requirements for what type of computer power you need to use this program. There may be an outside chance that your computer is straining to play the file you have loaded because it doesn't meet recommended requirements.
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Hi Zadoc-Lee,
That's a great question and something I've been wondering about since I picked up PD7 a couple of weeks ago. You inspired me to do some experimenting. What you are describing is known as an A-B-C-D roll edit. You have four sources that you want to combine into one master video. This can be done two ways...live, as the production is running, or editing in the studio, which takes more work. You're going to use method 2.
If you want PD7 to do it, I think I've found a way. But there are a few prerequisites. If all your camera people taped the event in its entirety without turning off their cameras, you can sync all four sources. If not, you probably can just skip the rest of this post as you will have to grind it out in trying to match all the clips.
Let's assume you have all the footage entirely shot with all cameras rolling from beginning to end. The first thing to do is to find a "sync" point for all sources. What this means is that you have to find a video frame that is common to all video sources at the beginning of filming. It could have been a camera flash going off, a certain sound, the MC walking on stage...anything that all four sources can lock onto as a common starting point.
Let's assume a camera flash went off when all four cameras were recording. This is the sync point and the very beginning were all of your sources will start. After capturing all your sources, make this sync point the start of your master video track, and the other PIP tracks.
Turn off your audio on the other PIP tracks. The master video will provide all the sound.
If you are planning to make many frequent cuts between all four sources, this method I am describing will be very tedious and hard to do. However, if you plan to cut to each source after several minutes or so, it will be easier.
Set Up Your Tracks:
Your main camera will be on the master video track on PD7.
PIP 1 should have footage that you want to cut to the most.
PIP 2 should be next in line for frequency of use.
PIP 3 and PIP 4 next in order of use.
Ok, now the fun begins. Lock your master track so it can't move. You'll see a little padlock at the beginning of the time line. Click to lock.
The next thing you'll do is to just work with your master track and PIP1. Click on PIP1 track and play as a clip. You'll see tabs above the tracks. One of them will say "split." This is your device to chop up PIP1 clips. In preview window, you'll see PIP as a little box. Move this to one of the corners so you can see the master track behind this.
Now you can begin editing. Make sure you save very frequently, or set your options to save every couple of minutes. PD7 is doing an awful lot right now, and it sometimes crashes.
Click on the PIP 1 track to select it. Then hit play in the preview window and make sure you are playing in "clip" mode. You'll see the main source play with the PIP 1 track playing in the corner. Watch the PIP1 window to figure out what scene you want to cut into the main video. Once you know where your scene begins and ends, hit the "split" button once to set where the cut starts, and a second time to where the scene ends. Stop the video. You will now see three segments. The first segment isn't needed. The middle one is what you just selected. Now you can use the slider to move through your PIP clip to the next segment you want. Make sure you delete the footage that you don't want previous to your cut.
If you make a mistake, no problem, just hit ctrl Z and you can erase your mistake in cutting. You can do going back up to 50 times, but you'll never need to do this.
Now, do this until you have the whole thing done. PIP 1 should have a track that is filled with spaces and clips. Now, you have to resize all of your PIP1 clips by dragging the box in the preview window to full size. When the PIP1 track plays, it will cut on top of the main video. Once you finish with PIP 1, lock it, and move onto the next sources. Remember, you can only cut to the PIP sources if another PIP track isn't already taking up timeline space. During your editing, if you want to see how the movie looks with the edited clips, you can just view in movie mode. Just don't forget to switch back to clip mode when you are done. You also might want to resize your PIPs to full frame after each clip is done so you won't have to do them all after you finish.
If you look at the time line, you'll see that there are spaces between the clips in PIP 1. These spaces are the places where you can add additional clip material from your other PIP sources. Since the majority of your cuts will come from PIP1, and the other PIP windows are just used to give different perspectives, the rest should go pretty quickly.
Remember to save, save, save.
This is what I did to practice. PD7 gives you a ready made clip of fishes swimming around. Use this clip for your main video. In PIP1, place another clip of this also. Change this PIP clips color to an extreme setting by right clicking on it so you can make the distinction of which clip is which.
Try and do what I described in the steps above and you'll see how this all works. It sounds a lot more complicated then it really is, but if you can make yourself a practice session that works, you'll be able to do your four camera edit.
I think what I may try to do is to make a short video of this later if all these steps are making you crazy. ![]()
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Jeff,
Now we've got some idea of what works.
On my end of things, I had two Samsung SH-S182D (latest firmware) DVD burners which never had a problem with any burning except PD7.
When I swapped one of the Samsungs out for a HP DVD Writer 1060d, the burning worked. The Samsung DVD burners worked with the trial version but not with the full retail version of PD7.
My rig was built by me:
E8400 Core 2 Duo at 3.00 GHz
Gigabyte 9800GT video card
Gigabyte EP45-UD3R motherboard
4 gigs of Corsair Blasitix Extreme DDR2 Ram
Fresh install of XP, upgraded to SP3. No software conflicts. No viruses. No problems.
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Quote:
Hi Frank,
I thought I would advise you that the problems you are having with burning through PD7, I have exactly the same problems when trying to burn with Adobe Premiere Elements, so figure that one out.
Have a good Christmas
Robert
You'll have to contact Adobe on that one. lol.
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Hi Robert and Cranston,
The post you read is actually a compilation of all the problems I encountered with PD7 regarding the burning of DVDs with the associated menus. Others on here, have also experienced this problem with general burning routines.
As to PD7 not being a stable burning program, I have no idea if this is true or not as I was able to burn DVDs successfully with the trial version, but not with the full retail version. When I was experiencing crashes with PD7, I uninstalled Nero, and installed Cyberlink's DVD burning program with the same results...PD7 wouldn't burn.
Yes, there are loads of DVD burners out there, but this isn't really a hard task to gather data from users on here; there are really only five or six major DVD manufacturers out there.
I know QA can only test so many configurations, this much is true. But testing on a selected series of DVD burners that go back a few years will usually show the problems of incompatibility right away. It is very rare, as I have stated before, for a DVD player to be the culprit in a software program. I cannot imagine that this bug was not evident during the QA process of PD7 with incompatibility issues.
At the least, Cyberlink can put a notification on their PD7 products that states that not all DVD burners will work with the product. From my experience with all the answers from customer support, the advice has nothing to do with the problems people are having with burning DVDs...the source of the problem is from code within PD7 that is not compatible with certain DVD burners.
The crash bugs aren't because of user error. People wait patiently for the program to burn and then PD7 crashes. This has been documented many, many times on here. I guess the point is that these bugs are not imagined or an illusion. No matter how many reasons are given as to the software not being the problem, empirically, through the reports of people here and on the Internet who are very accomplished PC people, people who are regular users like you, or beginners, the smoking gun points to the PD7 program. I really don't know what is so hard in excepting this obvious documented fact. I guess I really feel sorry for all the people who have been trying to get this issue resolved since the beginning of the year and haven't seen any progress on these problems.
It has nothing to do with "blaming" the program for these crashes. It is a fact, pure and simple. I think PD7 is the best video editing program out there. But this doesn't mean I have to turn the other way and pretend that the program isn't flawed, and for many users on here, flawed seriously. I want to see PD7 reach the levels that it is capable of. But to do this, you have to address the problems it has. Telling people out there that it's user error, when they know it obviously isn't, is not helping the problem. I can understand your loyalty to PD7. I am becoming a solid fan of the program as well. But we need to separate our enthusiasm of the program in order to see what the issues and problems with it is.
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