Messages posted by keglined

Quote Hey can anyone help. I have watched some of the tutorials on how to pan and zoom. And people are clicking on a video clip, then going to "tools" and then "pan and zoom"

However on my powerdirector 365, the "Tools" drop down is missing. All I have is a "marker" icon, a scissors icon, Edit, Keyframes, and a hamburger menu. There are no tools.

What am I doing wrong?

Thanks

I found Tools in 'Edit' but they are not nearly as workable as previous versions. Crop, for example, is a disaster . . . you can only crop the beginning frame of a clip; you can no longer navigate the clip to find out where the best crop is.

It's mind blowing when software makers turn their product into something worse when they build new versions. Very disappointing.

Title says it all - more than one file. Just trying to access the transition room gets a crash, and then one of those small white popup windows: "Tell us what you were doing when it crashed." So far Cyberlink will have gotten four of these messages from me.

Anyone else have this problem? Is there a bug being worked on?

Thanks

What did you guys do to the Crop function? Seems to me it's lost many of its better features and now the user is much more restricted in what s/he can do with it.

I'm specifically talking about the crop area around a clip/movie.

In previous versions of PowerDirector, the user could double-click a clip to open it for editing, drag your cursor to your preferred *reference* frame for forming your crop margins, unclick Maintain Aspect Ratio, and then adjust each of the four edges of the frame individually. Voila'! The crop of the entire clip is now where you want it to be!

NOW, doing most of what I just described is impossible. At least, that's the way it's looking to me. Crop is in Tools now for some odd reason, and once you choose it, you can only crop the very first frame of the clip you want to edit. The moment you move your cursor to find that reference frame, your handles for changing the crop are gone.

So you improvise, and cut the clip at the frame you're referencing (wondering why in the world you now have to split the clip, make your adjustments, annotate those specs somewhere so that you can later apply those same dimensions/points to the entire clip), and unlock Maintain Aspect Ratio . . .only to discover the "Free Form" setting is anything but. Both vertical borders move in tandem; there is no individual adjustment. Worse, you are unable to move the crop region as a whole.

Finally, you realize you can kindasorta do these formerly supereasy steps by adjusting the dimensions/points for your * reference frame, and then applying those to the whole thing. I.e., spending several times the effort and duration doing what used to be as simple as a quick mouse swipe or two.

Am I close to describing this right? Are these really this new version's limitations? Because if I'm anywhere close to right, it seems like you guys really messed up a good thing here.

Basics: I have version/build 11.0.0.3230, and despite clearing the cache, and deleting shadow and temporary files, I'm having a problem where the program seems to reference cached audio or video from an entirely wrong part of the movie I'm producing.

What I'm doing: I am adding captions, from the Subtitle Room (F12), in Timeline View. I'll play a few seconds, stop, create a new subtitle and type what was said. I then play the video again for a few seconds, and repeat the process.

What's wrong: About half the time I click the play arrow, the audio that then starts playing is from somewhere else in the production. (Audio and video tracks have been unlinked.) Occasionally, instead of the audio being from somewhere completely different, the video will be from somewhere else. These miscued video/audio locations are random, and from all over the (hour and a half long) timeline. Occasionally I get "lucky" and both the audio and video are screwed up (though never from the same spot, which I imagine would make me feel like I'd moved everything myself).

How I'm coping: I'm to the point where I have to hit the play arrow, listen quickly to tell if the audio is from the point my timeline is on, stop and back up the cursor to do it all over again . . . until it's the correct part. Typically, on the third or fourth try I'll hear the right part and enter some more captioning, and then get back to dealing with this glitch all over again.

Far more than half the time this is happening.

Please help! Thank you.

Bottom line: you cannot adjust a track's volume, as a whole. You can "normalize" (which is mostly garbage, anyway), but you cannot lower or raise an entire track's volume. You must do it clip by clip.

One of several dozen "you gotta be kidding, right?" moments with this software.

It's 2 and a half years later, I have a much newer version, and this same exact thing is happening to me.

I'm also having this problem.

Movie is 12:02:09, and have attempted rendering/producing three times. Each time the amount of the movie that "makes it" into the final production changes.

3:00 first go-around
10:57 second go-around
6:27 third try

First two tries were AVI default settings, third try WMV, also default settings.

Media I used to in the movie are:

MP3s
MOVs
JPGs

MOVs and JPGs all from the same camera, and the MP3s were all ripped from CDs/are in my WMP library.

Everything else (effects, transitions, keyframing, etc) were done internally.

Please help - I cannot believe the trial went so well, and now that I've paid for it this is happening.

Thanks

That's exactly what I went to as option 2, right after posting my lengthy response above, borgus. It does emulate a proper crossfade, but of course inconvenient having to unlink and lock/unlock.

Thanks!

Wow - thanks borgus. Found the note, and figured out what's going on:

In the classic sense, a crossfade is both an overlap and a fading action. Crossfading overlaps two tracks, simultaneously fading them in different directions: the first track is faded down as the second track is faded up. If you're adjoining two audio tracks, and want to crossfade, then during the transition you're going to have audio playing from both tracks at the same time. You need some "expendable" audio.

There are two ways programs (most, that is) deal with this expendable audio:

1. The user pushes two tracks together, and they will sort of mesh, in effect "crossing" over (or into) one another. Some graphics in these programs even go so far as to make it look like two tracks meshing together; each becomes transluscent, and you can basically see one track laid over the other.

2. The user must remove the expendable bit of audio at the beginning of the second track, as well as the expendable audio at the end of the first track. Then, abut the two tracks together, lay the "crossfade" effect across the two, let the software figure out which bits he/she removed, and fade accordingly.

PD11 can't do either of these things. Which is what the help file means when it says, "the cross transition is not supported..."

However, that's not the clearest way to explain this. The cross transition, as the user wants it to be, is not supported. But there IS a cross transition PD11 will do, after compensating for its inability to figure out those "expendable" audio bits -- fading out the first track early, and pulling in the second track far enough to fade it in.

The help file should say, "the cross transition is not a true crossfade," or better yet, "the cross transition will work the way you want it once you've gotten used to constantly unlinking audio/video, moving the audio track a specific measure to the right, programming a predefined amount of extra time into the beginning of the audio track, adding that same amount to the end of the preceding audio track..."

Major disappointment here.

For audio the Cross fades won't do it for me. The overlap fade is what I want, but this decreases the length of the two clips being joined. Is there a way to prevent this?