Messages posted by Salamand3r

Not strictly a Window 10 problem, but Windows 10 related (and confirmed by Cyberlink support) -

Hardware rendering acceleration no longer functions with AMD GPUs under the 15.x Catalyst driver series - reverting to 14.x series will work, however these are technically not supported for Windows 10.

So, immediately after fixing the major problem (OpenCL on AMD cards) that I've had basically since PD13 came out, PowerDirector is once again useless to me as a "daily driver" video editor.

According to CL support, there are no immediate plans to fix or attempt to fix the issue.

Very, very disappointed in this piece of software and this company right now.

Quote: Yeah kudos, it's only been just short of a year to get it stable!

I partially rescind my kudos - the patch also broke Fast Video Rendering technology for me - even reinstalling and not patching to the latest version the checkbox remains grayed out. Was working fine - I assume that there is a registry flag or something changed by the patch that disables the checkbox.

Sigh.

I just want to say that this is the single best patch since I purchased PD13 - until this patch it was totally unusable with OpenCL enabled (crashes, freezes, corruption, extremely poor performance) for me.

Saying that this patch "Enhances the stability" is a total understatement.

Kudos to Cyberlink!

Recommend the 970. Although the 290X trades blows with the 970 in gaming, and the OpenCL support is still slightly faster than nVidia's, PowerDirector's OpenCL and AMD APP support is still rather crashy.

Quote: To my knowledge, PD13 only uses OpenCL for accelerated effects, if the user selects option. For most user timelines very little of the overall content duration contains these "effects" so OpenCL performance for the most part offers the typical user very little for Nvidia. For all other regions of the timeline the basic Nvidia NVENC dedicated H.264 hardware video encoding is used.

I'm no fan of one particular GPU or another, owned both, just like working in facts as well as possible to make appropriate decisions. A standard test suite and results would be very beneficial for those attempting to spend dollars wisely. As in this case, if one’s not interested in HA encoding, no need for anything of the GTX970 level. However, it does take a very good CPU to beat it if H.264 typical profiles are of interest.

Here is my GTX970, encode time 0:48, 1.56 times faster than the R9 290.

Jeff

Very impressive result on the 970, far in excess of what I expected based on other benchmarks out there. I completely agree that a standardized test would be great - to my knowledge there are no benchmarks out there that rely on PD. Vegas or Premier are the only widely used ones, and in Vegas the Maxwell GPUs fare quite poorly (which I based part of my conclusion on). Great to have another stat to add to my repertoire.

However, based on that, I am now questioning whether or not I am seeing more flakery, most evidence indicates that the 290 should still be performing better. Off to tweak things more!

I should note that I am only speaking to personal experience on older nVidia GPUs - my stint with a 980 was too short to get a lot of data on it's OpenCL performance. That being said, if you do some quick research, there is plenty of objective benchmarking data coming to the same conclusion (even the superior DX12 API overhead performance of 2+ year old AMD GPUs vs. nVidia's GTX 980 can be used, albeit not entirely accurately, to infer low-level GPGPU performance), and even more subjective data on the quality of OpenCL vs. CUDA output. Keep in mind also that even the quite aged Radeon 7970 is faster than the GTX 980 in video encoding in many circumstances.

AMD's superior compute performance at this point isn't even up for debate - the pre-ASIC Bitcoin mining craze alone is hard proof of that. That being said, it would actually be interesting to start a thread just for benchmarking various hardware. I am actually a bit disappointed that Cyberlink doesn't have a built in benchmark function - with a leading encoding engine like theirs, it would probably be widely adopted.

Granted, the Maxwell core nVidia GPUs offer far, far better compute performance than any previous nVidia consumer-level offering, but they are not the top dogs in the majority of compute-centered benchmarks, and price-to-performance for compute, the comparison is ludicrous. They aren't even close.

Let me go on to say that I am most assuredly not an AMD GPU fanboy - these are the only team red GPUs that I have owned since the ATi 9800 Pro. I hate AMD's drivers, I hate their bloatware, I even hate their "Gaming Evolved" slogan. I built this PC just a few months back for two purposes - to be able to game at 4k, and to be able to comfortably work with video. On the gaming front, I lost some performance going with AMD. I only made the choice I did based on a couple of weeks of reading and research, and having found that nVidia's compute performance was still just barely up to par.

Quote:

Quote: Using OpenCL on nVidia cards yields better quality, but is not nearly as speedy or as well optimized as AMD GPUs.

Post some hard encode time data for your AMD speedster, say 20 of the boats.wmv in the timeline produced to a very common H.264 1920x1080/60i 24Mbps profile, that way the rest of us can compare to this speed.

Thanks
Jeff

As I have deleted the PD sample content, is there a link anyone can post? Otherwise, I am more than happy to reinstall PD13.

Edit: nvm, extracting from the installer archives.

Edit 2: Had to reinstall anyway, couldn't find the darn thing anywhere in the archive.

20x Boats.wmv, H.264 1920x1080/60i 24Mbps profile, total length 4:20:56, total encode time 1:15, single GPU. Multi-GPU crapped out on me again, unsurprisingly. I figured it would take me another hour to get it working again, and taking an hour to post results on a short encode would look...fishy to say the least.

Quote: Also remember power consumption of the card when looking at upgrades!
This site gives you the power connector needed for most popular cards:
http://www.realhardtechx.com/index_archivos/Page362.htm

For my computer the PSU (650w) is not easily replaceable and I have only one 6 pin connector left.
AMD cards in general take a lot more power than the nVidia cards.
So I could run a nVidia GTX960-970 (some only need one 6 pin power connector), but the AMD's Radeon R9 270 is the best I could find that needs only one 6 pin power connector from the AMD side.

Since the majority of PSUs now are single rail designs, in that scenario it would be acceptable to use a dual-molex to PCIe 8-pin or 6-pin connector to get the additional connector. It wouldn't be ideal, but it would work. Keep in mind that the secondary connector, much like the "+4" pins on on motherboard 4+4 power are mainly there as a purely ancilliary safeguard. Many GPUs will function with a single 6- or 8-pin connector populated. As long as your PSU actually delivers 650w (and assuming that it's an OEM unit based on how difficult it is to replace) it should (although there is an equal chance that it doesn't even come close, HP is particularly bad at using competent PSUs) be absolutely fine unless you are running something like an FX 9590 for a CPU.

Edit: even in your situation, the 270x should yield better and more reliable hardware acceleration in PD13 than the 960 for sure, and probably close to the 970.

Your 1150 is NOT obsolete, I think I may have not really thought out my wording. I meant to say that you won't see as significant of an increase between an i5 and an i7 as what you saw moving to an SSD - the heavy storage reliance of video editing makes the perceptible feel much more biased towards storage upgrades.

Also, although you can't go for the massive amounts of additional cores that the 2011-v3 socket will allow, the new Skylake (not released quite yet) CPUs are also LGA1150, and while they don't look like they will see huge performance gains over Haswell, they do gain some efficiency. And you will see a difference moving to an i7, as I said, just not night-and-day like changing your storage media.

Just really, really don't get an nVidia card for rendering performance, even in software (like Premier) that supports it - nVidia's CUDA codecs can be really horrendous in terms of quality. Using OpenCL on nVidia cards yields better quality, but is not nearly as speedy or as well optimized as AMD GPUs.

As to dual GPUs working - I wouldn't bet on it in 100% of cases. As it was, I had to change some driver versions and finally stumble upon actually DISABLING multi-GPU rendering (Crossfire) in the AMD control panel before ANY acceleration would function without crashing PD13. However, having done so, both GPUs load up quite nicely and quite evenly when utilizing them in PD.

In regards to using a RAM drive - that turns a portion of your RAM into basically a hard drive (at least as far as Windows is concerned) capable of operating at hundreds of times the speed of an SSD. The drawbacks however are many - first, you lose access to the RAM in your RAM drive. So if you were to create an 8gb RAM drive out of your 16gb of RAM, you will be back to only have 8gb available for software to use. Second, you are very limited on capacity - is the 8gb RAM drive actually going to be enough for all the footage you are using for a project? Third, RAM drives are volatile storage, meaning they disappear when you power down. Now, most RAM drive utilities will automatically save the data to hard disk and restore it when shutting down and rebooting, but you are really walking a thin data loss line when it comes to data safety. Its completely up to you. I don't use a RAM drive except for random thought experiments and testing, but YMMV.

Finally - while I do agree that Cyberlink should at least list tiers of various levels as to what specs you need for what content, some of this is really self explanatory if you do more research. If one plans on using a computer for ones work or hobby, it behooves one to know at least keep on top of PC hardware. I recommend something like the Linustechtips youtube channel for quick and easy to digest tech knowledge that will stick in your brain and keep you informed of the general specs you will need for whatever PC you happen to require.

Cheers!

nVidia and CUDA support have recurring issues in PD13. nVidia has focused on optimizing their CUDA rather than using the aptly named OpenCL standard which is, well, open. Although OpenCL does work on nVidia cards (mostly, and not always in PD13), the performance is in many cases vastly inferior to AMD GPUs.

The best bang for your buck, strictly in PD13 (the A-word's premier piece of software has gone whole-hog for nVidia's proprietary implentation) is, as it stands, an AMD GPU. Something from the Hawaii series, preferably the R9 290 (not the X, the price premium is not commensurate with the performance increase) does wonders in PD13.

The high end of the R9 series is superior to all but the higher end nVidia Quadro cards in terms of pure OpenCL performance, and can be found for under $300USD (in some cases under $250 depending on where you live). nVidia has focused on gaming, and gaming only for their consumer card architecture, hence the greater suitabilty of AMD cards for everything from Bitcoin mining to video encoding. If you spring for two and disable Crossfire in the AMD drivers, PD13 will even utilize both cards for both rendering and editing, basically giving you over 5,000 compute cores worth of theoretical possible performance, for less than the price of a single GTX 980 with a decent non-reference cooler. To sum that up, if you aren't going to spend a few thousand on a pro-grade nVidia card, don't bother with an nVidia card for OpenCL performance.

As to CPU cores, PD13 will use basically whatever is available. You will probably see an increase in performance moving to an i7, even with an identical physical core count due to the efficiency of hyperthreading - the i7 may be a quad core, but hyperthreading effectively brings it closer to an 8-core in terms of performance in most workloads. My older i7 laptop (dual core hyperthreaded) does amazing work compared to my similar i5 dual core laptop. The increase however will most likely not be as significant as you saw in the move to an SSD (unless you spring for a major CPU upgrade, say to a 5820k or 5960x).

As for RAM - more is almost always better, assuming you are loading enough content to fill it - moving from 16gb to 32gb if all you are working on is 2 minute Youtube spots probably won't give you all that much benefit - if you are working on 20+ minute 1080 or 4k content, you pretty much can't ever have too much RAM. That being said, 8gb is pretty much the bare minimum. At a guess, your system is probably using up at least 3-4gb just in system processes. 16gb should be considered the baseline for working with full HD video.

Anyway, that's my two cents.

Good luck with whatever your PC choice may be - any questions, feel free to ask!

Edit, yes I am using R9 290s myself - I came from using a pair of nVidia GTX 680s, then to a 980 which died an early, watercooling related death. I can honestly say that even using only a single 290, AMD's VCE codec and rendering performance far outpace the OpenCL performance on the 980, and give better quality results with almost equal speed to CUDA optimized software.

Quote: Your pc does not meet the minimum requirements to edit HD videos in my opinion.

Unfortunately, this. That PC was a beast 6-7 years back, but if you look at the quality of home-produced digital video from that era, it gives a good example of what was workable on a PC like that - i.e., not all that impressive (with some notable exceptions, obviously).

And whatever nVidia tech told you the 9500 was suitable for full HD decoding was an incredible optimist. For a short time I used a 9600GT (a much more powerful card) in an HTPC, and it still occasionally had issues with high bitrate full-HD content. Running the high screen resolution you are on the 9500 isn't helping your performance any either - that card is from an era when the average person was running 1024x768 17" screens, and although spec-wise it can drive large displays, it was never really intended for that.

Any video editing software you use will not offer satisfactory performance working with full HD on that machine.

That being said, if you need any advice on an upgrade or replacement path, feel free to ask. You can build a suitable machine on a shoestring budget these days.

Switching to Intel may be a valid idea, depending on what happens between now and when you rebuild your PC. I selected AMD simply to keep the price down, but if you have more to spend, an Intel 5820k on the LGA2011-v3 platform would be a good way to go - the downside is the forced upgrade to DDR4. Moving to an LGA1150 platform, i.e. the 4770K/4790K route will allow you to preserve your current RAM, but will also limit the upgrade path, as well as not offering a substantial performance benefit compared to an AMD when taking the price into consideration.

And yes, the Extreme9 is a superior board, although the Fatal1ty Killer is actually nice (despite it being a "gaming" board) for working with audio since it has a built in headphone amplifier. If you use an external DAC that's not going to be an issue, obviously. Asrock started as a subsidiary of ASUS, and in my opinion they have kept their quality to almost the same level. The Sabertooth is basically the best AM3 board available, but the price reflects that - if you are going to fork out the greenbacks for a Sabertooth, then you may as well move towards Intel.

Finally, I would get a beefier video card than that. The R9 290 offers vastly superior OpenCL for a very small price increase. Not the 290X - the price premium on the X version is not commensurate with the performance increase.

PS That cooler should be good for the CPU - however, check out the Thermaltake Water 3.0 Extreme - more cooling performance for a similar pricepoint.

It looks like DVD quality to me to be perfectly frank.

DVD are ancient by modern digital standards, with low resolution and a lossy video codec from the dark ages of codecs. I think you may just have gotten used to modern media. Happened to me recently when I tried to watch the DVD of Aliens. It was almost shocking how bad it was compared to the BluRay, and Alien was actually a decent transfer - now, the Matrix, that looks truly awful on DVD.

Quote: Tom's Hardware is an excellent site and they gave you very good advise. Time to upgrade. If you don't know how to build our own you could order one from CyberPower. [url=http://www.cyberpowerpc.com/

]http://www.cyberpowerpc.com/

As much as I hate to say it....you may want to look at building a new computer.

The most important things you could do to speed things up are a new CPU and a dedicated GPU for hardware acceleration, however in both of those cases you are probably going to run into power issues either from the voltage regulators on the motherboard if you upgrade the CPU, or from your power supply if you install a beefy OpenCL GPU.

Although in theory that motherboard should support an 8-core CPU, the voltage regulator module (hereinafter "VRM") is a 4+1 phase with no cooling whatsoever, active or passive - completely inadequate to keep juice going to the CPU during long renders or even long preview sessions.

The built in GPU on that board is even less suited to intensive tasks, if it even actually fully support OpenCL.

As I said, while upgrading one or both of those parts will provide you with an order of magnitude more performance, either or both would require additional parts in support. You would be monetarily better off just biting the bullet and replacing the core of the system all at once.

As for good news, if you stick with an AMD system or an Intel 1150 platform, you won't need to replace the RAM, and your SSDs, case, and other peripherals should be fine to use with a new motherboard/PSU/CPU/GPU.

If you want a recommendation for a setup, I'd actually recommend something close to mine in terms of the best price/performance ratio -

Any Asrock or ASUS motherboard with 8 phase power delivery - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157281 is a good choice.

AMD 8-core CPU - I don't recommend the 8350/8370 or the 9000 CPUs, the 8320 is the sweet spot, and if you feel adventurous it overclocks to the same speeds as the 8350/8370 with no difficulties whatsoever. Invest in a quality CPU cooler - an All-in-one watercooler is a great way to go. Rendering and editing can put heavy loads for long periods, and heat is the ultimate enemy of your CPU - it may also cause the CPU to throttle down under load, so a good cooler guarantees that you will be running at full speed at all times.

For a GPU, get something from AMD - right now the prices are rediculously low on their top cards, and they have far, far, far superior OpenCL performance than nVidia cards. The R9 290 (non-X) is the sweet spot, but the 270X and 280X are reasonable choices as well. Try to find one with a non-reference design cooler - non-reference cards run cooler and quieter.

As for the power supply, anything above 650W from a reputable manufacturer - Silverstone, EVGA, Corsair, and a few others (jonnyguru.com is the premier power supply review site, check there if you need to).

As for the rest, salvage everything else. If you live near a Microcenter, buy your motherboard/CPU there - you will probably save 40% off of what newegg charges.

Any other questions, feel free to ask.

Although I haven't seen anyone else with this particular issue, since I managed to fix it (when support was completely useless doing so) I figured I'd post here - note that I have been facepalming since I figured out the problem, nearly non-stop. It's so simple that I overlooked it.

I was having issues with PD13 crashing any time I tried to load a clip onto the timeline, with OpenCL and hardware decoding enabled. With no OpenCL but hardware decoding still on, I was able to actually do some editing, but PD13 still crashed intermittently - totally crashed, no error reporter or anything. With both options off everything was crash free, but somewhat slower that I liked.

After an exchange with support that was less than satisfactory (they told me to try everything I told them I had already tried), and after trying nearly everything, from an OS wipe to replacing the PSU, I was stumped.

I had actually completely given up on PD13 actually working well for me and went back to my older version of Vegas, when something struck me - I am running 2 R9 290s in crossfire, which realistically is an incredibly buggy driver hack. So, I went into AMD's catalyst panel and unchecked crossfire.

Bang presto, everything in PD13 works, and works great. I even see usage on BOTH GPUs now, which I actually wasn't expecting since there really isn't much information on PD13s support of multi-GPGPU.

Anyway, in case anyone else with crosfire is having issues, I hope this helps.

Side note, again for AMD users, the Gaming Evolved app still can break the Capture tab in PD13. If Webcam capture crashes PD on you, kill Gaming Evolved and you should be golden.

Quote: I just upgraded from pd12 to director suite 3 including pd13 and it is 10 times worse than pd12, when adding files it is slow & clunky, same when being dragged to the timeline.

Also the 2 new formats h.265 and xavcs are not even supported by youtube, so whats the point in them.

For me personally, PD13 is actually somewhat faster than 12 in most situations - perhaps if you provided details on your system and configuration you might be able to get some assistance.

Also, Youtube isn't the only (or even the primary) thing people do with videos.

If it's a legitimate complaint, the BBB is a good place to visit. Otherwise, you can leave reviews on cnet, Newegg's product page, and most sites that do reviews have a user comment section. Heck, you've got some decent video editing software - use it to post a video review on Youtube or your service of choice.

Keep in mind that if people do not agree with your opinions, many of these venues are unmoderated, or at least lightly moderated - you will be flamed.

The advantage of a moderated forum like this one is that you can voice your concerns in a friendly, pleasant manner (mostly) without fear of emotional damage from trolls.

The community here seems great, and from the perusing that I have done since purchasing (quite satisfied so far, by the way) in these forums, I don't see any heavy handed banhammering or crazy censorship of people's legitimate issues.

Hope you get your issues settled, good luck.

Edit: If you have the patience for it, you could go to reddit as well.

Hi all, new to Powerdirector 13 and Powerdirector in general, although I am an expereinced techie so don't be afraid to throw obscure and arcane possible solutions at me.

I am currently having a crash issue when switching to the "Capture" tab when my Logitech C615 webcam is connected. There are no error messages or popups, Windows simply reports that PowerDirector has crashed. Without the webcam connected, the capture tab loads properly - however if I connect the webcam after that, the software crashes immediately.

After some googling, I did try one solution which was to run the software in compatibilty mode - when running in ANY compatibility mode, the capture tab will load and not crash the application, however the webcam will not be present as a selectable device - however, the microphone integrated into it does show up.

I have take the following actions:
Connected the webcam to a different port (24 including a hub).
Running the webcam as the only connected device aside from a mouse.
Verifying that all Windows updates and drivers are up-to-date.Run the software as administrator.
Uninstalled and reinstalled the software (with no AV software running)
Performed a system wipe with a fresh Windows install and complete update of all files and drivers.
Running in safe mode (with predictable results).
Installing MSVC redistributables.

Note that the Webcam does function properly in other software.

I am at my wit's end.

DXDIAG attached, please, please help, thanks in advance....

********************SOLVED*******************

Well, (finally) figured it out. Just for the hell of it I started up the Logitech webcam software and let it run while I loaded up PowerDirector - and voila, the capture tabbed worked - that got me thinking that for some reason something else was causing a conflict in accessing the hardware.

Well, since a lot of what I do is "Let's Play" (goodness I hate that term...) style footage recorded from gaming, I have AMD's Raptr app running for screen capture - and that seems to pull exclusive access rights from the webcam, whether or not you are actually using it. Running the Logitech app apparently forces it to release the driver and lets PowerDirector access the hardware.

Solution: In my case, either run the Logitech software concurrently with PowerDirector, or exit Raptr while capturing with the webcam.

Thanks to anyone who put any thought into this!