Messages posted by GS kid

Try this fix (3rd post down) here....

http://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/posts/list/47025.page

Let us know if it worked for you.

Technical support took almost a week to respond to me and didn't give me the correct solution (solved by a fellow forum member).

Their customer service on the other hand, for a partial refund (I had not received my upgrade discount at checkout and overpaid for it) was pretty good. Got a guy on the phone and had my Paypal account refunded in a matter of days.

This forum should be your first stop for help.... then.... go to technical support if we fail to give you a solution that works. Always give the forum a few days for users to answer you before hitting up Cyberlink support.

PowerDirector does seem to add or subtract frames randomly. I've used the trim tool for 4K 30fps clips and for example had the IN position at 00.00.04.00 and OUT position at 00.00.44.00 ... showing a duration of exactly 00.00.40.00 which is correct.

But other times it could say the duration is 00.00.40.02 (2 frames over) or 00.00.39.28 (2 frames under).... even though the duration between the IN and OUT positions is exactly 40 seconds and zero frames. So I have to adjust the IN or OUT trim POINTS either up or down 2 frames to make it an even 40 seconds on the duration counter. Just a weird glitch to me.

I seem to be the oddball here. Rolling back my Nvidia drivers to the previous version fixed all my BSOD crashes.... but I still have my Geforce Experience installed (never removed it) and I haven't had a single crash in PD14. I've been editing my large 4K resolution projects for days now, so there's been plenty of chances for it to crash... yet it never does. I guess my laptop is special...(knocks on wood)!

Quote: As for editing videos while in vacation... really? Why even go in that vacation then if you are not enjoying it?

Because video editing is a hobby for me. A hobby is an optional activity done for fun. After a long day of vacation fun (and filming parts of it), there isn't much to do at night back in my motel room since I rarely watch television(except a little YouTube watching).

So... I bust out my laptop, eager to review that day's footage and start editing it..... all because it's fun to do. And having fun on vacation is the point.... right?

Quote: Laptops are the worst choice for video editing. Their video cards are not always perfectly identical with the reference design so the generic nVidia drivers might not work always. You need to stay with the drivers posted on the laptop manufacturer website.
Also, Optimus technology found in all the laptops with dual video chips (one internal in CPU and another the nVidia GPU) can throw another wrench in the mix.

I'll agree with you for the staying with video drivers from the laptop maker is usually best. Learned that with my last AMD based laptop. On the other hand... with my current Nvidia GPU / i7-based laptop I have updated my drivers through GeForce Experience for the last year with no problems until this latest driver.

As for laptops being worst for video editing? No... smart phones and tablets are the worst for video editing. Anything is worse in performance compared to a desktop computer. But rendering on my laptop using GPU acceleration is over 3x faster than having my i7 cpu render it alone. I'm quite happy with it's performance.

It's really handy to start editing video on a vacation trip back at your hotel room without needing to lug around a desktop computer. You can just upload it off the laptop that night from your room.

As for Optimus technology? Not an issue for most since people rarely find the need to edit and render on battery power. It just sucks through your battery life and most people can wait until they plug into an electrical outlet to do their editing.

Quote: Hi yes, thanks.

I am more concerned with SVRT causing stutters not so much for the speed of using SVRT, but rather because not using it re-encodes the clips which degrades the quality. (SVRT skips re-encoding those parts).

I recently made a lot of slow motion clips I might reuse in different things with different transitions and things and don't want them to get encoded again when they are used, when they shouldnt have to be...

While I'm not an "EXPERT", I am pretty well versed in most things about video technology. But your worry about degradation of video quality from a re-encode? I guess it depends on what you are doing with it.

For instance... My Sony AX100 camcorder records 4K at my choice of a 60Mbps or a 100Mbps video bitrate. I always have it set to 100Mbps cuz I want the original video clip to be of the highest quality. Even when there isn't enough movement of the filming subject to technically justify such a high bit rate, I just leave it set at 100Mbps anyways.

Now it records this in Sony's XAVC-S format. I edit and then render out to the same 4K 100Mbps XAVC-S format. If I then (always maintaining the same resolution, bitrate and file format) take that rendered clip and re-render it.... and then again re-render that re-rendered clip..... are your eyes gonna be able to tell it's a 3rd generation clip compared to the 1st generation clip? I highly doubt it. It's not the obvious generational degradation you would notice with analog video.

Where I guess the most chance of degradation of video is to appear is when the video changes resolution, bit rate, codecs and maybe file format. But I can't see the chance of much visual impact on a clip when I re-render that clip using the same exact resolution, bit rate, codec and file format as the source clip.

So for me personally....SVRT would be more about speed than the video quality issue.

I stopped using SVRT quite early on because of the random hiccups it would add to my videos. It may have been during transitions but I can't remember. I just know that it happened often enough that I stopped using it cuz I couldn't depend on it to give me flawless video consistently. I use the Intel Sync option and it seems to give me a decent render speed increase without the hiccups issues.

I can't wait to see when they get that hiccup issue fixed cuz SVRT is blazing fast otherwise. Though I highly doubt they even know it's a problem or are even working on it even if they do know. Time will tell. But as far as I'm concerned.... SVRT is broken. Cuz I'm not publishing my videos with hiccups in them.

Quote: GS kid, I've seen that happen often when the encoding processes has an abnormal termination. What I think occurs is that if PD for some reason had some type of unique encoding error for a particular format it sets a flag in windows registry. Once done, anytime one try’s the same task, you get this perhaps unwarranted error. If your system should be capable of producing the format in question, one needs to reset the windows registry key back to 0 from the imposed value of 1 for that particular format.

Edit windows registry at your own risk! With regedit migrate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Cyberlink\CES_FunctionLogger\Data and see if any values are still set to 1 with PD not loaded. PD13 still works as it uses a different key value vs PD14 for XAVC-S at least for Nvidia. All those values should essentially be zero.

For me with Nvidia PD13 uses value:
NVKEPLER_UNKNOWN_FMT[H264,AAC]_3840x2160p

while PD14 uses:
NVKEPLER_MPEG4_XAVC[H264,AAC]_3840x2160p

for the same XAVC S 3840x2160/60p 60Mbps hence my guess the reason PD13 still works.

Jeff

Dude you are a lifesaver! That fix worked perfectly!! That Registry profile did in fact have a "1" value (I also noticed an MPEG-2 profile happen to have a "1" value too) and changing it to "0" brought back Fast Video Redering for use again. Tested it out with a clip and it went just fine. Thanks!

It's like PowerDirector 14 is set up that if it encounters problems of any kind while rendering in certain resolutions and formats using Fast Video Rendering, it just assumes it's a permanent problem and blacklists it from use for present and any future hardware acceleration.

That's a very weird and dumb way to approach the problem. Most programs allow you to just try a function over again instead of taking the function completely away. Another thing that's odd is that PD14 is set up for blacklisting it in the registry, instead of simply some PowerDirector preferences initialization file that's within the program's folders. Messing with the registry is a pretty drastic step.

It also angers me that it doesn't allow a user friendly way of turning it back ON once it's been turned OFF. I'm computer savy enough to go into the registry, but your average joe has no clue and is nervous (and rightly so) that he might make things worse.

Before I tried your fix, I sent a tech support question ticket to CyberLink with a link to this thread. Hopefully I get a decent response. They need to fix this so that it never happens again OR that it is clearly reversible by the user in a menu from within the program itself.

I had the exact same KERNEL_SECURITY_CHECK_FAILURE BSOD issue on my HP laptop with both PowerDirector 14 and Sony Vegas 13 everytime I tried to use them. Likely due to both setup to access the GPU for rendering acceleration looking back in hindsight.

Word on Windows 10 forums was that the Nvidia Driver v361.43 that came out on 12-21-15 was the culprit for many people and to rollback your driver to v359.06 released on 12-1-2015 to remedy it.

I did so and both Vegas and Powerdirector work now and not a single BSOD since. So the driver rollback worked for me! Word also on the forums is Nvidia is aware of the problem and working on a fix.

So I normally render my 4K video to XAVC-S which is also the native format of my clips from my Sony AX100 camcorder. I use a custom 4K UHD 30fps XAVC-S profile set to 100Mbps video, 384Kbps audio. I've ALWAYS had it set for Intel Quick Sync Video acceleration with no problems prior to today. Intel Quick Sync always worked great for speeding up my rendering of XAVC-S 4K videos... including recently when working on my train videos.

So last night while rendering a clip, the progress bar stopped in it's tracks for the first time ever and I noticed the estimated render time clock was increasing. The progress bar wasn't moving any further for awhile, so I pressed the cancel rendering option. But it wasn't working. I tried to close the program but it wouldn't respond to that either.

The whole time I noticed the hard drive was lit up solid. It was getting used a lot. I opened up the task manager to not only force PD14 to quit, but to also see what was accessing the hard drive and hogging resources.

Turns out my Malwarebytes scanner software had just decided to run one of it's random periodic disk scans it normally performs a few times a day. So I ended that task and PD14 too. I turned off the scanner software so it wouldn't interupt my rendering anymore.

I loaded up PD14 again and for some reason the Fast Video Rendering options are NOW unselectable for 4K video in the XAVC-S section when it's always been available (and I have always used it) in the past. That includes ALL the default 4K profiles. BOTH 1080 and 720 resolution XAVC-S are still allowed to use acceleration, but no XAVC-S 4K profiles are allowed to anymore. But under the H264 section, I can still use acceleration to speed up 4K rendering there just fine.

I still have PD13 installed and tried it out. Acceleration for 4K XAVC-S profiles still works like a charm in PD13! I rebooted the computer and PD14 still wouldn't allow it for 4K XAVC-S. I uninstalled PD14 and reinstalled it. Now I was tired.... I'm not sure if it was before or after the PD14 software update was installed... but the options were no longer greyed out and were back to normal. So I thought...YAY...it's fixed! So I worked on another clip and now the lack of an acceleration option for 4K XAVC-S is back.

I guess I can use PD13 in the mean time to get acceleration for 4K XAVC-S rendering, but that doesn't explain nor help me with the issue in PD14.

Anybody have a clue how to get it back?

I was originally gonna cut and repost my post here too. But it's just easier to post the link.....

http://www.avsforum.com/forum/161-camcorders/2257274-don-t-bother-uploading-4k-clips-higher-than-youtube-s-video-bit-rate-recommendation.html

I did this to help others to save time on uploading the huge files 4K creates when you don't have to.

Bottom Line: Based on my testing with 100Mbps video Vs. 45 Mbps video .....Uploading a 4K 30fps video to YouTube that has a video bit rate higher than YouTube's 45 Mbps upload recommendation is pointless. Cuz it doesn't improve the quality of the final product at all once YouTube's VP9 compression butchers it in the conversion. Better to render it down in PD14 to a 45 Mbps bit rate clip and get the same YouTube video quality at half the upload time!

Eugen157...

I looked for a VP9 encoder on the net and almost all of them are for Adobe Premiere. But I noticed trusty ol' Super © converter supports it. I've used it for years and totally forgot it does VP9. Problem is...it only outputs up to 1080 res for the VP9 format. But I tried it out anyways to compare it to H265. The program would only allow me a max video bitrate of about 9.8Mbs for this format. It would not allow me to use two higher bitrate options for some odd reason.

The VP9 output file was unplayable in WMP and PD 14 would only play the sound...so I played it in Super ©. Looked pretty decent, but since it's not 4K....I have no use for it. Outputting the same clip in PD at 1080 res with H265 at the same exact settings as the VP9 file produced a file about 500KB smaller. So even less reason to use VP9.

But it proved your point.... H265 is too demanding of my hardware at 4K res cuz my laptop plays H265 at 1080 with no problems at all. I even dropped the H265 4K output down to 20Mbs and it still had issues.

So that's that. I'll stick to XAVC and live with the long upload times. Since I won't be making train videos that often, it won't be as big of an issue. Quality over quantity!

Thanks for HDR-HC1 footage. I'll share the link on a train sim forum I get on cuz you got some good shots. You can tell it's from an older camera. It's a little softer and less sharp than today's higher pixel 1080 cam sensors. The colors aren't quite up to par of today's output and are slightly washed out at times. That scene at the end where the train comes by on that long curve..... the exposure of the sunlit area in the background is massively blown out! Wow...LOL! I'm guessing it had so-so AE or limited options for ME?

BTW.... what's the max bitrate on that cam?

Eugen157...

I only really wanted H265 to reduce file sizes and hence reduce uploading time to YouTube. Space reduction on disk is only a very minor secondary reason.

YouTube uses Google's in-house developed open/royalty-free VP9 codec for it's 4K video streaming (VP10.. it's successor was just published in August, 2015). My Samsung 4K UHD TV's built-in YouTube app supports VP9 (as do Chromium, Chrome, Firefox, Opera and MS Edge browsers) and the quality looks pretty stunning for streaming video.

Google says VP9 wasn't made to compete with H265 but to simply compliment it...although clearly it seems to be turning out that way considering Google's goal for VP9 was compression efficiency that was higher than H265. It certainly seems to have more support at this time and to be less demanding of hardware at a fairly equal video quality.

Google's YouTube upload format page doesn't list VP9 as supported for upload. I'm assuming they convert it to VP9 once your clip is uploaded in one of the supported formats. Older comments on the net about uploading in VP9 format suggest it doesn't work, but a much newer webpage on the subject seems to suggest YouTube supports it now.

I was wondering because there are programs on the net that will convert to VP9 and if it saves significant space, then hence the shorter upload times I'm seeking.

PD 14 allows uploading directly to YouTube in the Production section of the editor AND has a 4K UHD 3840× 2160 profile to choose from. But since we never see the output file (it gets uploaded directly to YouTube), I have no idea if it's being converted to VP9 on-the-fly (thus saving me upload time compared to uploading the large original XAVC S file) or simply sending an H264 file anyways. I see no indication in the PD 14 specs that it supports VP9 in anyway... be it importing, exporting or uploading.....so I just speculate it's uploaded in H264 and thus saving me little or no time in uploading.

I may try a VP9 converter and test not only the quality of the output but also the file sizes compared to XAVC S. Then I gotta see if YouTube will accept it for upload.

BTW... since H265 appears to be so demanding on hardware, I expect it's adoption to be slow until more mainstream computers can handle it. Gaming PC hardware specs that can handle it aren't the norm.

PS.. I'll PM you a train video of mine..... although it's just in 720p from a point and click camera I brought on my last trip cuz I wanted to travel light on my way to Vegas to see a Skrillex concert at the XS nightclub inside the Wynn Encore casino. I had left my Sony HDR-SR11 1080i HD cam (2008-era) at home and got the FDR-AX100 about a month after the trip.

Quote:

I render in H.265 80Mbps from my Samsung NX1 camera clips and I convert to XAVC-S 100Mbps for YouTube. I upload from YouTube those files without problems.

On my pc WMP is the smoothest player for both H.265 and H.264. Perhaps it is because I downloaded the K-Lite codec pack before upgrading to Windows 10.

First of all... it's great to hear that YouTube accepts XAVC S video and all at 100Mbs! That means I can edit and output in the clip's native format without need for conversion.

As for WMP being the smoothest player for your H264 and H265? Well XAVC S is a H264 codec and WMP plays these native clips from my camera buttery smooth!!

As for H265? My NEW test clip is 10-secs long. It's the same source clip as before, but this time I used PD 14's default 4K UHD 30p (37Mbs) H265 profile instead of customizing it to 100Mbs. Just like the original test...in WMP the sound would end at the 10 second mark like it's supposed to but the video is displaying slower and plays for 15 seconds with obviously the last 5 seconds in total silence.

I took Eugen157's advice ....downloaded and tried Media player classic 64 and at the 3 & 6 second marks of my 10-sec test clip it would pause both video and sound for 2 seconds then play again..... but both video and sound ended at the 10-sec mark like they were supposed to. I tried Daumplayer (never got around to Gom Player) and also tried DivX 10 with their H265 codec installed. BOTH reacted basically the same way as WMP... audio plays for 10-sec, video for 15-secs.

If I play the H265 clip from inside PD 14 (the program that created the file in the first place) BOTH audio and video are in sync and end at 10-sec like they are supposed to.... but there is a ton of dropped frames. So when the camera pans there are clearly jumps without frames in-between that gives it a jutter-like-look. WMP's playback of it looks a bit smoother, but is playing the video for 15-sec/audio for 10-sec..... which means the 30fps video is actually playing at around 20fps.

I went into Sony Vegas 13 and it doesn't support H265 clips in loading OR in rendering. There is a 3rd party hack plug-in that will allow you to work with them but I'm not gonna bother going the unofficial route. I'll wait until official support arrives in a future version or update.

I will say this about H265... it does make pretty small files. The original 100Mbs 4K UHD 10-sec XAVC S clip was 117MB in size and in H265 at 37Mbs ended up at 41MB in size.

So until the support and playback bugs are worked out, I'm gonna leave H265 alone for now and just work in XAVC S for the foreseeable future. The files will just be bigger I guess. I highly doubt the K-Lite codec pack will work for me if all these other programs I tried with their H265 Codecs (including WMP) can't play it back right or smoothly.

Another problem with working with 100Mbs XAVC S files are they are HUGE in size. I recorded a handful of clips of a local train and they total 25GB before I start even editing some of it down. And the final movie of it is still gonna be around 15GB-20GB I'm guessing when I'm done.

My upload speed of my DSL is about 768Kbs and that's gonna take a long time! Even if I use my friend's cable internet with 6Mbs upload speed it's still going to be awhile. I was hoping H265 would help me here but apparently not at this time. I may look into recording my video at 60Mbs to bring down the file sizes and ultimately the upload times to YouTube.

Of course a desktop will always beat a laptop in performance and upgrade-ability. But just in the last few years, the gap between desktop and laptop performance has narrowed considerably compared to in the past. Laptop CPUs and GPUs are no longer the 2nd class performance jokes they once were 5+ years ago. But desktops will always reign supreme. They should.... considering the room they have for high wattage power supplies to feed any power hungry CPU and GPU you want.

If you have the money... you can have the best of BOTH worlds. Alienware's laptops allow you to use their powerful on-board GPUs when on the go... AND when attached to their optional external graphics amplifier, will allow you to use the latest monster desktop video card with your laptop when at home. And when a better video card comes out, simply buy it and pop it in.

I prefer the portability of my laptop and am willing to sacrifice some performance and ability to upgrade in pursuit of that. I film trains for my YouTube channel in often very remote areas off the beaten path and like the fact I can immediately preview and even edit my clips out in the field IF I so choose to.... or simply wait and edit it when I get back to my hotel room.

My GTX 850M in my laptop is a 1st generation Maxwell. I get plenty of fast rendering with it in PD. Is it as powerful as a desktop and does it render just as quick? No. But it's a gaming-class GPU that's powerful enough that I'm certainly "in the hunt" as they say when it comes to rendering times. And thanks to the HDMI port, I can edit on OR use as a preview window.... my 40-inch 4K UHD television at home. So with the big 4K screen, both a wireless mouse & keyboard, it feels like I have a desktop too.

To ynotfish...

Ok...LPCM was a nightmare. My windows media player wouldn't play the sound at all...just the video. Tried H265 and WMP played the audio fine, but the video lagged behind the audio big time. YouTube doesn't support my camera's native XAVC S that I know of (which will be the target for my clips on my YouTube channel). So I compromised a bit on the audio quality and decided on a custom profile that consists of H264 with a MP4 container, 100Mbs video and AAC audio at 384Kbs and 48kHz. It runs just fine in WMP.

Quote: Gs Kid
I think the biggest asset in my setup of PD14, is its ability to fully make use of the GTX960 abilities.

Still amazing to see it encode HEVC 4K in an hour what used to take days.

There is free software called MEDIAINFO it will give you data of a video file, better than WP

I did download and install MEDIAINFO. I like it although it's only off from what WP reports by only a few tenths of a megabit, so WP is perfectly okay to use. What I found strange about it was that MEDIAINFO showed the Data Rate and the Total Bitrate as having different values on the original XAVC clip.... just as WP reported them having different values. But.... for the two rendered MP4 clips from the test, MEDIAINFO shows the Data Rate and Total Bit Rate as having the EXACT SAME vaules....while WP shows a slight difference between their values.

A question for everybody....

As I stated before.....the original clip's audio had a bit rate of
1537Kbs with a 48kHz sample rate. Both of the test output files had a
bit rate of 127Kbs and a 24kHz sample rate. That's a rather large drop in quality...especially the bitrate. The original XAVC clip's audio is PCM. The two test render clips are encoded in AAC (LC).

The question is..... how do I increase the sound quality of the output clips to better match the original clip's sound quality?.... Considering the significant drop in bitrate in the rendered clips!

Well ynotfish....

I did some tests. I have a 10-second 4K 30p clip from my AX100 at the 100mbs setting. Using windows properties (and me rounding the numbers) it said the clip had a Data Rate of 96.5Mbs and a Total Bitrate of 98.1Mbs. When I used the intelligent SVRT button the output file render had a Data Rate of 90.1Mbs and a Total Bitrate of 90.3Mbs. Then I used the intelligent SVRT button a second time, but customized it manually to a 100Mbs seting just like you showed me and the output file had a Data Rate of 94.9Mbs and a Total Bit rate of 95.0Mbs.

Also... the original clip's audio had a bit rate of 1537Kbs with a 48kHz sample rate. Both of the test output files had a bit rate of 127Kbs and a 24kHz sample rate.

So I guess I can render output clips higher than 60Mbs after all. And to think I never had to upgrade to 14 at all to acomplish this in the first place.

Quote: PesiMan.

Yes, that copter shoot looks pretty cool.

I actually do not follow my own rules by using 50Mb, the default PD14 rather than the cameras 60Mb.

A month ago I was shooting the take off in Juneau harbor of a small plane. The entire water surface had very fine ripples on it as I followed the plane with the camcorder.

Later looking at the scene on a 4K PC monitor I could not believe my eyes, the shot was unusable, full of "mosquito noise".

After several thousand 4K shots this was the first time that happened, most likely caused by the rippled water. Just too much picture detail and not enough band width to carry it. Very much like the copter shot.

The camera allows 100Mb, a number of members on the AX100 forum too feel that 100 is overkill, so the final output for me is 50Mb VBR.

Eugene

As a fellow AX100 owner myself I say the 100Mbs mode is there precisely to help with these issues such as rippling water, river rapids, a dense forest with winds blowing through the leaves of the treetops and of course fast moving objects in general. Otherwise 60Mbs is fine if the camera remains mainly static and most of what it's filming does too.

I almost always film at it's 100Mbs rate for the same reason I film in 4K.... having the highest quality source material usually results in output material at it's highest quality....especially for down-converts to 1080 or 720 or lower bitrates. I only shoot in the 1080P 50Mbs XAVC S mode of this camera when I need the 60fps for very fast object filming.

I just upgraded from PD Ultra 13 to Ultra 14 tonight and I'm very disappointed that Cyberlink still kept the maximum output bitrate of renders at 60Mbs. It was the main reason and hope (assumption) when I upgraded that it would support a higher output bitrate. 60Mbs will be okay in most cases, but if the video really needs to remain at 100Mbs in order to not be a fairly blocky mess.... I'll have to resort to my Vegas Pro 13's 4K 100Mbs XAVC S output profile for those renders. Otherwise the render times in Vegas are the longest I've heard of. About 3x longer in general than PowerDirector takes!