Messages posted by AllyH

Thank you all for your help/input here. So the main takeaway is that Power Director will perform better the more cores/threads I throw at it as it uses that architecture rather than leveraging the GPU.

I've watched a few clips of different video editing platforms which show that the GPU takes the majority of the load both when navigating the timeline etc, and producing.

The producing time is less of a problem to me - but if I can speed up the timeline and editing experience that is the main motivator here.

So a Ryzen 3rd gen processor looks like the winner - just need to trade off which one against $$ (am guessing the newer 5000 series are going to be too $$$ - but who knows).

Hello

Thank you very much for your reply - it is very interesting what options I have. I'll take a look at the CPU charts, as I'll have to balance off performance with $$$

Would a fair trade off be the 3900x, or even the 3700? And what motherboard would you recommend with a Ryzen, e.g. a B450 or B550, or would I need to go for a 570?

Forgive the likely stupid question - but when you say I'd need a GYX 10xx series card to get hardware encoding of HEVC/H.265 files - is that something that will only affect the rendering performance? So I'd still be able to produce H.265 with my existing GTX 960 - it would just take longer? Given our iPhones are basically all taking H.265 would it make sense just in terms of viewing and handling these files if we upgraded the GPU at some point anyway?

Thanks!

Quote You've got a decent system, very similar to the one I built in 2014 for editing; but things have changed a lot in the CPU realm since then and I think that's where your biggest chance to improve performance lies.

Here's a comparision chart showing your current CPU, the one I upgraded to 2 years ago and the one I have now.

To do a major CPU upgrade you'll also need a new motherboard, but you should be able to use your existing 32GB of RAM and all your hard drives. You've already got a nice SSD for your C: drive, but if you wanted to get the quickest boot and app load times I'd suggest using the M.2 slot on your new motherboard as it's 10x faster than SATA.

The good news is that you can also keep your GTX 960 as long as you're going to be producing to AVC/H.264 because hardware encoding is supported by that card.

If you think you'll be producing to HEVC/H.265 and want to use hardware encoding, you should upgrade to at least the GTX 10xx series. This nVidia chart is a handy reference and you'll want to scroll all the way to the right to see the full NVENC capbilities of each card.

In the meantime, you should update your video driver as the one you have installed dates from July 2019. You can get the latest Game Ready version from a couple days ago or the latest Studio Driver whcih may or may not make a difference when using PD. In my experience it's best to only install the video driver rather than all the components the installer wants to include (unless you're a gamer).

On the nVidia Installation Options page, chose Custom (Advanced) then select only the Graphics Driver.

Hello

I built my PC myself about 4 years ago and at the time it was pretty high spec. It was built with the intention of being capable of doing video editing and we've been using PD14 on it since it was built.

We recently upgraded to PD19 ultra and are enjoying the new features.

We are noticing however that quite often the program is a bit sluggish when being used, for example when loading the cropping tool, and selecting which parts of a video file to choose, or switching between clips on the timeline.

I have included the dxdiag file as an attachment here which shows the spec of the PC.

I would be very grateful if anyone could recommend some updates I could make to the PC to allow smoother and quicker responsiveness when using PD19.

I'm a programmer so have some hardware knowledge, but not masses - so any thoughts on a CPU update, or a GPU update etc would be most appreciated.

Many thanks

Quote

Thank you optodata for taking the time for your detailed replies. I will have a go and the above points and Windows repairs and I'll let you know how it goes.

Sadly neither of the two options for windows fixes suggested above have worked. Will continue to look into it.

Quote Like PDM and tomasc, I have no trouble importing and playing those m4a files in PDR14, and after reviewing the DxDiag results I'm wondering if you could do a couple things on your PC.

At the end of the report, the last 10 serious app crashes are listed (WER0, etc) and often when I see a wide variety of crashes there it turns out that some of Windows core files are damaged. Not every time, but enough that I'd recommend that you run the commands shown here and see if they can find and/or repair any issues.

The other thing I noticed is that you're running a fairly new nVidia driver for your GTX 960, and normally I'd say you should update it to the latest version. Unfortunately, nVidia removed the interface that older versions of PDR used to access the NVENC hardware 2 years ago, so PDR14 isn't able to use drivers newer than 411.70 if you want to use hardware encoding when producing.

If you want to restore that ability, download the driver here and do a clean install from the custom menu so that the current driver is fully removed before the older one is installed. You'll have to reboot afterwards but you'll have hardware encoding back.

Thank you optodata for taking the time for your detailed replies. I will have a go and the above points and Windows repairs and I'll let you know how it goes.

Quote M4a audio files are listed in the specs of both PD14 and the latest PD19 as a supported format. You can download the free trial to see if it solves the issue.

You never said if the same m4a files play properly in your other win 10 apps outside of iTunes like the WMP, Groove, VLC, QuickTime, etc. That would point to a win 10 issue.

They play fine in both iTunes, and WMP. I haven't tried any other audio players...

Quote Yes. There are at least 8 .m4a files used in this project. I would convert those audio files used first and then change that in an xml editor to the mp3 or whatever you choose. You can then place the converted files in the same folder and open the .pds file or in a different folder where you have to navigate to find them.

Thanks tomasc. I'll wait to hear what Cyberlink support say, or the off chance someone else has had the same issue. But at least this is a fallback.

I can do some scripting to do this en mass as I've got over 200 pds files, and I suspect most of them have m4a files in!

Getting m4a files to work would be preferable! Do you think an upgrade of PD would resolve the issue? Would this even be worth exploring as I know 14 is quite old now...

Quote Thank you for the information. The project opened properly in my 64 bit PD14 and the two .m4a audio files also played properly. See the screenshot. Of the two .m4a files one is constant and the other variable bit rate as Apple audio with iTunes info.

I opened WaveEditor2 supplied with PD14 and converted one to .wma and the other to .mp3. M4a is also available. Both play properly in all players, including the default groove player in win 10. Converting can be one of the answers unless CS support can find a solution for this issue. There is none on my pc.

Thanks for trying!

Out of interest, is it possible to manually edit a .pds file and not corrupt it? So if I convert one of the problem m4a files to mp3 and then just open the pds file in notepad++ and change the filepath to mp3, should that be possible?

Quote Hi,

The version of PDR14 currently installed on my system is 32 bit Ultra 1810, so earlier than yours.

However, your project opens OK, but with blank timeline clips (as expected) and both .m4a tracks import and play from both the media library and the timeline.

I will try and update to the latest patch to get a better comparison, but I would suspect that it may be more of a windows update issue perhaps, or other updated software, rather than your PDR14 which has remained unchanged??

Perhaps look at an uninstall/re-install of PDR and see if that corrects anything??

Cheers
PowerDirector Moderator

Thank you for your quick reply. I have already tried an uninstall/reinstall but sadly to no avail. I agree that it is likely to be a change on my windows environment rather than PDR itself as that has only had one patch applied to it - quite a while ago - which didn't affect anything. Having said that - I'm not aware of any crazy updates I've done, or pieces of software I've installed which would affect the PDR link to m4a files.

I also have a support ticket open with Cyberlink themselves as hopefully they'll be able to suggest potential things to try to resolve the problem - I'm not averse to upgrading what is an old version of PDR also - but given that may not fix the issue would be a potential waste of money! Given it's throwing an error our of their codebase - I'm hoping they can suggest what may be causing it and a potential remedy.

One other option would be a mass update of my PDR files to look for all that referenced an m4a file, find those m4a files and conver them to mp3, and then update the PDR filepaths - although I'm not sure if PDR will be happy if I start just editing the pdr file directly in notepad++ like that. Plus it may take a while!

Quote It would help if you could upload one of the m4a clips that's causing you trouble to a cloud folder on Google Drive or OneDrive and paste the link to it here so other people can test it on their systems. See the Share a file publicly section in this Google FAQ or this OneDrive support page if you need help doing so.

It might also help if you could follow the steps shown in the ReadMe Before Posting guide so we can see how your PC is configured. Finally, please tell us the exact name and version number of PD14 (eg Ulimate 14.0.4207.0).

Apologies for not providing the correct info here. Hopefully all of this helps...

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/0q1vtfhnlp00pcp/AAAIV9rGrvVp2Xy6XBuMdNZTa?dl=0

There are eight files in this link:

(as requested)
2. Bangkok - March 2016 - trailer.pds - note I cannot open this project

3. 01 Baba Yetu [feat. Soweto Gospel Ch.m4a - this is one of the .m4a tracks referenced in the above pds project
4. 13 Four Seasons in One Day.m4a - another m4a file

5. crash report.xml - the report file generated by PDS when it crashes
6. crash screenshot.png
7. dxdiag.txt
8. minidump.zip - a zipped version of the .dmp file created by PDR when it crashes

If I've missed off any information that would help please let me know and I'll include it in this folder/forum.

Thanks

Hello

I have owned PD14 for 5 years and never had this problem. I have hundreds of pds projects that include m4a audio files which have worked fine.

But starting this weekend opening any of these existing projects causes PDR to crash between 59 and 60% of opening the file (after importing media ...).

Also - if you open a new project and import an m4a file it will crash immediately.

In both situations you see the PDR.exe has stopped working error screen.

Looking into the dump file which is generated it points to an access violation in ImageWrapper.dll (a cyberlink dll).

I'm not sure what has changed either in PDR or on my machine for this to start happening, but it is very frustrating.

I know m4a files are iTunes files and there is some noise to do with protected music - but these files have worked fine in projects for years and only now are causing a problem.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks!