Messages posted by Dimitrios123

I never tried to make such a video but could it be due to the embedded orientation information? I think you could easily perform a batch edit of your photos (to fix the orientation instead of letting PD to read the embedded information on each photo) using a free image browser like IrfanView or Fastone.

update: Since my previous post, I have refined my Keyframe workflow as such:

1. In the main (timeline) window, find the first point of interest then click Keyframe button
2. Enter a rotation value (Clip Attributes group) and press Enter. A rotation keyframe is created (note: clicking the respective keyframe "diamond" is not needed)
3. Without moving the playback slider, enter the value of Height or Width (note: clicking the respective keyframe diamond is not needed), press Enter. After experimenting, I found that I have to increase the value by a factor of ~0.03 times the rotation change. E.g. +/-1 degree of rotation needs ~1.03 Height or Width. This step will remove the black stripes.

As long as "Maintain Aspect Ratio" is checked, step 3 is a relatively easy way to crop without affecting positioning or introducing distortion.

Still a bit slow and the preview is choppy (when I drag the playback slider) but definitely more accurate than Crop & Zoom. Thank you all for your contributions to this discussion. They inspired me to try new things and improve my workflow.

Hello Hatti,

I didn't know that changes of viewport could automatically insert keyframes. Nice tip! So, I experimented in Keyframe window and found that I don't even need to set any keyframe at the beginning of the clip. All that is needed is to:
1. Find the first point of interest then click Keyframe button in the main application window
2. Set a rotation keyframe there and adjust the amount of rotation
3. Adjust the viewport in order to remove the black stripes (the weakest part of this method!)
4. (usually needed) Reset the Position keyframe in order to remove the unwanted move that was introduced in step 3.

Still clunky since it requires a lot of mouse clicking. But it's much more precise (ie more rotation and timeline resolutions, and it uses a larger preview window) than Crop & Zoom. Comparing to the PiP Designer, the Keyframe method it seems less choppy to me, plus that playing the clip does not prevent editing of clip attributes (as in PiP). I will experiment on this in difficult camera tilt situations. Still Crop & Zoom, with its dedicated window and simpler cropping (i.e. without altering position), is imho much easier and faster in cases of heavily unstable videos (as it usually happens in the football games I shoot).

I could improve my shooting technique in order to reduce this damn tilting but alas I cannot cope with the small camera viewfinder nor with its lens distortion. Probably both the camera and the shooter is to blame because even in photography I am not good in keeping horizons straight! In Photoshop and Lightroom, rotation automatically adjusts (crops) the resulting black stripes. I wonder whether Premier is able to do the same thing. Surely it's not about still images but...

Quote Hi Dimitrios123 -

You're right about the Preview pane in Crop & Zoom. It's very small & fixed. For that reason I barely look at it when cropping/zooming. I focus on the position/size of the Focus Area frame in the main preview.

My preference is to use PiP Designer for more accurate work, even though it looks like more work. Particularly when rotation is needed, Crop & Zoom can be set in increments of 1° where PiP Designer can be adjusted to 0.01°. Sometimes that's critical.

Using PiP Designer, your preview is effectively the same as using the focus area frame in Crop & Zoom.

Cheers - Tony

Hello Tony and many thanks for your response.

Indeed PiP is very accurate - sometimes I do need increments smaller than 1°. Plus that, as you said, PiP has this nicely huge preview window. Alas, the need to set separate keyframes for cropping introduces too much workload for me. If it could automatically crop the blank areas, PiP would be perfect.

I am very disappointed from PD16 on that matter. Does anyone know the workflow in competitive applications?

Regards

Hello all. My videos suffer from a lot of (horizontal) camera tilt. So I make heavy use of the Crop & Zoom feature in order to rotate them properly. The tilt is not constant (it usually varies +/- 1 to 2 degrees in almost every clip I shoot) so I have to use keyframes too (inside the Crop & Zoom window).

The issue that annoys me is that the preview window on the right Cyberlink calls it "Focus Area Preview") is too small for effectively previewing the rotation. Plus it cannot be adjusted. I am always struggling because of this.

So how do you cope with this microscopic preview window? Is it that your videos do not have variable tilt at all? Do you use other PD functions for microadjusting variable rotation? I tried PiP Designer but it proved no match to the Crop & Zoom when you have to use keyframes: PiP requires separate keyframes for rotation and croping (when rotation is used, crop is also needed to trim out the resulting blank areas) while Crop & Zoom's keyframes can combine cropping and zooming on the same keyframe.

Thank you

Quote

Quote I found a quick and dirty solution to my problem: Use a mouse macro recorder utility like Mini Mouse Macro or similar. Adjust its execution (play macro) time to minimum and you 're okay!

Interesting. I haven't used "macros" before so hope I can get the hang of it. Better if Cyberlink would add many more hotkey options and ability to save presets. Thanks

You're welcome!

I agree that Cyberlink should add more hotkeys (as I wrote above, I suspect that they do have the neccessary xml parser for this and they only need to reveal it to the PD users).

I found a quick and dirty solution to my problem: Use a mouse macro recorder utility like Mini Mouse Macro or similar. Adjust its execution (play macro) time to minimum and you 're okay!

Same inconvenience here. I use "Crop & Zoom" very often, in order to rotate my clips when the horizon is slightly tilted (it happens a lot!). In order to just reach "Crop & Zoom", I need to click 4 times at various screen locations. This makes my editing process very tedious (sometimes I have to correct the tilt of more than 50 clips !)

Unfortunately, Power Tools items cannot be acced via keyboard keys anyway. Therefore a keyboard remapping utility (like AutoHotKeys) would be useless here.

I noticed that the custom hotkeys feature uses .pdh (xml) files and I wonder if we could make use of it. The following example maps key "C" (VirtualKey 67) to "Link/Unlink Video and Audio" command ( Key Index 109):


<hotkey><set name="test2"><key index="109" controlkey="0" virtualkey="67"></key></set></hotkey>

If we knew the "Key Index" of the Crop & Zoom command, we could map it to an unused key combination and import to PowerDirector via a similar .pdh file. Anyone with such an inside information?

Oops, I just noticed you're using Color Director which I don't have it. Let's hope that someone else will help you in this issue.

I have a GTX 1060 Ti and I see that PD16 uses h/w acceleration:

On Preferences->Harware acceleration, I can check "Enable Open CL support" and "Enable Hardware Encoding"

I can choose "Hardware Video Encoder" when I produce

Are you able to do these things in your system?

You better open a new thread for this question. A quick answer is that miniDV cameras always use Firewire port (USB is essentally useless as it cannot guarantee that frames are not lost). So you need Firewire, regardless of the video capturing software you use (btw, the freeware WinDV is still ok for that purpose).

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Quote I have filmed a concert. My camera has a maximum file size of 2gb and then it starts a new file automatically. If the new file starts (as it often does) in the middle of a song, how do I seamlessly join the two files together, so that I can produce a perfect video of the song, without a gap or noise at the join?

I use Digial Camcorder Sony VX-2100 with Adobe System. Now that I have Power Director 16 I really like it but I will be usining it with my Laptop. How can I Capture Footage from Digital Camcorder to the Power Director Software? What kind of Digital Cable do I need?

Hatti is right, this camera can use SDXC cards and, since SDXC format uses the eXFAT file system, it does not have the 2G size limitation. All you need is to buy a fast SDXC card (and format it only in camera, to be on the safe side).

Quote It appears that after activating "shadow files" in the settings the problem has almost completely vanished. After the first generation of thumbnails changes of the view in the timeline now appear almost instantly. I suppose that the shadow files include a cache of the thumbs? That would be IMO the only explanation, as before they where seemingly generated from scratch with any small change.

I can verify that. See my response in a similar discussion.

On my system PD16 is reasonably fast during thumbnail generation (for the record, I have shadow files enabled). They need to be generated once in a session (PD16 does not regenerate them after a zoom-in/out or scrolling of the timeline).

For instance, I am now editing a project with 104 XAVC-S 1080p files. Everytime I load the project and zoom all the way out in order to have all clips visible on the timeline, it needs about 40 sec to generate the timeline thumbnails. Then it does not generate them again unless I close and reopen the project.

Is it related to the proper generation of shadow files? I see serious problems when I start editing without first waiting for all the shadow file (green) flags to appear. I do not even dare to copy the clips to the timeline before that moment.

(needless to say, the process of creating these shadow files is a veeeery slow one)

Indeed, one should enable shadow files. And not waiting for the shadow files to complete (the green flag Robert mentioned) would be a source of problems.

Another thing I should point out is that, if you are using the trial version, beware taht it has a very choppy preview performance (it was struggling on my system, though it is quite powerful for the purpose).

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Quote When I speed up a clip within a video project, the payback during editing is not working properly. The video freezes while audio continues and it is choppy when it does work. Any advice?

Hi

This behaviour is normally caused by a low powered PC. What resolution and format are you trying to edit?

Please post a copy of your PCs DxDiag file so that members can judge and comment on the specification.

In the meantime try using shadow files, and reduce the quality of the preview screen. You can also edit in Non Real-time, but note there will be no audio if you use NRT. However, the audio is not lost, just muted to help a struggling PC.

If you use shadow files, ensure that all the clips have a green flag before you start to edit.

Robert

Hoping this is exactly what you want:

There IS a simple way of adjusting the volume of all audio clips simultaneously. In the timeline, select all clips (Ctrl + A) and use the volume slider on one of these clips to control the master volume. As you adjust it, a tooltip shows the amound of change (in dB I guess, although the unit is not displayed).

Before finding that, I was pretty disappointed as you are, and that was just AFTER the purchase. As it happens with other PD features, it is not easy to find it (e.g. clip rotation with crop is even worse).

Hello all.

This is a note to anyone willing to evaluate the current trial version of PowerDirector 16. I noticed the following issues were noticed while editing a series of XAVC-S HD (1080p 25fps) clips from a Sony camera:

Choppy preview on the edit window. Lowering the resolution didn't fix the problem. Switching to non-real time preview didn't fix the problem. Also tried to disable hardware acceleration and OpenCL support, to no avail. Produced video didn't exhibit these problems.

SVRT (smart video rendering) was unavailable (red indicator). However, rendering speed was quite good (many times faster than Hitfilm Express).

I was quite scared by the above issues but I liked the UI so much that I purchased it (having in mind to use the money back guarantee if problems persisted). Happily, the purchased version run flawlessly. Preview is smooth and SVRT is functional with XAVC-S files. It's a pitty that such a good s/w may loose potential customers due to a buggy (?) trial version.

My hardware: Intel i5, 8GB RAM, GTX1050 Ti with 8GB VRAM.