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Just remember that your SUBJECT needs to be brightly lit - lighting the green screen too brightly will create a green "halo" of reflection around your subject that you will not be able to get rid of and the background will eat into your subject's border. I actually light my green screen cooler so that no green refelction bounces off of my subject. Note that Hollywood does not use brightly lit green - they cool it down for the same reasons. This is how they are able to get realistic results.
Also good information, though I submit that a lighting team and $30,000 cameras may have some affect on the outcome. My best green screen attempt.
Looks great, but the "green halo" around your subject can be avoided by shooting with a cooler green screen. Super bright green is what causes that. I have softboxes that I light my screen with at about half power and I get better results. When I crank them up to full, I get green halos around my subjects that I can't clean up.
QuoteThere are many tips and tutorials for green/blue screen techniques to be found on Youtube, I advise you to watch a few if you have not.
Bright even lighting
Light source with a high CRI
No wrinkles in your screen. None!
Try different camera settings, 60i vs 30P vs 60P, etc.
Is your screen a quality color? I returned my first screen as the green was too "piney" rather than vivid florescent green.
You may even be affected by the fact that consumer cameras record in highly compressed formats and throw out much of the color information that pro cameras save.
Just remember that your SUBJECT needs to be brightly lit - lighting the green screen too brightly will create a green "halo" of reflection around your subject that you will not be able to get rid of and the background will eat into your subject's border. I actually light my green screen cooler so that no green refelction bounces off of my subject. Note that Hollywood does not use brightly lit green - they cool it down for the same reasons. This is how they are able to get realistic results.
Agreed. Disabling hardware acceleration is the only thing that ever stabilizaed PD (any version) to keep it from crashing, no matter what system I've used, for many years now. Doesn't matter what kind of video card you have, disabling HA and throwing the entire load at a super hot CPU (like a ThreadRipper) and superfast RAM is the only stable way to get the job done fast. I was sick of this "video driver voodoo" crap and gave up on HA long ago.
I create BluRays of my homer movies. But after upgrading from PD14 to PD15, I started having BluRay stability problems.
All my BluRays created with PD15 exhibit the same behavior:
1. Any time around the 90-minute mark or anywhere thereafter, the video freezs on screen
2. Though the video freezes, the sound continues to play.
3. These "problem spots" are typically about 30 to 6- seconds long on the disc.
4. You can FF through the "problem spot" and move past it, and video returns to normal.
5. This typically is not found during the first 90 minutes on a disc, but it's a crap shoot any time after that. However, ALL discs wind up with this error at 90 minutes or after. In short, a ruined BluRay disc and up to 5 hours of wasted burn time down the drain. No exceptions for any disc longer than 90 minutes, meaning you only get to use half a disc if burning at H264/60i/1080.
6. PD14 DOESN'T DO THIS.
Different encoding has been used, such as 1080 H264/60i and 1080 H264/60p. BluRays have been tested on game systems and various bluray players with the same results - PowerDirector 15 is botching BluRays.
QuoteHave you ever tried making a folder set from your project and then burning that to as many discs as you want? If you have the option, you can also make an ISO file and burn that? I know that is in 14 but I don;t remember if it is in 13.
If it is taking a long time to re-burn (produce) a file the second time, did you make sure you had enough free space on your computer and that you have deleted any junk files to clean up the hard disc? If you have the disc type hard drive, have you defragged it? No need to do that for SSDs.
Are all your files on your system drive which speeds up the rendering or do you have them on several different drives. (USB or other?)
OOPS, I forgot to answer your question. I have never tried that, I always burn an ISO or folder set if I think I may make more discs in the future.
Thanks for the reply.
1. If you make a folder set, burn a disc, or create an ISO, you cannot go back into your project file to ever create them again. That's my point - PD actually corrupts the project on the very first burn. Try it for yourself. This is becoming an extremely well-documented bug.
2. If you ever want to go back into your project to change anything, you're doing it for no reason - PD will crash before you ever get to burn another image, folder set, or disc because the project itself is now corrupted. Even if you have the pateience to get to the point to where you actuqally get to click the "burn" button, it crashes about 20% into the burn process.
3. It doesn't have anytng to do with drive space (which I have plenty of on all drives). Defragging is nothing more than a very minimal peformance enhancer, it's really more about regaining clusters than speeding things up. Even so, if that mattered to PD, it still wouldn't thrash the heck out of the drive for 6 hours, which I can only imagine is CREATING a fragmentation problem.
4. Files on different drives: Yes, I do. However this should make no difference to PD, and if anything should speed things up. However, and again, this is not the problem - this is PD corrupting its own project file and/or settings after the first disc burn, creating a bug from which it cannot recover without the user specifically disabling part or all of their menus in their project (unacceptable in any atmosphere where production is taken seriously).
So there are only two workarounds for this issue, both of which are ridiculous but work nonetheless:
1. Immediately before you burn a disk, save your project and create a backup of it. This is the only way you will ever be able to make future changes to your project. You will have to re-backup your project every time you make a change or right before you burn. Once you burn from that project, it is corrupted and may as well be deleted - this is where you restore your "pre-burn" backup.
2. Burn ISO files instead of discs, because you will not have the chance to ever burn that disc or image again from that project if it wasn't backed up prior to the burn. Burning ISO files kills two birds with one stone, but not all 3 birds: it solves the issues of a failed disc burn, and solves the multiple copy issue, but still doesn't solve the corrupted post-burn project issue.
CyberLink: I sure hope you're paying attention to this. Your flagship product is irrepairably corrupting its own projects.
After burning a BluRay in PD 13/14, you cannot open the same project and burn another disc without the project hanging if motion menus are enabled.
In reality, PD has not hung or crashed - it is just sitting there grinding the hell out of your hard drive and pegging your CPU at 100% for hours until the burn menu does in fact re-appear, but can take from 1 to 6 hours to actually get past this obvious bug.
Once you get to where you can actually burn the BluRay, it still ultimately fails. Few ever have the patience to get this far because they believe their systems have permenantly hung and have usually reset their systems long before this point.
And thus, you only get to burn a BluRay disc ONCE per project because PD corrupts the project file and you never get back to the burn menu, and if you do, it will still crash - there is no returning to a project that was used to previously burn a bluray - you simply won't be able to (if you want to keep your menus).
Want to burn more than 1 BluRay from a project? Back up that project file before you do the burn, or you'll wind up having to create an antirely new identical project file to burn another bluray.
And no, uninstalling and re-installing the product won't fix this. Neither will disabling all hardware accelleration options. This is a legit PowerDirector bug that corrupts project files after a BluRay burn.
And so my question: Has PowerDirector 15 solved this embarrassing and easily-reproduced problem?
QuoteI'm having a new and interesting issue with Keying...
In older versions of PD I could key out that lovely bright green and have a perfect image. But since upgrading to 15 most images that I use the chorma key tool on leave a thin line of green at one edge of the image area. No amount of tweaking the settings will change this... Does anyone else have this issue? or know a work around?
Best workaround I have ever found is to simply purchase NewBlue's Video Essentials VI (6), which sells for $129. It has Chroma Key Pro included in it, which is absolutely fantastic. It incorporates itself into PowerDirector perfectly (identifies PD on install and installs accordingly). It's VERy powerful, and I swear by it. It will also instantly solve the PD15 green screen "sabotage" issue (why on earth did CyberLink mess this up and fix what wasn't broken?)
Time and time again, I have found that disabling all forms of hardware acceleration will prevent the vast majority of the stability and "general wierdness" problems found in PD.
It has become knee-jerk on my part (for many years now) to just disable all hardware acceleration immediately after installation. Sadly, it's the only way to actually stabilize this product. This is also absolutely required on laptops, or you WILL experience crash issues.
There should be no need to for the old hack as PD has supported 50/60p for a few versions now. Just checked in PD15 and it works fine. You have to select H.264 to see the 50/60p mode (make sure you scrowl down to see the option).
Thanks
Nathan
You know, I never even bothered to check PD14 to see if any new 60P additions were added to the menu choices before jumping the gun and assuming that it still didn't. I have to admit, I'm pleasantly surprised that CyberLink recognized the issue and actually did something about it. Wow.
Please pass the salt and pepper, this crow is a little dry. ;
QuoteThere still is some problem. While 60P HD burned with PD14 play on a Sony player they will not work on the Samsung UHD player. Yet 60P discs produced some time ago using Pinnacle Studio do work on both.
However I use stereo only.
Good luck
Eugene.
I really appreciate your reply, as this issue has been driving me crazy (as I will demonstrate). So my big questions are:
1. How do I actually produce a 60P/5.1 BluRay in PD14 (or now 15)?
2. Can it really even be done without a bunch of "hocus pocus post"?
3. Why didn't that "TurnOn1080P" reg hack work? (I really had my hopes up on this one, whatta huge letdown)
Just out of curiosity, which version of Pinnacle Studio produced the 60P discs that seem to work? That really spiked my curiosity. Can the most recent version (v20) do that? If so, I'll drop the $99 right this instant. I see that as a really huge tip you just gave me, and I'm very grateful, as that product gets very pretty good reviews.
If not, then I'm probably just going to have to cry "uncle" and go the AVCHD 2.0 route and abandon my quest of true 60P blurays and settle for having to re-burn the AVCHD v2 "memory stick" content to BD manually. At least they will be compliant I guess (he says with disappointed acknowledgement that he STILL has to jump through additional hoops).
Rant: I cannot adequately express my frustration and amazement with what I regard as an utterly ridiculous problem: The inability to produce a 60P bluray when everything is 60P and BluRay, including most modern bluray players. I mean, who on eart at CyberLink (and Corel for that matter) are still refusing to add 60P to BluRay burning capabilities? Why do they feel they are beholden to that lame limitation? I mean seriously, I lay an epic "WTF" at the feet of whoever continues to make this "we're not adding it even though Sony, Samsung, and pretty much everybody else did a long time ago" decision at CyberLink. (pant pant pant - ok, rant over).
Thanks so much for being willing to respond. And I am quite grateful that there are ways to accomplish 60P blueray authoring if I want to make the sacrifices of jumping through all those PITA hoops. I am still, however, balking at the mere concept of having to.
I apologize, as I now this thread is old now. However, it is just as relevant now as it was 3 years ago.
I was extremely excited when I came across your registry hacks for enabling 60P bluray authoring in PowerDirector. I eagerly downloaded it, applied it, rebooted, and put it to the test, hoping that PowerDirector 14 would work with it.
Sadly, following the instructions you provided (to the letter - 720P, 5.1, etc), the bluray disc that PD cranked out turned out to be a "slideshow" at 24P!
That's right - the disc was created as 1080/24P.
How on earth did that happen? Does your brilliant registry hack not work in PowerDirector v14? Did I do something wrong?
Desparate to get 60P blu-ray authoring working, and your hack is the closest thing I've seen to seeing this capability actually usable "in-app" without having to resort to a bunch of tedious and utterly ridiculous (but much appreciated) "Rube Goldberg".
So I guess I'm looking for confirmation that your "TurnOn1080P" hack actually works in PowerDirector 14.
Thanks so much for all that you pour into this topic and helping people.
RLH
PS: I shoot everything in 1080/60p with 5.1 sound, and have PD14 defaulted as such.
So let's fast forward to late 2016, where we are now at Powerdirector 15.
ALL of our cameras at this point shoot in 1080/60P. ALL of our players and TVs support 1080/60P.
Question of the Day:
Did PowerDirector ever fix this embarrassing problem? Or realize that the lowly hobby developer had to come to the rescue on this because PowerDirector itself corrupts 60P video files? Is it possible to create 1080/60P BluRays in PowerDirector 15?
Yes, but ColorDirector is not using true motion tracking, it is a cleverly renamed masking function for the purpose of changing an object's color. Why they decided to call it "motion tracking" is baffling to me, it's not accurate - you can't actually make use of it to attach any objects to a fixed point because it doesn't track fixed points or provide a path. It's also not PowerDirector, either. "Motion tracking" seems to just be inaccurate marketspeak to help sell ColorDirector.
I know, I know, PD doesn't motion tracking (you have to manually do it with keyframing and it's a royal pain in the butt with lousy results).
Attention Cyberlink: Adobe Premiere Elements, Corel VSX, and many other competing products have motion tracking capabilities that work extremely well. It's not like motion tracking is bleeding edge technology anymore, but it is in fact a much-used function in production these days.
Are we EVER going to see this in PD? This is turning into a really huge embarrassing hole in PD for anybody that knows how to do special effects.
I can think of only one single reason to upgrade to PD13 - support for alpha channels. And this is only if you are doing special effects work and have the need for such a feature (the vast majority don't). If not, then PD13 has no other additions/features that would be a good enough reason to upgrade. This software is created for "video dads" who do not need any real creative/prodiction power. It's an elementary level product that tries to be a one-stop-shop to get your video from your camera onto a disc. It does a reasonably good job, but with no frills or stability.
I can say this: if the next version of PD doesn't support motion tracking (especially since most every other competingproduct has for multiple versions now, such as Corel VSX, Adobe Premiere Elements, etc), I'm jumping ship and just going full Adobe and doing it right. For me personally, this crash-ware has been nothing but a painful reminder that you get what you pay for.
YNOTFISH - Now you get my conundrum and have seen the light.
"Junk in, junk out": A term used in Hollywood and the graphics world to describe the problem of how a low res image cannot be upscaled to a high res image without becoming badly pixelated, no matter how we may try to write software that fumbles with trying to make it work ("interpolation"). There is no magical process that can do this to any professionally acceptable degree.
Bottom Line: The majority of the menus downloadable on DZ are useless (certainly all of the "4:3" ratio menus), and DZ has no way of telling you the resolution of the original background image, which means it's a gamble (at best) if you're wasting your time or not. This is a HUGE letdown to pretty much everyone since everything went HD a long time ago but the menus got left behind. The only solution is to spend the time to create your own menus, and if you're not lifting images from someone else and/or not a graphic artist yourself, you're pretty much limited to extremely basic menus. Quality-wise, this whole situation is basically a disaster for the casual user who is unwittingly expecting a quality "HD" output result from a "16:9" menu download.
I'm a developer myself, and it is up to the developers to write into the software something that is called "error handling". PD's crashing issues are not the user's fault "telling PD to do the wrong thing", which is not possible in properly written software. PD is abysmal at error handling because the developers are not writing proper error handling code, resulting in the software itself doing the wrong thing. That's why bug fixes get released (if the developers can focus on stability instead of new features). What's most frustrating is how this lazy style of programming results in software instability that is continually blamed on the end user's "drivers", which, I'm sorry to say, would get any development team fired by any company that takes its public image and constomer relations seriously. CyberLink is well-known to not really care about this issue.
Challenge: Have CyberLink explain why PD crashes so much while every other video editing software product out there, like Corel's VideoStudio Pro, Adobe's products, etc, doesn't.
How does one sort / search for / or otherwise determine the resolution of the image prior to download on a web site with almost 500 pages of DVD menus? How does one weed out the junk?
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