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If you want to throw some money at the problem then something like Tricaster (Google or look on eBay.com in USA)
which is a true multi-camera input mixing and switching desk.
or this
http://cgi.ebay.com/VIDEONICS-MX-1-VIDEO-MIXER-TITLE-MAKER-EDIT-SUITE-/220740514497?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item336528f2c1
As stated in previous post, PD can record off a single source but that source can be whatever video source depending on the input card to the PC. I dont know what you would need to convert RGB and sync to be Firewire or if you would need a pci video card with RGB inputs.
Search Google for multi-camera mixing desk and you will find others Search eBay for Video Switchers and routers which seem to run around $100-$500 or more
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_mixer and maybe look for Tandy or other home consumer electronics as opposed to professional gear.
I presume I wont be deleted by Dafydd since this is a hardware adjunct to any video editing software and so non-competing with Cyberlink - hopefully
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I just recorded 1.19Gb of MPG-2 video using the PD9 Capture from DV Device (my Sony camera)
Runtime 20 mins 25 secs
Bitrate 7.6MBPS
29.97fps
During recording I played back an FLV video caught in the camera field of view along with the capture disk info
Also captured a shot of live Taskmanager showing memory params and processes etc. Yes CPU usage jumped up and down all the time, very spiky. Understandable since I was also playing FLV in a viewer while recording, though stopping the FLV did not hardly affect CPU useage.
Will save this mpeg video for a while in case we want to take another look, but it seems for me with a clone pc running Vista Home edition and 4Gb ram it was working OK
Had to remove the DV Tape from the camera or after 2 mins the camera switched off, With no tape the camera feeds DV signal fine for as long as its on.
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So,
How much, minutes, seconds are you able to record before this problem occurs?
Is it saving as MPG-2 ?
What size was the file when it crashed?
What disk space was available?
Did PD continue or freeze or throw an error?
If you don't actually record but have the PD screen show the image from the camera and just leave it displaying but not writing, does it occur after the same time (again, How long a time is it?)
Just out of interest I will reproduce by recording some myself and see what happens.
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Ask yourself, Am I wanting sheer volume of visits to my video ( for nefarious purposes or whatever) or am I genuinely just happy to see my video published so I can email to friends or perhaps include a link on my blog or social networking site or this forum.
If its the former, add a one second clip of any female friends in bikinis waving goodbye at the end of the video.
Include keywords bikini, girls, saucy, waiting-for-U and any other salacious phrases/words guaranteed to be searched by teenagers on YT. - It works.
By the way, searching just this forum site for "sex, sexy bikini" produced over 63,000 articles so good luck on yours being top listing on any forum.
So, What was your question again ?
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Linked as you suggested....
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I offer this as advice to others new to video editing who wish to try these techniques
Would you like to try doing Bluescreen or Matte, PIP, Chroma-key ?
Then read my how-to tips on the following page
http://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/posts/list/16042.page#78670
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I offer this as advice to others new to video editing who wish to try these techniques
When you go beyond a single timeline and start blending photos or other video on a secondary timeline you are in effect dabbling in PIP and/or chroma-key technology. That can lead to wishing to record a video against a bluescreen or a greenscreen, using chroma-key to mix the topmost video into a background.
Regardless of what you read on the web or elsewhere, here are some tips I can vouch for, having done PD green screen for a while now.
1. Lighting with stage or studio lights can be a disaster. The reason is, getting it evenly lit - the human eye just cannot detect the minor difference in intensity or even-ness of lighting. Chroma-key depends on the background having the same color, luminance,intensity all over or you will get black sparkle or flaws when the image is processed in the editor.
2. The color of the background is almost unimportant. I have used green, pale blue and plum colored with the same results. The reason is the chroma-key is a spot color of a very specifc hue and your eyes, hair, clothing etc are unlikely to be an exact match, so almost any color will do except beige or yellow which seem to not work well.
So how do you get perfect lighting.? You need absolutely flat lighting and you have a free source - Daylight, but only when its constant during the recording, flat full cloud cover in UK is fine, meaning full cover clouds, not clouds with blue sky where the sun is constantlay breaking through because the light intensity and color changes visibly.
3. Choose a room with as large a window as possible. If you have net curtains, remove them or make them stretch flat and so not having folds or gathers or patterned flowery details. Pick a wall opposite the window and maybe 10 feet away or further.
4. Pin or nail a bedsheet (my pale-blue experiment) Make sure its flat with no wrinkles if possible. I nailed mine to the picture rail and skirting board with push-pins. My plum color experiment was a heavy blanket in thick polyester and was fuzzy but it was still nailed up flat as could be.
5. Next, place your subject about 2 feet or more away from the wall so the sheet or blanket is out of focus if possible which reduces any flaws in creases or other surface detail.
6. Place the camera as near the window as possible aimed at the subject and wall, zoom to crop with the subject in center and only the sheet or blanket in the background. If you can, leave a border area around the subject so you can crop again in edit if there are any sparkle flaws in the corners.
Try to shoot while the cloud lighting is flat and constant. If the sun breaks through, stop until its cloudy again. I did mine in southern Scotland in april-september but it depends where you live.
I guarantee this technique will work perfectly and the chroma-key will work well. (studio lighting I tried was so difficult to get flat even lighting in a small room and results in dark areas when you do the chroma key)
Finally, a variant of bluescreen is matte work where a special photo or image is blended over a video shot to give the impression that the background has a feature which is not there. Horror movies and SciFi make use of this to fool the viewer into thinking that mountains, castles etc are in the background and this is the staple of Hollywood post production. I include some samples and how-to below.
I have published some of these videos elsewhere but here they are together as samples to creating bluescreen and matte work - enjoy !
Successful BlueScreen at Home
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oC5wUUDUuOw
BlueScreen Part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exv9yqgefNE&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL
Making Mattes in PowerDirector
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQk-HDW4diU&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL
Mattes Part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRhTCqlSpFA&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL
and some actual finished videos ![]() ....
Ron in Paris (Humor)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLOXPbWC7C4
Ron in Paris Part 2 (Humor)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etat6YUGQQ4&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL
Sean Connery (humor)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5G4oyfSFDs&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL
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I am gonna say something publicly here of which I have absolutely no proof except a gut feeling.
When I first started using PowerDirector 9 with Vista Home Edition I too got stalls and freezes and all manner of nasty problems. I kept using it on moderately small projects and one or two 30 minute videos in an effort to define what was going on. To my surprise within a week the problems seemed to have gone away.
I dont know if its Vista maybe shuffling its internal list of DLLs or Registry entries or is it the hard drive deleted file space being re-used by Vista or what. All I know is it seems to have settled down and stayed that way.
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The problem really wont go away except by shooting under higher exposure/lower shutter spped if your camera allows it.
Try adjusting brightness, contrast & sharpen as well as denoise and you maybe will get a better result. I find that simply brightening the clip and THEN denoise has worked in the past.
Alternatively you simply add a banner at the beginning saying "This movie was shot under available light conditions so that the performers would not be distracted by my presence...." or something like that.
Remember great content is always going to be interesting even in low light, ask any senator caught in his car with a girlfriend.
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Hi,
Some comments: Your analysis pdf was well written and focussed. Senior members will read and pass to Cyberlink surely.
This forum is an open discussion by users, for users and as such we get everything from the sublime to the ridiculous. from simple bugs to outrageous rants. I will re-read the pdf later and maybe PM you. Meanwhile, my response is,
PD8 and PD9 are both usefull and powerfull editing tools. As windows software they seem to behave well with what I would call any "standard" pc loaded with as much ram as the user can afford. Gaming PCs with extreme performance curve video cards or accelerators seem to be quirky and often cause difficult to define bugs.
I say this because I am one of, I think, 50 -100 unpaid testers headed up by Dafydd who evaluated PD7, PD8 and PD9 before they were each released. Over the years my PCs have changed but mostly have been either off-the-shelf designs like Dell or clones made by reputable mail-order companies who sold thousands of the models they offered on the market at the time. None of the PCs I have owned were racehorse breed and some were distinctly lacking in ram and processor speed.
In use I learned to not drag my mouse too fast in PD8 or it would often freeze. When I eventually got a PC with more than 2GB ram PD8 worked so much better.
When we came to test PD9 it started off really buggy but as we reported errors via Dafydd the product got revised until its eventual release. I think that was about 18 weeks in testing. The quirky PCs threw up lots of 'bugs'.
The way to report bugs today is to report them here with a detailed description and possibly a web location where we can download any sample video files, hopefully small as possible.Other people can then evaluate the stated bug in their own environment and suggest help if possible and one of the senior forum users will then report it back to Cyberlink who also monitor this forum. Please remember that all the bugs you find are premised on your files edited in your PC with your hardware and your software revision, including video drivers, codecs and hardware so it might not be easily repeatable elsewhere.
Finally I think that Cyberlink is attempting to market to a huge spectrum of users from low-budget students with cell-phone video who want a quick edit wizard and post to YouTube on up to users like me who want complete editing control without buying something like FinalCut. For its cost, PD9 comes remarkably close to that with multiple track overlays and audio splitting etc. I'd like a better chroma-key but that may come in Version 10 (Hint, hint Dafydd)
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Andrew,
Also confirm some really dumb questions, just for starters.
1. What format of the video clip .AVI, .MPG or what ?
2. Can you play it in any player ? Windows media player for example
3. When imported into PowerDirector and it is selected (Green tick over the clip image) does it show the initial frame in the small view screen to the right (you dont need to have dragged the clip to the time line yet)
4. When you click play it should play in the viewscreen and time marker should be incrementing in milliseconds as it plays)
Can you post part or all of any clip taken by the same camera to anywhere ? even youtube to see what happens when converted to FLV format.
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Just anounced by University of Glasgow
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/blogs/mapping-babel-10017967/academics-develop-super-fast-1000-core-fpga-chip-10021386/?
On Tuesday Glasgow University announced that academics led by Glasgow's Dr Wim Vanderbauwhede and colleagues at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell had created a field programmable gate array (FPGA) with the functionality of 1,000 separate cores.
The chip processed an algorithm — a Discrete Cosine Transform — central to the encoding of MPEG video at 5Gbps, 20 times faster than top end desktop computers, Vanderbauwhede told ZDNet UK on Wednesday.
Sometime soon we could see a low cost AGP graphics card with this ability WooHoo !
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Overlap for me.
HOWEVER, one new feature for me in PD9 was the ability to split audio and video on a section of a clip. This has allowed me to artistic in the same way that you see in many commercial movies - the audio of the the next clip in time is placed over the audio of the preceding clip. Easy to do in PD9
Witness: a dialog between players in a room suddenly has audio of a railway station while we are still looking at a scene in a room. Then the video snaps to a scene of the railway station. The audio has alerted us to the change of scene.
VIDEO - ROOMROOMROOMROOMROOMROOMSTATIONSTATIONSTATIONSTATIONST
AUDIO - ROOMROOMROOMROOMROOMSTATIONSTATIONSTATIONSTATIONSTATION
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I just read this topic and for furure readers, yes in flash video on say a website you can have links using Flowplayer which is a free FLV player. Google the name. This program allows lots of embedded tricks during play.
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Works well with landscape and still life.
Changing speed to slower also works well when zooming in on artwork.
Most camersa have a jerk or lurch when zooming starts and finishes.
Clip out the beigin and end portion of a zoom and then stretch the remaininder by as much as 2X
You will then have a very good zoom. Slow and stable.
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Make a copy of the clip onto a PIP track.
Now you have two identical tracks running together.
Make timeline positions where it will be OK to stretch the video - Not where talking or singing in close-up on screen.
Use the Power Tools Video Speed to change part of one section faster, the next sect slower.
Do all changes ONLY on one track leaving the Master Track untouched.
Now MUTE the track you changed if it messed up the sound when you speed it up, because PD will drop the sound if its too fast or slow.
You can now use the sound from the master tack and move its video off-screen
Result: Master sound with PIP video
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black clip named "0,0,0" is a black color board. Did you use one ?
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It sounds like the program is having difficulty scrolling the text as transparent over the background.
Tip: Make a new project with just the scrolling text on say a bright blue color board background.
Produce it as a video.
Does it scroll OK ?
Now change the project to have your desired image as the 1st track and place the movie you just produced as a PIP and make the chroma-key be the bright blue so that the text appears transparently over your background image.
Produce this movie
Does it play perfectly?
If so append this movie to the main slideshow and get rid of the scrolling titles you had originally.
The reason for the jumping may be unclear but possibly lack of memory after doing the main DVD.
By creating iit seperately you avoid that problem since it does not need to process the titles.
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Not really, but there is a kind of a cheat mthod
Start with 6 clips in the timeline
SAVE THE PROJECT. !!!
Delete as many clips as you like
Produce the video
Now, back in Edit, type Ctrl-Z control and z repeatedly and you should start seeing the clips re-appear as the undo is putting them back up to a maximum set in your undo preferences.
If you lose everything clear the workspace from the File menu and load the last project again.
Dodgy but it works. Test it with a few samples before spending hours editing, cuz its the software equivalent of russian roulette with a semi-automatic ![]()
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When a video is placed on a PIP track it is smaller by default. In doing so you can see that there is something behind it (or not)
You now edit/cut slide around to get it in the correct time placement.
Then you either click Modify or you can double-click on the PIP segment and it will open a window where you can grab the highlighted cornera and drag them to be eirher full-screen or bigger.
Why? because in other editing scenarios you may not just want to butt-joint or overlay the title track. Your PIP track could be a transparent image or one with motion moving across the screen.
In other words your PIP track can do hundreds of things you have not thought of yet.
Practice and experiment - You will amaze yourself.
[movie removed..]
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re - quality of pro DVD
If you have a rock solid tripod like a Cartoni D603 and a top of the line pro camera by Canon or Sony with good lighting or at least the same lighting conditions, then you will get the same crisp results.
The test is simple. Place your camera on a solid table top like a marble counter and preferrably in bright sunlight so the shutter speed is high and film a subject in sharp focus in 1080 resolution and I guarantee you will get really good video.
Unfortunately, we cannot reproduce these conditions everywhere else compared to a TV or motion picture company. Our equipment (I assume) does not compare with theirs. However if you can justify buying a $3000 tripod and a top of the line camera then you are on an equal footing.
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