Messages posted by danmcb

OK! the reason was quite simple. Thank you for the explanation. Indeed i will provide my feature requests via the progream. Thanks again.

screen shot attached of my timeline. I fifnished a bunch of editing, I have only two tracks I need - one audio and one video. But there are two empty tracks that simply do not get removed when I do "delete empty trakcs"). But they ARE empty?

(WHY oh why is there not a simple "delete track" option which just asks me to confirm if there is content on the track? CyberLink - why do you have to make the easy stuff difficult?)

And as you can see I am stuck with a Voice Track, title Track and Effects Track which I have no use for, but I can't remove them - god only knows why ... see my feature request in a separate thread. I have more useless tracks I don't even want than ones I do want!

ANYWAY - why can't I delete empty tracks?

I'm a Gold Member for a year, and generally I like the program - but there are a few things in the interface that are REALLY irritating. I just renewed for another year, but only after I checked out the competition - I stay with PD365 because of one or two features that I don't find elsewhere.

Anyway a few things that could make PD365 a really GREAT product:

Make it possible to clean up the time line easily. I don't WANT the Effects track, or the Titles track, or ... any of that stuff. Please just give a "delete track" option (with a warning if it has content of course) and let ME decide what I want on the timeline. I HATE all that clutter on the timeline that I don't want or use.

2. Make it possible to lock a clip or a track in TIME (so that every clip on it cannot be shifted) but still possible to trim or cut clips, or add effects and so on. Why? I make music videos. I have a soundtrack that I bring in as a .WAV and that never moves. Then I have footage of people playing instruments that I bring in and manually sync to that (has to be manual because the music is a mix of many sources). That's OK. But once that's done I then want to cut that long video take up, manipulate it all kinds of ways - but NEVER lose the sync. (this would just be a flag attached to clips that stays on every clip derived from the original, but can be turned on or off on a clip by clip basis).

3. PLEASE make a way to "de-activate" video clips without actually deleting them (as many audio workstations do). You can turn off a whoel track - but I want to do it to clips in a track. So useful to play with different edit possibilites.

Thanks for listening (I really hope you do, or I'll be shopping around again soon ...)

I'm using PD to make simple music videos. I come from an audio background, and I am used to using DAW's to edit. I miss some of the features that you usually find in the audio world in PD17. Specifically - Solo-In-Place and the ability to "mute" video clips. But I am wondering if that is because I am doing things in an awkward way and there is a better way to do it. I need to explain this.

My projects are multiotracked audio-plus-video. That is, I have anumber of audio tracks recorded in different takes by overdubbing, and each has one or more video tracks that go with it. My workflow goes like this:

set up 2 cams in my recording studio, and all the audio gear (mics/DI instruments, whatever - these are recorded to a Zoom HD recorder).

Lay down the first track (this might be guitar + vocals). Now I have 1 or more audio tracks, and one video track per cam. T^here might be more than one "take" - I call each take out at the start so I can ID it later, and usually I just snap my fingers a few times (poor man's clapper board) before the music starts so I can later sync the audio tracks together. I usually just leave the audio and cams recording until I get a good take (usually after 2 or 3 times). So might have 15mins of audio and video now.

Overdubs. This is a new set of audio and video files, again there can be a few takes. More finger snaps on the lead-in.

Now I have all the source audio and video, next step is to pull all the audio files into a DAW and get a good mix. That gives me eventually a 3:30 wav file plus the intro with count in and finger snaps. I Also place a marker in the DAW project so I can see where the start of the wav is (important so I can do a remix later without the count-ins and finger snaps, and get the sync correct).

Now starts the video editing fun. I

Start a new project in PD, first step is to pull in the audio and align it to start of project - this is the common timing reference for everything.

Pull in the video tracks (one base track and one overdub, 2 cams each = 4 video files) and find the matching takes that I used from teh DAW. Trim them on the timeline and sync them. (This is where I wish PD had a feature to LOCK POSITION of the video tracks so they can be cut up but not moved!)

Now I usually apply some colour correction to the source videos and render them seperately one-by-one to new "preprocessed" files. This reduces the file sizes a lot which helps PD - although it costs some time.

Now I make a new project with the same audio and the processed files. If I did eveyrthing right, they all sync perfectly when I align everything to the start of the timeline.

Now I can finally find where I want to cut between tracks, cut the timeline where I want to, and move the clips down to a new "composite track".

Finally I apply pan-zoom to any segments that I want to, add text, any other stuff.

Replace audio with a new version minus count-in and finger snaps (and any tweaks I might want to do to the audio mix).

Render the finished video.

So here are some features (borrowed from audio edit world) that I would like and would make my life easier:

fix video tracks in place so they cannot lose sync (but still allow them to be cut, pan/zoomed, filtered etc)

allow clips to be "deactivated" (i.e. turned off without being deleted) - now I would not have to move clips to a composite track - just deactivate the ones I don't want to see

"solo" a video track - i.e. pres a button and have only one video track enabled, all others off. (release "solo" and you revert to whatever you had before.)

Does this make sense? is there a much easier of doing what I want to do? (I did look at multi-cam stuff but it doesn't seem to quite do what I want ... )

thank you

Daniel

hello,

I'm using CL17 on a win7 64bit box, quad i5 with 8GB RAM. The videos I am editing are typically about 3:30 long and I have to cut up and select between 4 video tracks, all synced to an imported audio track. The input videos are at 2700, and file size is about 430MB for 3:30

Initially the files were larger (up to several GB) but I found things were becoming unworkable, so I came up with trick of first syncing the input tracks to the audio (and colour correcting them) and then exporting each to create an already synced file of the same length as the outout file. This helped a lot.

But I still find that the preview lags by the time the 3;30 playback is done. This makes it very hard to identify edit points, and I end up having to do a test render so I can find the places to cut by running the test render in VLC and noting the timing. It's a pain.

Reducing the resolution of the preview helps quite a bit, though still not perfect.

I could push the memory on thos box to 16GB or 32GB but I am wondering if this is the issue? with four input files adding up to less than 2GB total, I would have thought 8GB would be OK for this project?

Thanks for any insights or advice.

Quote You could select all of the clips on your timeline, right-click and select Group Objects.

But a better solution might be to save your music mix as its own project. Then start a new project to create your video portion and, in that project's Media Room, select your music mix project file, which you'll be able to load as if it were a single media clip.

Hi - thanks for the response.

Music mix is done in a different app, it is imported as a stereo wav file, already mixed and mastered.
So the issue is that the various video clips (their audio is not used, except as an aid for syncing) need to be fixed relative to the stereo .wav file.

Didn't know about grouping though - useful feature, I'll probably use it for other stuff.

Hello,

I am using PD for making music videos. The audio track is an audio file which has already been mixed on a DAW and corresponds to a number of video clips. Sometimes there can be 4 or 5 seperate clips for just one instrument (because that instrument in the mix comes from 4 or 5 separate recording takes).

Once the clips have been placed in their own video tracks and sync'd to the audio, I want to lock them in place so that they cannot be moved accidentally. (Actually best would be to lock them relative to the audio, but as the audio usually will not move, this is not a big deal.)

I see ways to lock individual tracka (which stops you doing anything to them) but there doesn't seem to be any way to do what I want?