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I removed and then reinstalled the latest Quicktime and my problem as described in the prior post disappeared. My apology for blaming this on Cyberlink and PD10.
Larry
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I have done (literally) hundreds of different AVCHD disks with PD 10 and PD9, and never had this exact same problem until I began using .MOV files rather than the typical .mts files which come directly from most AVCHD camcorders. Using .MOV files from a DSLR causes the render to hang EXACTLY the same way as the original poster described.
My machine is a super high end 16 GB RAM, Windows 7, fastest 6 core, 2 SSD drives, $500 nVidia video card, etc. and it normally cuts through AVCHD / h.264 HD material like a hot knife through butter.
When PD10 gets .MOV files, it renders very quickly up until some point where it just freezes, the time continues to advance, and I need to do a CTRL-ALT-Del to quit the program since it hangs.
I fully beluieve that the problem is a bug in PD10.
And yes, I am using the latest update released just a week or so ago in December 2011 of PD10.
Larry
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Now I see why there is a misunderstanding.
The program DOES permit you to create AVC files using the "Produce" function, but it DOES NOT allow you to author AVCHD 2.0 disks.
When I saw your original subject line, I expected that it could now author AVCHD 2.0 disks, but it unfortunately can not.
I do have a very limited authoring program which DOES produce AVCHD 2.0 disks, Sony PMB, which is supplied with their alpha 77 DSLR. It unfortunately has no features to edit or enhance the content in any way, and is almost useless.
However, it does allow me to create AVCHD 2.0 disks which play properly on my Panasonic BluRay player when the latest firmware is installed, confirming that the disk is working properly.
I VERY MUCH wish that Cyberlink would actually add AVCHD 2.0 disk authoring capabilities to PD10.
There are a significant number of new cameras now offering 2.0 capabilities, and no real authoring software other than PMB to make disks.
Larry
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There sre no AVCHD 2.0 choices in the latest PD10 update.
The bit rate limit and interlaced 60i are the exact same as they were before, and the same as PD9.
What makes you say that Cyberlink has added the new July 2011 AVCHD 2.0 bitrate and progressive frames?
Is there some hidden switch you have found??
Larry
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Jeff,
I don't think we can ever know the reasoning for the choice of a system rate spec'd at 24 Mbits/sec but then limited to 18 for DVD, but my technical insight says it is not at all a technical issue and my political / business instinct is that it is everything to do with market segmentation.
Sony introduced the BD format over 10 years ago, and I actually played with their earliest BD players in Tokyo at that time. They have squeezed every last drop of market potential out of this invention, looking to generate and protect their revenue for both content (since they own Columbia / CBS / studio properties) and for their delivery system. Those who have followed HDCP and the progression of content scrambling and encryption and their licensing will understand what I am referring to.
I personally have no doubt that some players cannot / are not running firmware to support 24 Mbit/sec red laser playback, although the only such players I have encountered personally are their Playstation 3, which will handle it effortlessly with some firmware and not at all with other firmware, and a few odd Samsung players, again, based upon the rev of the firmware. In some instances, the player stopped handling the high rate disks after a new firmware rev was flashed into the player, disabling the 24 Mbit/sec feature.
Cyberlink may have sincerely believed that they did us all a great service only supporting the lowest common denominator, if this is indeed their thinking and motive. But I would argue that it would far better serve their user community to handle this in exactly the same way as they eventually chose with progressive 1920 by 1080p for the Panny TM700 and TM900 crowd, namely to provide a "non standard" template which the user can chose to ignore or use. Compatibility should be at the user's discretion in this way, at least if I had a voice, as opposed to the least capable players.
It is also entirely possible that PD9 can be hacked via either the registry or in one of its DLLs or ini or other files to replace a useless template (such as a 720p template they currently provide) to allow it to get to the highest 24 Mbit/sec rate. There are enough of us mad scientists, retired engineers, and other dreamers that such mods are not out of the realm entirely. It would be so very nice if Cyberlink recognized that numerous 24 Mbit/sec camcorders are out there, that a year and a half has elapsed since the first (Canon HF11) was introduced, and that the newest Canon Vixia HD Pro line including the model I am presently using are ALL capable of MXP 24 Mbit/sec rates.
Larry
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and I understand clearly why I didn't become an engineer.
Hi Nina!
I am indeed a retired electrical engineer! I put my first TV station on the air in the early 1960's, so I have had many years of dealing with Sony and all the other past and present players in video and electronics!
Best,
Larry
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Interesting indeed!!!
I thank you Andrew for your reply. I offer the possibility that the method suggested by Daffydd is really not complete, and offer, as evidence, a very simple shareware program which makes perfectly playable 24 Mbit/sec AVCHDs on red laser disks which play perfectly fine on all of my (3) BluRay players, all of my computer players (PowerDVD, ArcSoft Total Media Theater) and (most of the time) my Playstation 3.
As I stated originally, the hardware is vastly most capable of 24 Mbit/sec speeds on a red laser disk. Indeed, I authored over a thousand HD DVDs with 25 Mbit/sec MPEG2 streams on red laser which played flawlessly in players starting over 5 years ago......
I suggest you download and use this program:
http://www.sharewareconnection.com/bdmovie-maker.htm
You merely specify the input file, a .m2ts (or, for that matter a re-named Canon .mts) copied directly from the Canon STREAM folder or re-authored /"produced" using PD9, in the MXP, 24 Mbit/sec format.
Create an ISO file and burn it with IMGBURN.
You should found that it plays flawlessly on your BD player if it like my Sony or Panasonic.
Daffydd's method (I believe) overlooks the improper buffer specification and lack of cache sync which arises when a STREAM folder encoded at one bit rate is merely substituted for another, without correction to the supporting information files, in particular BDMOVIE.OBJ.
There have been several techniques floating around literally for 18 months or so now to do what I am describing, and those of us who got into 24 Mbit/sec AVC (and above) but refused to fill at 25GB expensive blank with 2 or 3 GB of video clips of home movies have worked around this using several shareware and hex editing techniques.
I will concede that Jeff's interpretation of the AVCHD spec may perhaps limit "official" DVD burning to 18 Mbits/sec, but this is no means whatsoever a technical limitation but rather a 'political / marketing' limitation, which can be overcome as I describe.
Regrettably, the ability to do nice menus, subtitles, etc. is not as easily accomplished until Cyberlink or somebody else decides to change the few critical bytes needed in the .OBJ files to make the 24 Mbit/sec disks play properly....... That is ALL THAT IS NEEDED!
Larry
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I interpreted the spec differently, since it makes no sense to me to create a consumer spec which allows 24 Mbit/sec video encoding without a distribution method other than BD burning, particularly if the media and players for red laser disks can inherently support much faster bitrates already.
Judging by the lack of support for this 24 Mbit/s rate in PD9 as well as other AVCHD authoring software, I must agree with your conclusion.
I have numerous media players (Seagate, Western Digital, PC and Mac-based, Apple TV, Sage TV) and routinely play the 24 Mbit and higher content from them, including stuff from my Canon and Sony DSLRs which can run into the 45 Mbit/sec rates, and I personally do quite a bit of BD authoring using Vegas 9 and Final Cut / DVD Studio Pro and other professional tools. I've used TSMuxer, multiAVCHD and other tools to edit the MOVIEOBJ.BDM and other files to essentially 'fake out' the player to handle red laser versions of BD content as if they were AVCHD, and I have seen a number of my players and other peoples players handle the higher data rates without any issues. And indeed many players, even my temperamental Sony Playstation 3 will play raw .m2ts MPEG2 transport stream files with 24 Mbit/sec AVCHD content without sweat.
Thanks for your reply, which I accept as correct, with my regret that PD9 does not allow this form of 'non-standard' red laser disk as it does for the 1080p much less standard format!
Larry
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Thanks for your reply, Jeff.
The AVCHD spec for the format is at:
http://www.avchd-info.org/format/index.html
In this reference and elsewhere, the spec identifies an 8 centimeter DVD which can be provided in AVCHD camcorders to record AVCHD content rather than use an SD card. For this specific case using mini-DVDs inside the camera recording, the limitation you refer to does indeed exist. The AVCHD spec is 24 Mbits/sec, and does not specify BD in any way as far as I can tell.
As you say, PD9 does only appear to offer the 24 Mbit/sec option when burning BD disks, but surprisingly offers 1920 by 1080p AVCHD disks, which are NOT part of the AVCHD spec. I presume they do this to support the camcorders such as the Panasonic TM700 and TM900 which provide an unusual, nonstandard progressive 1080p mode.
DVD players and DVD optics and drives can run at speeds way above 24 Mbits/sec, and those of us who copy and rip DVDs are well aware of 16X, 20X, and even 24X burners which handle red laser DVDs at well beyond 100 Mbits/sec.
The Cyberlink re=rendering and downsampling are unfortunate and time consuming and degrade quality. And although I have a BD burner, I just don't see the logic of using expensive disks for the typical half-hour or 40 minute home video which will fit nicely on a red laser disk at much loss cost and with no re-rendering waiting time.
Larry
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I am using a Canon AVCHD camcorder which produces 24 Mbit/sec NTSC 1080i 29.97 fps video. I have been unable to burn AVCHDs at this bitrate.
The 24 Mbit/sec bitrate is fully supported by the AVCHD standard, and Canon has been making 24 Mbit/sec camcorders since August of 2008.
The AVCHDs I create are all downsampled to 16.75 Mbits/sec. They also require re-rendering to generate these lower bitrate disks.
I am using the latest version 2702 patched PD9 Ultra. PD9 can properly generate 24 Mbit/sec output when using the "Produce" feature to make a new output file, but I have yet to find a way to generate a 24 Mbit/sec AVCHD.
Am I missing something, or is this program unable to properly handle the AVCHD format released over 18 months ago?
Thanks for any help here,
Larry
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Lew,
I received your PM and am glad to see that the issue regarding this forum user privileges has been solved.
As regards the capture process, the hardware device is correctly characterized just as you said, as an analog to digital converter, taking video samples timed to agree with the format your content originates in, most likely NTSC standard definition 525 line interlaced, 29.97 frames per second.
With each sample being shipped over the Firewire interface, via the driver doing reads from the Canopus, the application program (in this case Power Director) uses an encoding codec to take the stream of sampled values and encode them into a compressed format. Simultaneously the audio content is sampled in hardware, encoded with another codec, and stored along with the video in a so-called "container" such as .avi, .mov, .mkv (the 3 most common) which are merely wrappers which contained time-multiplexed audio and video samples compressed using whatever codec the app has designated.
Noise encroaching on the "active lines" of the 525 line frame get digitized as if they were original content of the program, and the results are thus in need of cropping. I have never used PD8 or 9 for cropping, but the algorithms for doing it and preserving aspect ratio are pretty intuitive, essentially a zoom to magnify the entire frame.
I have no other suggestions to put forth regarding your specific problem, and it would appear your best solution would be to try some other program, perhaps one of the ones I have already suggested including freeware / shareware.
Capturing the video and then doing the crop in another app is a viable solution, but I will leave it up to you to figure it out from this point forward. Your expertise and interest in this should get you to a working solution, despite the Cyberlink lack of support. It is most unfortunate that they have such a weak support approach since their software is quite appealing in terms of price and performance, and (recently) not any more buggy than their competition.
Good luck Lew,
Larry
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Glad to try to help you Lew. I am a retired computer / electrical engineer with a lot of broadcast engineering experience so it is especially interesting to me to see how these video editing programs work. I own most of them, teach others, and am always updating to the new stuff to keep up to date.
Regarding the IEEE 1394 driver, Windows provides I/O to the application program (in this case Power Director) via a set of device calls to open, read, write, close, mount, unmount, format, etc. The driver may not be properly called (for example, a read attempt before it has been opened) and the offending program then hangs, beyond the ability of the Task Manager to terminate the offending process. The root cause is in the poorly written app, but the presence or absence of a newer and more mature driver which tolerates such errors may often "solve" the problem. For Firewire in particular, I was surprised to discover / learn that some software firewalls such as Zone Alarm and others also attempt to restrict 1394 traffic, defaulting to a mode where only some apps can use the Firewire ports and others cannot. I know it sounds bizarre. And indeed it is. I have "fixed" some compatibility issues with my older HDV camcorders which totally relied on Firewire to communicate with their capture app software by disabling the firewall temporarily, and, lo and behold, the app suddenly began to communicate properly with the camcorder Firewire port. I have no idea whether such an issue exists in your case since I do not use Power Director to ingest video (but instead bring all my HD video in via SD memory card files).
Regarding the noise impinging on the edge of the video frame, the majority of VCRs have some such flaws and rely on the monitor overscan of the earlier monitors to hide the defect. The fact that it shows up regardless of which capture device you are using is not evidence of a capture flaw so much as an artifact of the imperfect VCRs technology. I assure you that a 3/4" Betacam or 1" inch Ampex also has switching noise (since they all use a helican scan drum, switched heads, etc.) but you begin to see the flaws specifically if you look at all the active scan lines. Normally, in the analog era, you did not.
Once again, cropping will solve this problem.
If I were "stuck" as you are, lacking Cyberlink support / remedies, I would next look for a shareware or free capture utility, or use Microsoft's Movie software to ingest the video into an avi file. You can then use PD or other editing software to crop and otherwise adjust / cut / edit your content. I know this is a pain, a bad workaround, and a disappointment. You could try playing with your firewall, try starting up in Safe Mode with drivers enabled, or find an entirely different program.
No other thoughts come to mind. Good luck....
Larry
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I brought up the topic of overscan to explain why some edges of analog video may have been concealed by older TVs and monitors yet now appear "ugly" since the current displays do not hide such border defects. Your approach of cropping is an altogether sound and legitimate solution, and can be mostly achieved using the PIP Designer approach I referred to in PD9. Sony Vegas Pro has a true crop feature which can work better for this situation, but the software is several times the price of PD. TMPGE also has a very good crop capability, and their Movie Works 5 may be the "best" solution for you, all considered.
The conversion being done by the Canopus digitzes the analog video line by line, and some amount of noise in the head switching interval is making its way through. No doubt you are aware that VCRs use different heads for extracting the (helical recorded) video, some 4 heads, some 2 heads, and the VHS tape recording system was never especially great in this regard, even if the same machine which was used to record the tape originally is now being used for playback. Aging and wear and machine to machine differences along with tape stretch, capstan and pinch roller and belt deterioration and head wear along with the commutator brushes on the spinning head drum all contribute. Cropping is a good solution, all considered.
Regarding your PD8 crashes, I would attempt to install an alternate 1394/OHCI driver in Windows by deliberately removing / uninstalling the device driver, and then letting Windows once again discover the device and install a new driver. This is not merely disabling the device but rather removing / uninstalling the device which will force this to occur. Perhaps a newer driver version will help.
Also in the task manager, if you look at the running processes, and find the actual PD9 process called (I believe) PDR9.exe and you kill the process tree (right click).....you should be able to avoid all the restart crap entirely.
Good luck Lew,
Larry
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Glad to hear that my strategy worked, Lew. Regarding the crop issue, let me make a suggestion:
The head switching noise in the bottom of the frame is normally concealed in older TVs and monitors due to the deliberate use of "overscan", thereby putting the extreme edges of the video frame outside the viewing area of the display. This was done in recognition of the fact that horizontal and vertical sync and blanking pulses were not to be seen, particularly the smeared versions of them regenerated by VCRs. Newer displays are less forgiving...
Take your video clip and use the Modify feature of the PIP Designer to move the video around in the frame, and stretch it to fill the bottom or top as neccesary. By turning off the "Keep Aspect ratio, the height and width can be independently adjusted.
This is not exactly a "crop" but can achieve the same effect.
Let me know if this solves your remaining problem.
Best,
Larry
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Cyberlink and others who sell this type of software are truly pathetic in their support, and compound the problem by releasing software before it has been adequately tested. I have encountered the very same issues with slow, non responsive support from Corel, Nero, Magix (especially Magix) and others who offer video editing software in the $100 price range.
The fact that the support and development people have weak English skills doesn't help either.
I am at a total loss as to what the issue is with your forum "limbo". I share your opinion that you should have all functions but perhaps there is some intermediate state for new users? I highly doubt it.
Larry
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The Canopus is a solid A/D converter, and should be easily handled by PD9 or other programs. I will assume that yours is working properly and that the Windows driver for IEEE 1394/Firewire must be working properly since other apps are able to see the device and accept the video feed.
It might be useful to start PD9 and go to the Capture tab WITHOUT the Canopus connected. See if the program can get to screen where it shows the 8 buttons which allow selection of various capture devices. THEN, once you have reached that screen, CONNECT the Firewire cable and see if PD9 goes through the "Detecting Device" step where the thermometer / progrerss indicator appears. I assume this is where the hang has been taking place.
Perhaps by altering this sequence as I describe the program can mount the Canopus device and begin to see and use it?
Good luck and let me know if this is helpful in any way, Lew.
:arry
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Sorry to hear of your frustration Lew. I have been, at various times, either strongly defending / recommending Power Director and at other times damning it and cursing at its problems. It has become a very capable, low priced, and quite stable product in my view, and I own and use many other editing software packages. I only edit AVCHD/h.264 which is extremely stressing / demanding compared to the HDV and standard def video I used to do. I still prefer PD9 to Sony Vegas Pro 9, Edius, Corel Video Studio X3, Adobe Premiere Elements, and Nero Vision, all of which I own and use as well. The only software I have found which runs faster and with less fuss is TMPGE Video Mastering Works 5, and it has far less capability compared to PD9.
I am surprised that the forum members have not offered suggestions if you posted in the PD9 area. They have been very beneficial for problems I encountered over the several versions I have owned of this software.
I would be glad to try and help you work around this issue if you want to get into detail about where the hang occurs. Perhaps I might be able to help.
Larry
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It has been literally several years since my prior post, and 2 major revisions of Power Director with countless patches in between. The latest rev seems to run without hangs in nearly all the many times I have used it. I suggest posting this in the newer PD9 area and letting the folks there provide guidance. Also contact Cyberlink support.
Despite glitches and occasional issues, PD9 is a solid program and well worth the price IMHO.
Good luck,
Larry
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Thanks, but my concern is that the new PD9 will crash, hang, stutter, and do all the things that PD8 did when it was first released 18 months ago. It took at least 6 months before it was usable as a reliable editing tool.
A thread on DVInfo.net described it initially as "a train wreck", and many people from around the world who bought the early release were totally unsatisfied with all of the problems and issues they encountered.
Some companies are extremely meticulous about testing their software before release, and have very few bugs. My favorite non linear editing software is Edius Neo 2 with AVCHD Booster, which has had ZERO updates since it was initally released, and not a single bug I have encountered in using it for over a year.
I intend to eventually buy PD9, as I have done with all of the earlier releases. I just will not go through the first six months of beta testing at my expense and inconvenience if I have to pay for the current (Beta quality) software.
Larry
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Sorry to hear that. It leaves prior Cycberlink customers with quite a dilemma:
Install the trial / PD9 retail and lose the stability and integrity of the PD8 prdocut which took many updates and many nearly a year to (finally) fix properly
or
Do not install the trial / new PD9 and wait for Cyberlink to get its act together
or
Deal with having a dual boot / backup strategy to install and try PD9 and then revert back to PD8.
For whatever it is worth, as an owner of Vegas (7,8,9, and now 10), they made a much better decision to allow both old and new to coexist. I wish Cyberlink had done the same.
My current thought would be to hold off buying or trying PD9 since it is extremely clear that the quality control and beta testing are still in their infancy.
Thanks Jeff and Nicholas for your replies.
Larry
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