Messages posted by Evan

Quote: The problem is the Import directory like all windows software remembers where you were last

Technically, not true. As the saying goes, with time and money anything is possible. When I develop software it is possible to programatically maintain some settings for a particular project/document/etc. One approach is to maintain a couple of paths per project that are tried in order:

1. Relative path of import (or export) location. If it exists use it.

2. Absolute path (includes drive letter) of import location. If it exists use it.

3. Default path to location.

Typically #1 is the saved setting, and #2 is figured out behind the scenes and also saved with the project file. #3 would be the global/software default setting.

Just 2cents

Quote: The final solution:

Power Director does not like to have any other video editing s/w on your machine. Basically it tries to share the filters (titles effects, transitions etc.) from other programs such as Ulead or Pinnacle. Once I uninstalled both programs and removed all traces in the registry I could burn the program without any issues.

I don't argue with the results

but I don't think a registry setting for "filters" (meaning titles and transitions) of another video product is going to mess with PD... there is not to my knowledge a Microsoft common framework for video editing effects.

But... what could get messed up is PD's choice of codecs (sometimes called filters and not the same as titles and effects) during a burn... and I don't know enough about video programming to know if any of that could accidentally mess up PD's explicit call to a particular encoding component during rendering.

Evan

My DVD burning issues per crashing were intermittent. Unfortunately I had other issues that I was unable to resolve - screen/menu dvd background image quality, DVD video quality from HD source material, sync, etc.

On occasion producing a file (vs burning) would get to the end of the progress bar but never finish -- even though it appeared the physical process completed.

Someone here gave the suggesting of burning with both DVD and DVD-Folder checked. Maybe try that, but it seems like black-magic to me.

Good luck.

Something similar I've also seen is where my video project consists of one video file, but split and trimmed into clips.

In the timeline it looks fine, but after producing or burning the edits are off... meaning that later in the video I see video during a transition that should not have been there because it would have been edited/trimmed out (as it is when I preview the timeline a frame at a time).

It could be an artifact of the video/audio sync issue.

Cheers,
Evan

Quote: Is anyone noticing that there is tiny/rapid vertical shaking of the resulting [DVD] video during playback? It ultimately makes the picture, especially still portions, unstable.

One week since purchasing and still no joy. At this point I've reinstalled clean, directx update, found a kbhotfix for Vista/Dual-Core, tried downgrade and upgrade video driver, tried internal vs. external storage.

It comes down to, in my mind, the actual source HD material is not being interpreted or converted as well as what the other products can do, that I decided against not buying. Of all the things that could could have gone wrong this one is "good".

Someone sent me some AVCHD source video and I was able to produce or burn that to DVD (not high-def) format without issue.

Later tonight (EST) I'll upload a snippet of my HD source video as well as the resulting DVD/MPEG2 conversion if anyone is curious.

Coming close to cut & run time.

In PD7 when burning a DVD I can pick only DVD HQ, SP, LP, or "smart" -- other than that I cannot really fine tune.

The HQ setting is Quality level 6 (of 7), vbit-rate 4000-8300Kbps, and video compression data bitrate 8000Kbps.

I can however fool with these settings when "producing" an actual mpeg file and turning up the bit rates just makes the shaking a bit clearer.

To make this really odd, I sometimes see slight jerkiness in preview mode which carries over to the output -- whether DVD quality or real HD quality. It seems to be more prevalent if the clip is trimmed (even just once at beginning). And when this happens I see that some of the vertical oscillating in the output goes away (!) but as I said the jerkiness carries over to the output as part of the video.

I also tried separating the audio from my 30 second clip and deleting it, but that did not help. Something is going on. For fun I updated DirectX but that didn't help or hurt.

Again, I've only noticed this when the source file is HD.

Like you, other software trials that I experimented with (VideoReDo, Aimersoft, Ulead/Corel) did not exhibit this issue in playback and production. Their output was solid.

I mainly didn't go with Ulead because my testing revealed really bad crashing that others were experiencing and I hate their DVD menu operation... on the other hand it gave you free rain over DVD output parameters and the resulting video was extremely nice when converting from HD.

I've noticed that when previewing the menus. Though in my case it's not difficult to see. Perhaps I was looking at bright menus.

I just bought PD7 (build 1829, clean install, etc) and among other things I am going to use it to archive/edit some TiVo HD shows for future playback. The mechanics of this work great and I'm outputting DVD HQ files/discs, which is fine for my purposes.

However, I'd like to know if anyone else is doing the same thing and, regardless, is noticing that there is tiny/rapid vertical shaking of the resulting video during playback? It ultimately makes the picture, especially still portions, unstable. Noticeable from all playback software (WMP, PowerDVD, etc) and actual DVD player.

I think it's related to the conversion from HD to DVD or interpretation of the HD material itself (field order?); I pasted in the source video properties below... which don't match what PD7 "thinks" SVRT HD video should be and I don't know if that matters.

At any rate I've tried about 3 other software packages that produce VOBs, Mpegs or burn to disc and the outputs were fine, rock steady picture. I've also tried a few different source video files.

I just noticed that build 1915 was released. I tested; same results.

Here are 2 sets of properties for the same source video file. Not sure if it matters that they don't agree on bitrate.

CyberLink:

Type: MPEG-2

Bitrate: 10.02 Mbps

Resolution: 1920x1080

Frame rate: 29.97 fps

VideoReDo:

Encoding: MPEG 2

Bit Rate: 25.000 Mbps

Encoding Dimensions: 1920 x 1080

Frame Rate: 29.97 FPS

I just know someone will answer or comment on my question above.

In the mean time my newbie opinion is that SVRT UI is a bit over engineered. If I'm inaccurate below please correct me with regard to PD7 as I'm still learning.

It seems to me other software easily (from an end user perspective) can "smart" render any video. The parameter should be the source material + target material = yes or no to smart render. I really shouldn't have to tell the software up front what I think the smart render profile is as that doesn't make sense.

Anyway, I import a 720p MPEG2/AC3 video (from my TiVo HD) which works fine. I trim out commercials but there is not an SVRT profile that matches my source video (sound format matches, though), thus I can't smart render out an edited video file.

On the other hand I can use VideoReDo TVSuite, cut out the commercials, and when I go to save my video there are easy to pick output options for video, sound, aspect, etc described as "No change" -- i.e. no rendering needed. Ultimately my trimmed 3gig HD file is saved by this utility program in literally 5 minutes, and that includes increasing the sound track volume level.

I only point this out to show it is possible to have SVRT work better (in my opinion) and because I really like PD7 so far I hope that SVRT will get a makeover or refined a bit.

My last comment about VideoReDo is that the Video navigation options are easier to use, fast, and all customizable... something CL could consider perhaps.

Per my above post, if it is possible to edit/create a SVRT profile please let me know.

Maybe I wasn't clear, so I will upload a screen shot.

PD7... How do you create a custom profile for SVRT?
For example I see "(HD) MPEG-2, 1080i" but not a 720p version.

My question is... how can I add "(HD) MPEG-2, 720p" as an SVRT profile?

Screen shot attached.

Thanks!

PD7... How do you create a custom profile for SVRT?

For example I see "(HD) MPEG-2, 1080i" but not a 720p version.

Thanks,
Evan

I've been testing PD7 for a couple of days now (since I've decided to return Ulead VS11).

The one feature that I would really like is to be able to create a multi title (multi-layered) menu with each title optionally having its own chapters.

I think PowerProducer can do this but I am resisting buying a whole other pkg just for this feature.

My experience -

I use Vista Enterprise 32bit and of course when I first installed many months ago it I found that there were many missing codecs so I downloaded the freebie VistaCodecs package.

I was having intermittent burning (or producing file) crashes as well over the past 2 days I've been testing PD7. I really wanted to like this software so I decided to remove VistaCodecs to see if that helped.... and it did. At I really hadn't wanted to remove it because my system has been stable for almost a year and the only thing changed was recently installing PD7.

But, after removing VistaCodecs and rebooting I've finally been able to burn a full DVD from HD material as well as output an edited HD movie file.