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Being slower than you want isn't the same thing as being broken, and maybe it would help to have some apples-to-apples comparisons.
Take a look at the two projects and sample clips in this OneDrive folder. Once the folder is downloaded to your computer, double click on either of the .CDS files to launch CD with the settings I used.
You should also create a 4K custom profile using the same settings I used to match the 4K source clip:
For the AVC 4K 60p MTS clip produced to 4K 60p with the Red Planet Artistic Preset, it doesnt matter whether I produce to AVC MP4 or M2TS, or to HEVC MP4. My system took 3:08 to produce the 13 second clip. That's a rate of 14 seconds of processing for every second of content, or about 4 frames per second.
If I instead produce to 1080/60p, it takes exactly 60 seconds. That's 4.6 seconds for every second of content or 13 frames/sec, which is about 3x faster than the 4K producing time.
For the HD 60p clip test, producing to 1080/60p with the 80s Fab Preset, it only takes 16 seconds to produce the 11.5 second clip. That's 1.4x the duration of the clip or 43 frames/sec, which is about 10x faster than processing a 4K clip to 4K.
How long do these clips take to produce on your system?
Upgraded processor to a Ryzen 9 5950 X. Puget Sound Davinci benchmark overall went from 753 to 990. 4K Media Score went from 62 to 81. Processing your 4K60 project in identical manner yielded 3:08 minutes to produce. This is a 16% improvement with a processor upgrade that benches ~32% better at similar tasks. This tells me that to use this feature in any reasonable amount of time I would need a processor around 10 times as fast as this one. Looking at the PassMark Software benchmark scores for CPUs, the most expensive consumer processor available, an AMD EPYC 7763, only benches at about twice the speed for a cost of about $7,800 for the CPU alone.
The CPU upgrade did improve the time to process my real world (for me) test of a 36 sec 4k60 clip in Power Director, round tripped to CD with manual changes and then back to PD, down to 18 min. I haven't tried Resolve yet but before the upgrade it color corrected in about 29 seconds. Honestly, So I guess in the end I'll have to admit the process isn't broken. It will eventually work. Just not sure why Cyberlink doesn't want to fix something that drives folks like me, that otherwise like the package, to go to a different editor suite.
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In my opinion, I think they have introduced something strange with PD20 and possibly multi monitors. Friend of mine had issues too. He's running 3 multi monitors of various flavors. He went down to one monitor and these adjustments were instantaneous with PD20. Not sure if experience will repeat as I'm unsure what's creating the issue nor should one have to use a single monitor.
I really can't time my single monitor adjustment in PD20 for you, it's virtually instantaneous and any timing would just be error.
Jeff
Very interesting! I run 3 monitors as well. I wonder if that relates to my issue with Color Director being DOGMEAT slow. I'll have to try it all with only one monitor enabled. Thanks again!!!!
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Wow! It cut the time in half! Still twice PD18 but a real improvement. THANKS!!!!!!
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Hardly delay is in terms of 100-500 ms (I have not measured that).
a quick look at your DXDiag file:
- the DirectX database is old, I use 1.3.5
- there may be a newer NVIDIA driver for you (do you have multiple GPU cards?)
- I see that the Cyberlink software including PD has crashed or aborted a number of times. (There is a newer version of PD available,than you use/reported).
- Maybe "play" a bit with the screen settings (why 125%?) and the PD preview settings (maybe HD is toohigh for your screen resolution). Etc.
No doubt others in the forum have more clever suggestions wrt your machine.
Thanks for your observations and taking the time to reply. I noticed the DXDIAG was from a few days ago when I reported Color Director ungodly slow. I have since updated PD and the NVIDIA drivers but it has had no effect on these problems. I reported the Color Director problem and received a cut & paste reply "it needs a fast computer" to run. I'm sure I'll get the same if I report this. PD18 was (and is) a stable, well crafted version. PD365 appears to me to be an onging beta test where many ambitious additions have bogged down the program in many unintended ways. I have a fairly fast computer now. I will be upgrading to the Ryzen 9 5950X this weekend which should put it about as fast as you can get under $10k or more. Davinci Resolve chews up 4K60 work effortlessly. I checked DirectX and MS claims v12 is the latest and windows update says I'm up to date. I ran a better test to quantify the issue. Take a small clip and open in a new project in PD 18, Open FIX and select Color Adjustment. use the up/down arrows next to the exposure adjustment and click up or down 10 times. (changing exposure from 100 to 90 as an example) In PD18 this completes in approx 7 sec. In PD365 it's approx 26 sec. How long does this take on your machine? (Iused my Iphone clock to time it)
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Here is the cut & paste response I received from Support. I closed the claim as following up further is a waste of everyone's time. I sincerely thank those responding in the forum. Sad that Cyberlink support is dwarfed by orders of magnitude to what one can get here from fellow users.
Thank you for contacting CyberLink Technical Support.
We understand that you find the ColorDirector 365 (in Director Suite 365) useless after testing it in relation to the forum link provided. We are more than willing to assist you.
With reference to your concern, after further checking the condition, per the current program design, the color/pixel adjustments, and video stabilizer-related features in ColorDirector and in the Fix / Enhance panel of PowerDirector require relatively heavy computing resources on the CPU hardware (but not GPU processing) to process and add the video effects on each video frame in user's project.
For instance, technical-wise, for 10 mins long video/clip which is encoded in 60 frames per second. To add color/pixel adjustment effects on the target video, it would require the program to process 36,000 frames totally, and if the resolution of the video is higher (e.g. 1080p or above), it would take a longer time to process further accordingly.
And, those color/pixel-related effects processing are CPU-intensive tasks rather than processed by the GPU using a hardware encoder. It is expected that the ColorDirector and PowerDirector would take a much longer time to process the color effects when producing the high-resolution video project as the color/pixel effects processing is CPU-intensive and requires heavy computing capacity relatively.
Our engineering team keeps enhancing the program feature and compatibility between PowerDirector versions.
We have escalated your concern to our engineering team for performance improvement reference.
Thank you for the report and feedback.
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It may be the format of the clip or it may be some settings you use.; and it may be the hardware or drivers or any combination?
On the 4K60 footage I have there is hardly any delay when changing such settings.
I have the preview set at full HD and I have enabled the creation of shadow files,which both help a bit with the speed of editing.
Maybe share some details, like your PD settings and information on the clip and on your PC (dxdiag file)?
PD is set to timeline 1080p/30. Media in is a mix of 1080p30, 4K30, and 4K60. The color adjustments are the same on all. There is a hesitancy of 1-3 sec as I adust and it doesn't seem to matter what the clip is. It's the same on 1080p. I have shadow files enabled and preview set to Full HD/Real Time/RGB.
I found an NVIDIA driver update and did that but no joy. I cut the clip to 4 sec but length/size made no difference. CPU usage never gets over 14% during the operation. When you say "hardly any delay" how much are you talking about? Did you compare to PD18? In 18 I estimate the corrections are applied in 300 - 500ms. In PD365 it's more like 2 sec.
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I'm doing most color correction in Davinci Resolve now as Color Director is ungodly slow. But some 4K30 drone footage was pretty good so I brought it directly into PD365. It needed a little tweak so I went to FIX and tried adjusting exposure, saturation, etc. in the color section of FIX. Each change seemed to take 2-3 seconds to appear in the preview window. I went back to PD 18 and did the same thing with the same footage. Changes were almost instantaneous. Is there a setting I'm missing in PD365 or is it just all around dogmeat slow compared to PD18?
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That's not how it works, unfortunately. In a simplistic view, then yes you'd want all CPU resources devoted to the task at hand, but in reality there are often other processes going on that the CPU has to wait for, which means it won't be running solidly at full capacity.
It looks like the Resolve code is doing that, so maybe they've got their color grading code fully optimized. Take a look at all the forum posts here on bottleneck for some background of that kind of issue.
As it happens, I was running a produce cycle in resolve and watching CPU at 100% when I noticed a backup in progress doing a verify operation. I thought cancelling it would have some effect, but it did not - as far as I could tell. I'm running about 10% cpu when Resolve is not producing with a few other programs open. From a very layman POV it looks to me like once CD or PD with CD correctors hits 100%CPU it goes through some repetitive cycle that gains 3 and loses 1-2 frames. I see the time remaining go down a little, go up a little, then go down a little more over and over. Its like it throttles up - gains a frame or two - hit's overload and dumps the last frame as corrupt, throttles back, gains a couple more, and repeats the cycle.
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I doubt that's what's actually happened, but since there's such a big performance gap it would be interesting to see how they respond. Please post back when you hear back from them!
I will. Another interesting aspect is the observed CPU performance. In Resolve my CPU goes to 100% and stays there when rendering. In PD, with no corrections or only internal to PD corrections, I saw it go to 80 and occasionally 100%. BUT, using either CD or CD corrections ported back to PD it ran around 50% and almost never got higher. At a minimum, that's counterintuitive, as it should be working at full capacity.
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Glad that worked for you. Again I think you should report this to CL tech support and see what they have to say.
OK, I reported it & cited this set of comments in the forum. It's such a major bottleneck. I can't imagine they are not fully aware of it and released it anyway, thinking most users are working in 1080p or less.
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Took the same 36 sec 4k60 clip into Davinci Resolve and processed with no corrections = 29 seconds. Applied a full set of color corrections - absolutely lovely - processed with corrections = 29 sec. GAME OVER
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I'd suggest producing without the color grading to make sure everything else looks correct, then use the round-trip method from PD's timeline to apply the presets and produce overnight.
If you think something's defective with CD, you should report the issue to Cyberlink tech support from their contact page. Include a link to this discussion so they can see what's been discussed so far and see what they have to say.
Thanks, I have over a day into this already and I've never had much luck reporting things like this. It is what it is and I'll just move forward. Thanks for your help. You were able to confirm it wasn't just me. The program is a nice 1080p movie maker and I'm clearly asking too much of it.
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Yes of course, when you enable "Fast video rendering technology:" and then you use the "NVIDIA NVENC" the GPU is doing the encoding. That's what you told it to do with this option. However, any color correction like a LUT is done by the CPU prior to being encoded by the GPU. Usually the application of the LUT is the more time consuming piece for PD, with current PD, this is done by the CPU. When you don't use the "NVIDIA NVENC" feature, both the frame prep by the LUT and the encoding is done by the CPU which will put more load on it.
Jeff
The Ryzen 9-5950x arrived today, which should roughly double my processing power if the benchmarks are any indicators. I'll be running the same tests once I get it installed later in the week. One thing that has me wondering though, Does PD apply all the facets of a preset or lut even though they are set to no changes? I tried limiting myself to a few changes, but it did not seem to make any difference.
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Did you do the little study I had suggested? Did the CPU load go to 100% as guessed? From that little comparison you would have recorded your time differential too for your comparison on your exact encode task.
For the most part, Intel HT or AMD SMT is usually in the noise for PD. Basically some things maybe 0-10% faster, some things 0-10% slower. It's really not a major differentiator.
What I did state, since you claimed your CPU was unloaded at only 50%, if you judged that with the basic Task Manager, that percentage is calculated of the SMT logical processor cores which is 2X. So tasks that can really only load the physical cores at best can achieve 50% by that metric.
Jeff
Actually I was about to pursue this further when I received some other tests to run. It got real interesting then.
It would take awhile to document. What I saw was when I produced with PD using a 30 sec 4K60 clip in/1080p30 out and no corrections i got CPU usage of ~30% and GPU usage of 20%
When I produced with PD in 4k60 with color corrections from within PD and 1080p/30 out with no fast rendering i got cpu usage of 86% and GPU usage of 40%. While slower to produce, production was smooth and steady
When I used the Fast NVIDIA option to produce the same 4K60 clip with corrections fron PD it went quicker and CPU dropped to 50% while GPU went up to 50%
When I went to use the corrections from CD CPU went to 45% & GPU went to 50% but the produce was horribly slow.
So, once I saw a CPU of 86% (and occasional peaks to 100%) it made me wonder. Maybe when you enable fast rendering it limits the CPU and relies more on GPU??? It clearly is overworked when the color corrections come from Color Director.
I could do more with this but frankly, if all this is as good as Power Director is going to get using Color Director Corrections, I need to spend my time learning a new editor.
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I gave some thought to reducing everything to 1080p/30 ahead of time but I use 4k so I can zoom and frame a bit in places. I use 60p so I can slow selected sections as needed. Both very nice features of Power Director. I create 10 - 12 min videos that are visual documentary of communities and homes in communities. A typical clip used is 6-10 sec long cut from a 10 min video. Sometimes several from the same parent clip. So really my other option is to color grade the 60 - 90 GB of raw video before I start editing. Since they are in many locations under various lighting conditions and from 2-4 different cameras I would have to do each clip individually. A huge add to the workflow at these speeds. Our 4k to 4k test above suggests 18X original clip length using factory presets. That's roughly 108 hours of processing for the typical 6 hrs of video. If you are not using factory presets double that or more. This makes my original 5 hour produce time look like the best choice. But that's a horrible choice. Any mistake seen in the produced version requires another 5 hours to fix. As opposed to 20 min or so if I don't use Color Director. So if it's just that slow and they ain't callin' that broke than I can't use it.
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I agree it's time consuming. Your results are a little hard to decipher as it's a bunch of mixed bag comparisons. Maybe this simplistic table will show some of the challenges.
In each case, the source video was the same properties of the produced video. I don't want to confound resolution, frame rate or bitrate reduction times with application of the LUT. When resolution down scaling with CD, from a time perspective, it is better to do the resolution reduction first to simplify the LUT application computational requirements.
Basically, from what I see, although maybe slower than desired, the time roughly scales with expected complexity so I don't see any big BROKEN conclusion.
Jeff
I gave some thought to reducing everything to 1080p/30 ahead of time but I use 4k so I can zoom and frame a bit in places. I use 60p so I can slow selected sections as needed. Both very nice features of Power Director. I create 10 - 12 min videos that are visual documentary of communities and homes in communities. A typical clip used is 6-10 sec long cut from a 10 min video. Sometimes several from the same parent clip. So really my other option is to color grade the 60 - 90 GB of raw video before I start editing. Since they are in many locations under various lighting conditions and from 2-4 different cameras I would have to do each clip individually. A huge add to the workflow at these speeds. Our 4k to 4k test above suggests 18X original clip length using factory presets. That's roughly 108 hours of processing for the typical 6 hrs of video. If you are not using factory presets double that or more. This makes my original 5 hour produce time look like the best choice. But that's a horrible choice. Any mistake seen in the produced version requires another 5 hours to fix. As opposed to 20 min or so if I don't use Color Director. So if it's just that slow and they ain't callin' that broke than I can't use it.
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For fun, I just tried round-tripping from PD's timeline and with the same settings applied in CD and producing to similar profiles in PD. It took 4:21 for the 4K clip and 0:23 for the HD clip, which is about 40% slower than when producing directly in CD.
If these results are typical, it would seem to imply that CD's producing algorthim is better suited for color grading than PD's is.
In that case I'd say you'd want to produce the clips in CD and then import them into PD for the quickest workflow, even if producing with CD takes longer than you think it should.
I tried the same. to go to 1080p 60 took 75 sec or 6.25 x clip length
to go to 1080p 30 (which is mostly what I do) 42 sec
So,,,,it is slow using these canned presets, but it does work - IF....you want to stick with canned presets
I used the same setup that took 42 sec and instead of using the canned preset I chose the adjustments tab. I unchecked everything but Tone. I went into tone and made minor adj to exposure, brightness, etc. then I went back into PD and processed to 1080P30 as before..................................................7 Min 19sec later it completed Thats 36.6 X clip length. My videos run about 12 min with maybe 8 min of color corrected material so ~5 HOURS to produce a 12 minute clip. I tried the same thing with the preset I had made from the manual adj. screen with similar results.
So, for Fun I went back to the 4k CD project you sent me and went to the Manual tab. I unchecked everything but tone and made similar adjustments. I produced it to 1080p60fps........ 133 seconds or 11X clip length
I was on a call with creators from around the world yesterday. Justin Brown hosted the call - (Primal Video). When I presented my dilemma and the fact my video took 5 hours, they all just shook their heads and said I needed software geared for this work. They assured me buying new hardware would not cure this, nor was it normal in Davinci, Filmora, Premiere, or Final cut.
So, if it ain't broken, then I guess I need a new editor. I really like a lot about PD. But the color correction internal to pd doesn't hold a candle to what Color Director can do. But I really need a workflow that allows me to bring in large 4k clips and precut several small pieces from each. I could preprocess the clips but even at these speeds that adds a day or more.
Frankly, the fact that even simple manual adjustments take much longer than a canned preset suggests genuine doom if more of the available choices are selected or one adds special effects.
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Being slower than you want isn't the same thing as being broken, and maybe it would help to have some apples-to-apples comparisons.
Take a look at the two projects and sample clips in this OneDrive folder. Once the folder is downloaded to your computer, double click on either of the .CDS files to launch CD with the settings I used.
You should also create a 4K custom profile using the same settings I used to match the 4K source clip:
For the AVC 4K 60p MTS clip produced to 4K 60p with the Red Planet Artistic Preset, it doesnt matter whether I produce to AVC MP4 or M2TS, or to HEVC MP4. My system took 3:08 to produce the 13 second clip. That's a rate of 14 seconds of processing for every second of content, or about 4 frames per second.
If I instead produce to 1080/60p, it takes exactly 60 seconds. That's 4.6 seconds for every second of content or 13 frames/sec, which is about 3x faster than the 4K producing time.
For the HD 60p clip test, producing to 1080/60p with the 80s Fab Preset, it only takes 16 seconds to produce the 11.5 second clip. That's 1.4x the duration of the clip or 43 frames/sec, which is about 10x faster than processing a 4K clip to 4K.
How long do these clips take to produce on your system?
4K to 4K 3min 39sec
4K to 1920 60fps 67 sec
HD60 18 sec
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After a day of testing I have concluded Color Director, either by preset or by even limited fix selections, overwhelms my machine at anything more than 1080P input. And at that it takes 6X the length of the clip to process. With no corrections a 36sec 4k60 clip produces to 1080P/30 in 11 sec. Its 30% done in 5minutes if any corrections are done in CD. If I reduce the input file to 1080p and then apply the corrections it's done in 206 seconds. If I do the corrections in PD the produce time for the 4k file increases to around 29 sec vs 12 min or more if corrections are made in Color Director - My conclusion: BROKEN
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You probably have AMD SMT enabled in BIOS which will show 50% CPU load as PD does not effective use the two logical processor cores per physical core. Disable SMT and you will probably see near 100% CPU usage for the same comparative task that you said showed 50%.
A RTX3070Ti will not improve timeline playback fluidity with LUTS, render preview with LUTS, or encoding with LUTS relative to a GTX1650 for the current PD20 release.
Jeff
Should I turn AMD SMT off?
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