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Hi:
First off, "i" stands for interlaced while "p" means progressive (http://www.axis.com/products/video/camera/progressive_scan.htm).
The Mbps, megabits per second, figure is the data flow bitrate and yes, presumably, the higher this value, the better image quality. It could be useful to look at this in your source files. (However, you'll have to do this outside PowerDirector. The other day, I got a recommendation on this forum to use Splash Lite video player, which can show the video bitrate.) I think that PowerDirector can increase the bitrate but I doubt the image quality is actually very much increased by this.
I don't know any exact numbers but I suppose YouTube downgrades the image quality if it's too high. You might simply want to experiment with a short video and produce it using different profiles.
Have you considered using the YouTube upload feature in PowerDirector? A wmv file is produced in this process. Hopefully Cyberlink engineers optimized this choice from the quality and production time's points of view...
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Thanks for your responses. I mainly appreciate the hint to use Splash Lite. Thanks, Patrick. Its Pro version might well be worth the 20 bucks it costs. On my machine, it's definitely a better alternative to VLC player.
I'm not much wiser about the relation between the timeline frame rate and the source or target but I'll keep exploring. As regards my problem with transitions producing from a 1080/50p source, I'll wait to see if the graphic card I'll get soon helps.
I've tried a few more things but didn't really solve it. This really could be an issue of my computer being obsolete for this kind of thing or it's a PowerDirector bug. Hard to say unless I can rule out the former...
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Hi everyone,
I'd appreciate hearing a bit of an insight into frame rates with respect to PowerDirector's inner workings.
PowerDirector shows videos as 25 or 30 frames per second for PAL and NTSC, respectively. I'm on PAL so I'm going to refer to this standard's conditions from here on (25 fps).
I've been so far mainly editing 720/50i videos; no principal issues. However, I have now started using 1080/50p videos and I've encountered a problem: I have been unable to correctly render a 6-minute video with 15 clips when I put transitions between the clips. I've tried different output formats but the production sometimes doesn't finish at all or there are some "frozen" clips or short sections in the resulting video, always following a transation (e.g. "Fade"). I've also tried a few different transations and their modes, with, where possible, our without Smart Video Rendering Technology; to no avail. Since the problem is rather irregular, I suspect my computer's performance could be the culprit as it's rather marginal so I have ordered a graphic card supporting nVidia CUDA technology; I'll get it next week.
Besides trying to render only three clips with two transations, which worked fine, I also tried to render the entire video without transitions as 1080/24p, cut up the output video to the clips again and insert the transitions: the same problem.
I'm not actually asking for help with this problem. I'm more wondering about how PowerDirector deals with the difference in the number of source frames, edit frames, and target frames.
If my source is 50 progressive frames, PowerDirector shows 25 frames, and the target frame rate rendered is 24 progressive frames (AVC), what are the relations between those? Also, are there any practical implications for the most convenient source format recorded with a camera if editing with PowerDirector is the intended use? Should I prefer shooting in 1080/50i to 1080/50p?
PowerDirector can also produce in 1080/50p. Again, how does this relate to 25 frames per second shown when editing? If the sourse is 1080/50p, is every other frame dropped when editing and then rendered by approximation between two consecutive frames or are the original source frames all preserved for rendition but only every other shown for the editing purposes?
My camera can also record in 1080/24p. I have somewhere (probably Vimeo.com) read a recommendation to shoot using 24 fps whenever possible (no reasoning in the immediate context though). Any thoughts on this format? I understand it's the original movie industry frame rate (actually ~ 23.976 fps) but I don't see any other applications.
Looking forward to your enlightening me. Thanks...
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Hi there,
I'm not aware of the possibility you want. I think you need to move the subtitles manually. You can select a group of subtitles to move them together at a time using the standard usage of CTRL and SHIFT keys, respectively.
If you have a relatively weak processor, you may actually encounter difficulties moving a lot of subtitles together and the application may even freeze or crash...
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Sorry! I've fixed the file extension above. Typing faster than thinking...
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Quote:
Okay, more foolproof:
Your projects are in pds files. When opening a project via the File menu or using the key shortcut, CTRL-O, the following file browse popup dialog filters the files displayed to dps only. In other words, you only see dps files with your projects to select from.
On selecting your desired project (pds file) in the above procedure, PowerDirector loads the media files for the project. Paths to them are saved in the pds file. If a media file is not found, you get the following error box:
If you know, you've just moved the media file, choose Browse. (Don't select Ignore or Ignore All.) You need to locate the file whose name is shown in the error box, "camcorder_43.avi" in my example, each time this error box pops up...
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Okay, more foolproof:
Your projects are in dps files. When opening a project via the File menu or using the key shortcut, CTRL-O, the following file browse popup dialog filters the files displayed to dps only. In other words, you only see dps files with your projects to select from.
On selecting your desired project (dps file) in the above procedure, PowerDirector loads the media files for the project. Paths to them are saved in the pds file. If a media file is not found, you get the following error box:
If you know, you've just moved the media file, choose Browse. (Don't select Ignore or Ignore All.) You need to locate the file whose name is shown in the error box, "camcorder_43.avi" in my example, each time this error box pops up...
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Hi,
I've always had this box asking me if I want to browse for each media file PowerDirector can't find on loading a project. You can simply navigate to each media file's new location on selecting Browse.
PowerDirector project files are xml files. This means they are plain text tagged files which can be viewed and edited even manually. I don't mean to recommend editing them but if you manage to view a pds file, you should see that the media files' locations are stored using absolute paths. This means that if you move the entire structure of folders that hold both the pds and the media files, you still need to let PowerDirector know of the media files' new locations.
It may be a bit tedious if there are a lot of media files in a project to browse for them all one by one, but once you've done so, you project will contain all your work...
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Hi boong,
Just wondering: have you actually experienced symptoms of insufficient system resources while testing PowerDirector?
My computer is older than yours, configured quite modestly, and I haven't had any restricting problems with my hardware. I don't make discs though. That's something I can't report on.
As a matter of fact, I only see insufficient power when I replay resolution 1080/50 progressive (I'm in Europe) using for example VLC Media Player; gets jerky. No such problems with interlaced videos or in PowerDirector...
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Hi,
I have a similar camera. It seems the camera can only communicate with Panasonic software (HD Writer) via USB. Neither does the camera show up as a storage device in a file management program when you connect it to your computer. I don't recall reading the SD card from the camera using a card reader but I think this could work.
What I do is load the recordings to the computer (video and still images) using HD Writer and then just read the files into the PowerDirector project library.
I don't know why you think the output resolution degrades. PowerDirector has the option of generating shadow files for the editing purposes. These are of lower resolution. Also the preview window can be set to three different resolution levels to adopt to your computer performance. These resolutions, however, do not affect the "produced" files' resolution...
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Hi abslayer,
I Just wanted to point out that your post was illogical to me. Your reasoning in the second post just reinforces this feeling in me: you say you do have "quite a lot of" experience with Final Cut Pro. Why did you ever spend money on PowerDirector, then? SORRY, I NOW SEE THIS OTHER POST WAS by Schbang:
You're mixing advertising and (whose?) expectations. Which particular PowerDirector's advertised feature wasn't delivered to you? Perhaps you just misinterpreted some marketing talk for yourself.
PowerDirector delivers what I need to me and I find buying it a fair deal.
There are compatibility problems and I hear complaints about rather poor technical support by Cyberlink (no personal experience). Can you positively confirm Final Cut Pro is out of such issues. That might be useful information to share.
This forum is not Cyberlink. This forum is the users. Did you mean to tell the people here you were smarter than them?
Jirka
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Final Cut Pro, hmm. Not sure if it makes sense to compare products whose price tags are at ratio 3:1. Also, do you actually have any hands-on experience with Final Cut Pro to give the people on this forum some useful information rather than just relief yourself?
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Hi,
I understand srt subtitle files are not meant to be tagged (for their format see, for instance, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubRip). Thus they don't carry any font property information. If tags are supported in them by some software, it is not standard or generally compatible.
I'm afraid you can only set italics manually. Unfortunatelly, PowerDirector doesn't seem to support different font settings within one subtitle. One caption either is all in italics or isn't in italics...
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Hi,
I'll speculate a bit but unless someone proves me wrong, I think it's as follows:
You can't edit each of the six channels for the 5.1ch format in PowerDirector separately. If you choose to use this option in Production, the surround effect is synthesized by the software from a two-channel format. If you have multiple sound tracks in your project, they are simply mixed in superposition in mono or stereo only.
Even when I open a 5.1-channel sound track from my camcorder in WaveEditor, it shows up in stereo there. I suspect PowerDirector might only handle the front left and right channels and synthesize the other channels on surround sound production anew. There's no way for me to test this at the moment though...
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Hey Slinden,
A solution I see is changing the title block size by adjusting its LEFT side and than moving the block back to its desired position. It's still two operations but you might be able to place each title's right side to the desired position when adding it to avoid the latter operation.
Perhaps someone knows of a better, semantically cleaner way. I do agree it should be possible to switch between "insert" and "overwrite" modes for this but I couldn't find such a feature...
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How about locking the music track (by clicking on the padlock symbol to the left of the track)?
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Well, there are usually more than one way to skin a cat, right? I actually think now that one easy straightforward way of achieving the same as I first described is unlinking the video and audio while the footage is on a track. This time you right click on the clip when in the Timeline View. You can then move the latter audio clip back to the former audio block to make the audio continuous after splitting both video and audio. There's a chance you don't need to split the audio at all while splitting the video...
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If I were you, I'd simply separate video and audio and put the audio on an independent sound track. You can use the Extract Audio command on right clicking on a video clip in the project's multimedia library. This allows you to save the footage's audio in a wav file, put the file in the library and place it on a track where it will not be affected by any changes to your video...
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I experienced audio dropouts while editing that I think were due to insufficient computing power. It was okay when I turned off the subtitle track (by unchecking its checkbox). The output produced should be fine although I didn't really try that as I only needed to export the subtitles into an srt file.
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Sorry, I kind of missed the word 'temporarily'. For that, I'd either go the way described by playsound or, if the transition should be immediate (as opposed to ramped), I'd split track 1 to make a clip aligned with the clip on track 2 and mute the former as mentioned by FredB...
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Wnuk suggest using the Audio Mixing Room but the easiest way to mute an entire sound track is simply by unchecking the box to the left of the track. Video and audio can always be enabled (checked) or disabled (unchecked) separately...
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