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re - quality of pro DVD
If you have a rock solid tripod like a Cartoni D603 and a top of the line pro camera by Canon or Sony with good lighting or at least the same lighting conditions, then you will get the same crisp results.
The test is simple. Place your camera on a solid table top like a marble counter and preferrably in bright sunlight so the shutter speed is high and film a subject in sharp focus in 1080 resolution and I guarantee you will get really good video.
Unfortunately, we cannot reproduce these conditions everywhere else compared to a TV or motion picture company. Our equipment (I assume) does not compare with theirs. However if you can justify buying a $3000 tripod and a top of the line camera then you are on an equal footing.
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Absolutely you can do what you wish.
For example you can have a master clip in the top time line and a sub-clip on the PIP line(s)
You can then watch along any one track with the others turned off until you find a section which you like.
Make spit points Ctrl-T at approx the start and end of a section
Do this along all the tracks you have on-screen.
Now what you do is complex to describe but you will get the hang of it by trying.
lets say that on the master track at 1 minute 20 seconds you want to inset a section from track 2
You go to that point on track 1 and drag an empty space at that point by dragging the second section of track 1 off to the right. You will now have track 1 ending at 1m 20s and a big gap and then the remainder of track 1
Now on track 2 you need to drag the wanted section to the left until it is positioned under the gap on track 1
If you played everything now you would see travk1 then track 2 then track 1 again.
Now, on track 2 you need to double click and make it fill the screen since by default is only shows as part-screen .
Do this for all the segments you wish to insert into track 1
When you get good at that you will eventually want to do clever tricks like fades and other transitions but for now just do jump cuts
You can also have the output be
track1 track2 track2 track3 track1 track4
Hope you understand this.
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Yes you can use MS MM to capture to disk - I did that for a long time. However there isn;t a bug as you think.
When you recorded the original DV tape did you record the full hour as a straight recording or is it a set of clips where you stopped and then started recording again?
If so there are end of clip marks on the tape.
When you sart capturing it will auto-stop at the end of the clip You then save that clip.
You can then Capture the next clip abd so on.
I don't have the system pc up tonight or I would check for you.
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I don't know why you are contemplating compressing stuff down - that almost always means losing quality of image.
Are you wishing to archive or will you be showing it to others ?
You should always be aiming for best quality - always.
With the cost of recordable DVDs now being a dollar or less, make a double header DVD and edit it using PD to be chapters if the content is relevant .
In other words make a twin DVD to be proud of.
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Dafydd ought to read this and comment but the symptoms are the same as using mp3 audio tracks with clapperboard video. It doesnt work. And I'm betting it doesn't work in other non-linear editors either.
Thats why (inverse logic) the PIP track sound does work.
I don't know technically how sound gets onto DV video but there's a timebase somewhere and I dont think there is on wav or mp3 files.
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Now I want to ask, why extract to a wav file at all?. I think thats a mistake. When you use a video on the PIP line it obeys the frame by frame properties as the video timeline.
I can't fully explain it, but some years ago I recorded an mp3 using an audio recorder which writes to a ram disk, and had clapperboard marks at start and finish, so you would expect , matching clapperboard to the video image of the clapperboard, you would get sync, but it doesn't and the reason is that a wav mp3 recording, varies in time, with no proper timebase but as long as the audio track on the video stays together the sound is always in sync.
This wav problem sounds just the same.
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Glad we got a solution.
Regarding the CL grumble. There has to be a reason why you and everyone gets this 'bug'
I don't think is a bug per se, but something that happens during the process of video speed manipulation. If it was a simple bug, it would be fixed by now, and having worked with CL through other real bug-fixes I'm prepared to think its a 'feature'
Specifically, if you started with a clip with say two or three tones as the audio and now change the video speed to be
X1.5 X2 X2.5 X3 and also X0.75 X0.5 X0.3 etc so both fast and slow
What is heard in the clips ?
I admit I have not tried this to see and hear how it behaves.
Maybe some one with a musical ear out there might try this and report.
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I hope you solve the chroma-key issue.
I use it all the time in PD and its OK.
I have done lots of green screen and blue screen work and here are my tips for getting the best.
By the way here is one video done with green screen under a battery of homemade studio lights. 6 fluorescent 75W 5 foot tubes for the background and six pink pearl 100W lights in a semicircle around the musician.
http://www.videocentricity.net/view/86/tommy-a-blue-mood/
Its VERY difficult to get good FLAT lighting of the same luminance all over.
Its the change in luminance you are seeing as black when you apply the chroma setting.
heres a video
http://seemyworldonvideo.com/view/664/paris-bleu/
made on a blue screen background where the lighting was flat cloudy daylight from a window lighting both the subject (me) and the background. There were NO room lights at all. (The window was behind the camera)
I have also used a dark red blanket under daylight. The color does not matter. The lighting is everything !
Typically when doing green screen, your background isn't perfectly lit so the green is not the same luminance all over. When you do the chroma-key you can get dark areas usually further away and below where the eye-dropper was touched.
So, 99% of the problem is the human eye can't detect small changes in luminance across a lit backdrop, so it all looks OK until you do the chroma-key. I suggest less is better. Dont try to overlight the backdrop with lots of artificial lights, thats where flaring occurs and the eye cant tell. I even tried using a Weston light meter to measure but the change is so slight, and the effect so visible.
Best of Luck
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pull the PIP down and to the left of the display area and/or resize it will effectively hide the image
Adjusting video speed is the cause of the problem, but you knew that. Thats why I say mute the clip where you need.
I did notmake that clear
Video XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
________sound___.___Muted__._____sound_____
PIP_______________ XXXXXXXX
____________________sound__
The audience hears what you want in the main video until the PIP clip takes over sound and video , then back to the main video again
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Short of having the clips to play with its difficult to be exact.
here is something you can do however.
In the video timeline, mute or remove the sounds as you described above.
In the position in the movie where yoy want to hear the sound of the steward, place a clip of the steward andn you in conversation onto a PIP line thus
Video XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
PIP ______________ XXXX _____________
This should give you proper speech timing etc exactly where you want it.
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again, may I proffer my two bits.
While I dont see the reported problem, and I dont use the Trim, I simply delete unused parts.
But, in my opinion, when using Vista for long periods, there is a build-up of crap memory or memory fragmentation which leads to big applications suffering - only I cant prove this at all except by experience and observation.
Just yesterday, late in the day when I had been using Vista all day for emails, web development etc - but not PD at all... Then I started using PD with a few browser windows and windows explorer left open.
There had been ten explorer windows and some big development tools running all day.
PD ran terribly (slowly & with some small delays) and I happened to be dragging segments from the middle of a 5 minute long original AVI to the end of the movie.
I ended with about one minutes worth of 5 second clips, some were movie-in-reverse and some had other scene manipulations like speed and brightness applied.
Then PD froze for about 20 seconds and I had not saved the project . I was afraid it was a solid freeze up and I would lose my work, Then it continued OK.
I saved my project and rebooted Vista and continued editing for another thity minutes with absolutely no delays.
Maybe nothing to do with Roberts experience, but Vista should be booted before going into a 'troublesome' test project.
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Robert,
remind me again - was your PC purchased as is from a builder who sells direct to the public.
Did you add-in any new video cards etc?
I cant get past how the little guys with their lowly cpu and on-board video are scraping along just fine and the big-turbo chromium plated 400HP machines are conking out at simple (relatively) fade transitions.
Just my two pennyworth
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I dont have an HD camera.
PM me for submissions please for raw HD of about 30secs
1080i format MT4
A clock ticking with visible seconds would be good
PM me and I will give you an FTP site and password if needed
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The video clip is one which Robert (I think) created and after the original topic was deleted I put it back up on my own site for users to download, though I renamed it TEST.MTS It has never been edited/saved so its the original.
Later I will re-read the posts and update wthe O.S.
I am not surprised Cyberlink labs cant reproduce the error, as most of us cant either. Its localised to just a few PCs but our sample is so small, if we had a hundred users it might be much larger
Dafydd, your error report of failure to play audio at first pass then OK on the next pass IS EXACTLY what I got once and assumed that some cache somewhere changed the nature of the problem.
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OKay then...
I can see from the last ten posts that this is a quagmire. but straining the contents of the swamp reveals the following in as far as freezing
Dafydd - No errors - Note: his Quad PC sounds like a racehorse
Ron - No errors
Tony - No errors
Fred - Using a quad core with nvidia CUDA and turning off shadow files causes the video to freeze during preview. His PC is a quad like Dafydd.
Peter - Plays from one clip to the next (with or without a transition) the audio carries on but the video freezes.
Robert - With low resolution shadow proxy files ON the clip played through fine. - With Shadow files OFF stalls at first fade while sound continues on in preview mode. - CUDA on or off made no difference to the move stalling on the first fade.
Totally confusing. One quad PC fails & one does not. The slower PCs seem not to fail, completely opposite to what logic would predict. You buy a fast PC to avoid stutter or freezing.
Lets be specific, by freezing we mean a temporary suspend in video playback while the PC somehow thrashes internally and meanwhile the audio plays. I remember initially someone saying the audio did not play at the beginning of a clip, but the post has been deleted. I too thought I saw that but it was not reproducible.
I think the concensus has to be that its a quirk of PDR and you need to ignore it. When the movie is produced the quirk goes away., but I am confounded by the seeming reality that slower PCs dont fail.
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Dang - Whats left ?
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Define what a transition is :
A fade is a progressive dimming of the image towards black over a fixed number of frames followed by a fade to full intensity of the second clip.
Other transitions are e.g. rotation of the image overlaying a second clip or a page wipe or rollover.
Is it possible that vector graphics in a smart videocard can do this by itself. Anyone?
Since the timeline in the editor contains our "program of steps" and we dont enable shadow files then all the video graphics are being created in real time.
Since a fade is to my opinion the simplest transition you could wish for, what the heck is wrong - Smart graphics like SVRT or an Nvidia card should be able to do that easily. Or is it too easy? Could the Nvidia card have done the frame conversion and the interrupt or whatever DLL command for the next frame to process be missed cuz Cyberlink was expecting it to take fractionally longer?
Can Robert and others test again with CUDA turned off in their preferences please ?
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Not so gentlemen,
Look at Roberts setup. He is using CUDA while most of us do not.
Now we dont know what Cyberlink does when CUDA is detected, though its not a gaming environment so we are not building walls and passageways like Doom but we could well be using it to handle part of whatever microsoft does these days to show video graphics - anyone?
I have been suspicious that high-end graphics cards like Nvidia might just be responsible, while us poor lowly guys with video on the motherboard are trudging along with one cpu doing all the gatekeeping and housekeeping chores like garbage collection.
Remember we are talking about cutting edge visual codecs and megabytes of data rates. It may be connected. Add to that the error occurs when shadow files are turned off.
So, we know that 2 or more PCs with add-on video cards (however well known models) high-speed CPU and I guess top of the line motherboards can fail. Race condition ? We just dont know.
Thats why I suggested as many people as possible copy Roberts preferences setup and hopefully have a supa-dupa video engine in their PC
Failing that we ask him point blank if he shot an albatross recently or found animal entrails nailed to his front door. Its all voodoo software to most of us anyway.
I hope Cyberlink back home have been reading and testing this too
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Here is the situation for anyone who wants to test this.
Reboot your PC
download this clip
http://www.yardwolf.com/images/TEST.MTS
Open a new PDR8 project and add the clip to the timeline four times
Go to Transitions
Just under the Menu Choice CREATE DISC you will see the Library Menu icon
Click and choose Apply Fading Transitions to All
Now run the project timeline
Does the audio play and the image run without freezing ?
You should have sound from the beginning through the end.
ONLY if you get a freeze then
1. Screen print your PDR Preferences, for the first three tabs to an image and
reply to this post
It will look something like this
http://www.yardwolf.com/images/prefs.jpg
2. add a brief description of your PC
CPU type, Graphics Card, Installed Ram, Operating system
I think thats as simple as it can be defined for now.
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We had an ongoing topic regarding testing of the PCs and PDR8 Preferences which was deleted by mistake.
To summarize, the sample clip would freeze on only two PCs but we were going to emulate the preferences setup to see if it can be reproduced elsewhere.
Will Cranston, Robert, Peter and others please come back at their leisure to continue... ?
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OK, a field with searchable keywords.
I will add this to the VB program too so it can be searched. And a search input as well to tell Access what search is required.
Will take a day to do it and publish. Thanks 'rider
DONE
You can now sort by any column, search for multiple keywords, export text, it still does not affect any PD Files e.g. the .pds file
HOW TO USE IT
As you go through a set of VHS tapes, or AVI files or any video tape system, viewing them on say a TV or a PC editor,
Make a note of the Tape Identity and Format and possibly the Disk path to the file c:\files\Nov2006\
As you watch the tape you can add records like
Party at Joes + Tape Position + Length of Clip _+ Comments
BBQ at Joes + Tape Position + Length of Clip _+ Comments
Poolside Party at Joes + Tape Position + Length of Clip _+ Comments
It remembers the tape ID etc for you
When you have done a couple of tapes you can review the database, sorting by any column, and add keywords as you go or edit any field any time. You can sort columns and search keywords.
You can print a list and get it into your clipboard (Copy) and paste it elswhere any time.
Then when you are ready to do a big edit of say that party you can sort by subject and see what tapes to get out of your library and corral them into the editor, roughly clipping at the start/runlength times and now you are ready to do the PowerDirector editing proper. This way you wont spend hours with PDR open while browsing dozens of files cuz you already did that part and saved it in the database.
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