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It could be something to do with your hardware set up. Although you have 6GB on your system, all of your memory may not be utilized. Here's what Microsoft says:
"For Windows Vista to use all 4 GB of memory on a computer that has 4 GB of memory installed, the computer must meet the following requirements:
* The chipset must support at least 8 GB of address space. Chipsets that have this capability include the following:
o Intel 975X
o Intel P965
o Intel 955X on Socket 775
o Chipsets that support AMD processors that use socket F, socket 940, socket 939, or socket AM2. These chipsets include any AMD socket and CPU combination in which the memory controller resides in the CPU.
* The CPU must support the x64 instruction set. The AMD64 CPU and the Intel EM64T CPU support this instruction set.
* The BIOS must support the memory remapping feature. The memory remapping feature allows for the segment of system memory that was previously overwritten by the Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) configuration space to be remapped above the 4 GB address line. This feature must be enabled in the BIOS configuration utility on the computer. View your computer product documentation for instructions that explain how to enable this feature. Many consumer-oriented computers may not support the memory remapping feature. No standard terminology is used in documentation or in BIOS configuration utilities for this feature. Therefore, you may have to read the descriptions of the various BIOS configuration settings that are available to determine whether any of the settings enable the memory remapping feature.
* An x64 (64-bit) version of Windows Vista must be used.
Contact the computer vendor to determine whether your computer meets these requirements.
Note When the physical RAM that is installed on a computer equals the address space that is supported by the chipset, the total system memory that is available to the operating system is always less than the physical RAM that is installed. For example, consider a computer that has an Intel 975X chipset that supports 8 GB of address space. If you install 8 GB of RAM, the system memory that is available to the operating system will be reduced by the PCI configuration requirements. In this scenario, PCI configuration requirements reduce the memory that is available to the operating system by an amount that is between approximately 200 MB and approximately 1 GB. The reduction depends on the configuration."
What this all means is that your system hardware setup may not be able to use all of the memory that you have installed. If you built this computer yourself, make sure that you have installed the ram in the correct slots and that your bios is able to access all of the memory as well.
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Thanks for the feedback. My PD7 installation was a clean downloaded version on a brand new computer running Vista Ultimate OS. Cyberlink support provided uninstall instructions using Microsoft Installer Cleanup and some specific regedit deletions. They also provided a link to CD7 build 2429a, which installed. All of this was done and the system crashes about every 30 mins during editing. This is frustrating.
I can imagine. I don't have any experience with Vista Ultimate, and I'm wondering if this is the source of your problems.
My second guess is that it has something to do with the computer's RAM. Some people have inferred that PD7's ability to clear out and utilize its resources effectively is in need of some fixing. Perhaps you can check how much RAM you have installed on your system as opposed to how much Vista is reporting.
Also, check to see if your RAM is running ok. There are some freeware programs out there that can do this. Other than that, I can't think of anything else that may be causing your lock ups except perhaps some programs that are running in the background that PD7 doesn't like.
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Hi Matthew,
Here's a link to the recommended power and requirements as far as hardware is concerned. But as most people have said, the more power your computer can muster, the better.
http://www.cyberlink.com/prog/product/main.do?ProductId=4&lang=en_US
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Clicking on the window in Modify does nothing. Have you been able to delete the window from an existing template?Cheers Robert
Hi Robert,
Very odd indeed. If you are in the create disc menu, and you click on any of the templates, and then hit the modify button, this should bring up the "menu designer" screen. Are you seeing this screen?
As soon as you are there, any of the objects, including the video window, is editable. As mentioned before, you can resize the video window to make it small and just move it outside of the video zone box.
If you cannot edit these menus in the modify stage, this may mean your PD7 is corrupted and needs to be reinstalled, or there may be a program running in the background that is interfering with the use of PD7. If this is the case, try turning off all your programs in the system tray. (Right click each icon in the lower right hand corner in windows.)
As far as removing the video windows completely, the only thing you can do is to just make them "invisible" via the resize method.
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Is there any way to customize the first view (photo or video) on the main page of the menus? Thanks, Cindy.
Hi Cindy,
I was able to figure out a work around. This is how you do it...
1) Make sure you have a photo/graphic that is saved properly to jpg.
2) Open up PD7 with the project of your choice, or a test project in the time line.
3. Go to the create disc menu by hitting the tab at the top of PD7.
4) Click on the menu of your choice and hit the modify tab.
5) Shrink and move the video window off to the side so it is outside the dotted video zone.
6) In the design menu, hit the "add image" icon.
7) Go find the photo in your computer and select and load it.
8.) Resize the photo that appears on the menu template to your liking.
9) Hit "save" and this should bring up the "save as" menu. Name it and save it.
What you have now is a menu template that doesn't play the video because the video window is off to the side. What is left is the photo that you inserted while modifying your menu. If you do a preview of the video in the create disc menu, you'll see that your image has taken the place of the video. When you hit play, the video plays and doesn't show the freeze frame since it isn't part of your time line.
Cool, eh?
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I have not isolated completely but it appears the pan and zoom might be the issue. It typically happens very early in the pic frame. I can reproduce the issue with just the following
1) 1 windmill in the timeline, set duration to 10sec
2) Apply magic motion with pan and zoom
3) Preview or burn to dvd and watch
4) Within the first second, the hiccup occurs, watch careful
Stepping through frame by frame I can not see any issue, only during playback. Depending on the picture content, the issue may or may not be as noticeable. Jeff
Uh oh. I went through the steps you listed on how to create the stutter and it didn't happen for me. The zoom/pan function played back smoothly with no jitter or hesitation. It looks like it may be a problem with the latest build.
I've still got the 2227c patch on my PD7 and haven't upgraded to build 2429a. If you want to regress back to the old version, I've still got the file on my computer.
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I have a video I want to burn. I don't want the 1st video to show up on the main page. Instead, I want a photo which I put at the beginning of the timeline. I thought the menu designer would just pick up that first photo since it's at the beginning. Instead, it picks up the first video. I tried to go into Menu Designer, but it won't let me change it. It will only let me change the background picture which I don't want to do. Is there any way to customize the first view (photo or video) on the main page of the menus?
Thanks,
Cindy
Hi Cindy,
The problem probably has to do with the photo file format of your picture. It should be in jpg format. If it isn't, you can open your photo with the photo editor/graphic program of your choice and do a "save as" to a .jpg format.
But here's the bad news, even if you can do this, although you'll see the photo in the beginning of the dvd menu, when you actually play the video, you'll still have that freeze frame in the beginning, so in other words, you'll see a freeze frame for 15-18 seconds before the actual video starts.
I've got some ideas on a work around. I'll get back to you on this after some experimenting.
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BTW Frank and Cindy
I tried re-sizing the window as you suggested but nothing happened - clicking on the window has no effect - no box with handles to re-size. Is there a setting somewhere I should be using?
Thanks
Robert
Hi Robert,
Try these steps to see if this will let you resize that pesky window.
1. After putting something in the timeline, hit the "create disk" tab from the PD7 workspace.
2. On the left hand section, hit the "new" tab to open a new template.
3. This will take you to the default screen for a menu. On the bottom, you'll see a "goto" drop down menu. Select the "chapters" heading.
4. There, you'll see the video window. Just click on it and it should allow you to resize it. Also, you must be in the "edit" mode to do this. (When you are in the "menu designer" it's the fourth icon from the left.)
If the above doesn't work, I'm not sure what is going on, unless you installed the latest upgrade. Some users on here have reported that some functionality is disabled when they install it.
If you are clicking on the author and preview window located on the right of the create dvd screen, you cannot resize it from there. This is only possible when you click on the "new" button in the menu template tab or the "modify" tab, which you really don't want to do as it will change the original template permanently if you save it after modifying it.
There's a way around this, but that's for another post. 
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I installed build 2429a, and my PowerDirector is crashing every 20 - 30 mins. I have tried turning on and off the CUDA setting but that doesn't seem to be the problem. Is it possible to uninstall the update?
Hi Mark,
Hopefully, you have your system restore feature turned on in XP or Vista. This feature will bring back your computer to a time period before you installed the update and should return PD7 back to it's former self. The system restore menu should give you detailed info on when the PD7 update was installed. Select a restore point sometime before this time and activate restore.
For further info on the system restore function, go here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306084
If your program still crashes, you'll have to reinstall the program from scratch. If you take this route, be sure that you uninstall the program properly.
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Hi David,
It sounds as though you've got a corrupt installation file or a virus. The ntdll.dll file might be infected. So first off, do a virus scan of your system to see if that file is infected or corrupt. If so, remove the virus with your virus program. Problems with the ntdll.dll file are also associated with incompatible add-on programs to the Internet Explorer browser. You might want to disable any recent add-ons to see if this helps.
In order to get a clean uninstall, go to the Microsoft site and look for a program named Windows Install Cleanup. Look for all occurrences of PowerDirector when you use this program and *carefully* select them by clicking on each one, then hit the remove button. DO NOT select all. If you do this, you'll damage your PC and it won't run. If you don't want to attempt this, get a computer geek friend to do this for you.
Restart your computer and reinstall PD7.
See if this fixes your crashing problems.
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I had a problem like that with a video project I was doing for a client once, except the problem was distortion at the top of the video frame. Here's a trick you can use to make your video look "normal" without the time code. You're going to make a mask that will look like a letterbox, which then, will hide your time stamps.
1. Make a freeze frame or black frame and save it as a .jpg file where you can get at it later.
2. Hit the title menu icon on PD7 and select the "default" effect. Pull it down to the title portion of your time line.
3. In the time line, double click on your title effect. This will bring you to the title design menu. At the top of the menu, click on the third icon from the right...this is the "add image" icon.
4. From here, navigate to where you saved your black frame. Open this file. You'll see a small black box in the title frame now. Grab one of the corners and make it as big as the width of the video window. Then, move the black frame up until the edge just covers your date data.
5. Do the same in this step for the bottom portion of your letterbox frame at the bottom to make things look balanced.
6. On the title designer menu, there is a little button that looks like stars...it's the middle one, second row down. This is your object selection menu. You'll see two objects there of the same title. This is your black frame, you probably named it something else. Click on one.
7. On the video time slider, found underneath the video, you'll see two pointers. Move each one to their respective ends so that the yellow bar is as long as the blue bar. This is your fade in fade out effect. By making the yellow bar equal with the blue bar, the letterbox will show up immediately and not fade in or out.
8. Select the second black frame in the object selection box and do the same as in step seven.
9. Hit Ok, and you're done. You'll have a Title effect which is for all purposes, a letterbox effect that will mask out your time date data.
I know this reads awfully complicated, but it is really easy to do. It's just that putting the steps into words is sort of daunting. Now, all you have to do is to stretch the title effect time line to match the video length in your project and you'll have a nice clean looking video without the time stamp.
Now, the next thing is to find out how to turn off that function in that video camera so you won't have to go through this again. 
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I upgraded from PD 5 and never had this problem until PD 7. The video files were captured from my DV camcorder as MPEG2 format. I did notice that when I used the default video clip that came with PD7 I did not have the problem. Its format says MPEG1.
Using a Pent 4 2.66 Ghz with 768 MB RAM. I use an external HD with 20GB free.
Hi Derrick,
Hmm, I'm going to make an educated guess and say that the available free hard disk space and 768 RAM may be the source of the stuttering problems.
PD7 is doing a lot of stuff in the background, and this probably includes lots of swapping of files and using the disk drive for temporary storage while processing commands, files, and other stuff. The RAM is also doing a lot of swapping too, so more RAM may help too. For most people, they like to have at least 2GBs of ram on board.
Your disk drive may be groaning under all the load and is trying to keep up with all its house cleaning chores. Try using another drive with more space and see if this helps out.
You can probably borrow an external one from a friend so you don't have to shell out money just to experiment. Also, disk drive performance may be adversely effected if it is highly fragmented. Try defragmenting your drive and see if this helps too. If you only have 20GB of free space left, you've probably got a ton of fragmented files on there, unless you keep up with your disk tuning duties.
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Sorry Robert,
I forgot to tell you what you just found out in that last post...you can modify or get rid of that window, but there is no new window command. But considering there are a lot of different styles and shapes of windows already available as a starting template, you can just modify them to to your liking to make a new one style.
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Hi Frank,
Hold off for the time being, I and a few others are Beta testing it and it crashing on some functions
Robert
Hi Robert,
Thanks for the heads up. Safe and slow is the way to go...
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Hi gang,
While combing through the Cyberlink website, I happened to see that there is a new update for PD7 users! Anybody use it yet? How's it working for you?
I guess for me, call me paranoid, but I've got my PD7 working now and I'm skittish about upgrading. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," I believe is the proper sage wisdom for this situation. 
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The problem is that transition times are limited to 50% of the length of the clip. So if I want a two second fade, I have to set the duration of the picture clip to four seconds, so I end up with two seconds of freeze frame and then two seconds of fade. Is there any way of freezing the frame and staring the fade immediately?
Yes. Set your freeze frame to 1 second. After the freeze frame, add a fade effect and set it to .8 for duration. Add a black frame after the fade and set the duration to a couple of seconds. This should look like an instantaneous freeze frame to fade to black.
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Another problem I've had is specifying the duration of clips and transitions. I can't specify any fraction of a second about 0.28 or 0.29. So I can do 4.00 or up to 4.29 but nothing between 4.29 and 5.00. It's very annoying.
In video editing, a second of video is split up into 30 frames (for US televisions) or in other words, 1/30 of a second for each "picture" of video. You need 30 of these to make one second of moving video. There is no fractional setting for PD7 or for that matter, any video editing software that I am aware of. Cutting a transition or clips into fractions between two frames of video (2/30 of a second) is rarely, if ever needed. The human eye wouldn't even notice such a small interval in duration.
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A related problem is setting the default duration of transitions. I can't set the default duration properly from the Edit/Preferences/Editing settings. I want 1.25, but the closest I could get was setting "1.9" and that resulted in transitions of 1.27.
Here, we are talking about two different timing standards. One second in real time translates to 1.0 in video frames...and as mentioned before, there are 30 of them in one second of video. Hence, if you selected 1.9 seconds for your duration for a clip or transition, this would translate into about 1.27 in video frames. If you wanted one and a half seconds for your duration in real time (1.50 seconds), this would translate into 1.15 in video frames. Why? the ".15" means 15 frames, and this is exactly half of 30 frames, which is equal to half a second. The software is converting your real time duration into video frames, which is why you're not seeing the same numbers in your effects. It is approximating the video frame count from your request in real time seconds.
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Hi Dave,
The preview mode doesn't always represent what you will see in the final product of your production. If you're using hi-def clips, sometimes you'll see jittery video, or other odd things in preview mode. Try "producing" the clips as a playable clip to see if you still experience the gaps.
What type of video clips did you import? It's possible that PD7 has a problem with working with a particular type of file format. Also, make sure that you are running your clips under the proper TV format. Are you playing back your clips in PAL or NTSC?
You can change this by going to preferences (found in the edit pull down menu) and selecting the proper format.
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This is sort of a cheating way to get rid of the window, but it seems to work.
While you are editing, depending on whether you're on the main page or chapter page where the dastardly window appears, there are two ways to make it "go away."
First, click on the video window. Resize it to a very small box...but not so small that you cannot move it around while in editing mode. Select it and move it to a portion of the frame that is off and out of the way. Click on the frame again and make it as small as it will go. After you exit edit mode, you'll find that the window is so small that it virtually disappears.
The second way is to follow the exact same steps above, but just move the shrunken window point off to the side and outside the "video safe zone," (the dotted square box). Anything outside of this safe zone should not show up on your screen.
In reality, the window never really goes away, all you're doing is making it so small or placing it an area where it cannot be seen.
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Looks like your DVD burners may be too "old" for PD7 to work on, which really, shouldn't be the case at all with software programs. I had a couple of Samsung drives that wouldn't burn and were constantly giving me error messages until I swapped one of them out for a late model DVD burner...an HP 1060. After that, all my DVD problems vanished.
If you can't swap out your DVD drives, try updating your firmware for your burner. There's an outside chance that this may help. Your particular drive, the Philips 8421 has been reported to have problems recognizing blank discs and other issues. It seems that PD7 is very particular as to which burners it can work with.
Here's the link for the update to your DVD burner:
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/genericSoftwareDownloadIndex?cc=us&dlc=en&lc=en&softwareitem=pv-25051-1&jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN
Also, although it's a pain in the butt, make sure you turn off all unnecessary programs that are running on your computer, clean your registry using a reg cleaner, etc.
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Uh oh. This doesn't sound good. The broken file message that you're seeing is probably due to changing something in the pds file when you opened it and saved it with your text editor.
Since we don't know what you changed, this is going to be difficult to figure out. But let's assume that whatever you did happened at the beginning of the the pds text file. This is where your cursor would naturally land on.
In the first few lines a healthy pds file would look like this:
Content-Type: multipart/related
--- partseparator
Content-Type: text/AEFF
Content-ID: movie-layout
--- separator
You might have added or deleted a line or character when you opened the file. If the beginning of your file differs a lot from this example, the pds file is probably corrupted beyond repair.
I tend to like to open files with notepad just to see what's in them out of curiosity, but I never save the file, but you already know that now.
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