Messages posted by neils

Hi guys,

I occasionally use PD (older version), and have gotten into a huge project in the past couple of weeks of finally transferring all of my DV tapes to PC. I use PD to capture, and then slice it up where necessary. No extra transitions are used, simply TRIM some video files and then Produce to MP4. I noticed that the rendering time is rather slow, even though I am often just using 1 video clip with no effects.

That got me investigating my built-in GPU, an Intel HD4600. I never had a need for a dedicated video card because I do not game on my PC, just email and web and occasional PD edits. I do have an i7 if that helps.

Besides the clock and memory on the GPU, which seems decent on the HD4600, what else would I gain by moving to a dedicated video card. I am looking to slice my rendering time significantly (more than 50%). I found a really cool site called gpu.userbenchmark.com/compare which has the stock GPUs along with the cards. If I look at the MRENDER data, is that a good guideline for fps rendering in PD, or is that for gaming only ??

If I am convinced that a video card will shorten my time signficantly to produce and render in PD, my budget is probably looking at something like a GTX 950/960, maybe a 970 if I know I could really cut down in production time.

Your thoughts folks, and I am looking for hard facts and data, not just I own card xyz and it kicks butt...

Thank You

Neil

Just wanted to say thanks for the recommendation of WinDV. So far it is working like a charm. It is capturing my 16:9 aspect DV video as such, 16:9, and not a hit and miss like PD, where sometimes the 16:9 video is captured as 4:3. That is too bad, because I would prefer one workflow where I capture the entire tape, and then trim and create smaller clips on the timeline directly.

Oh well, can't ask for miracles. Then again, I am using an older PD9, perhaps PD14 is much better, with lots of solved issues, and my guess is probably a lot faster at rendering using same HW/PC.

Thanks

DVCam is a Panny GS300, consumer model. Perhaps I should have been more clear in my post but when PD brings in 16:9 footage as 4:3, everything looks squashed, but it looks natural on the 16:9 DVCam screen. There is some footage that was captured correctly as 16:9 and it looks natural as captured.

I will go ahead and try Windv and see if that makes any difference with the footage that has incorrect captured aspect.

Thanks

I am using an older version of PD, PD9. I have my Sony DV Cam hooked up via FW, and the capture process technically works. Only thing is that while all videos are recorded as 16:9, and correctly displays as 16:9 on the DVCam, it is a hit and miss as to how PD captures the video aspect. Sometimes it comes in as 16:9, other times as 4:3. It is so frustrating.

I realize that I can simply EDIT the capture aftwerwards, and stretch the captured 4:3 to 16:9, but even that process is a hit and miss. Sometimes the stretched video looks good, other times there is noise present, where you can see jagged lines.

So my ideal option would be figure out why PD is not recognizing the 16:9 format and squashing it to 4:3 during the capture process.

Thanks

Neil

Thank you gents !!! It was just a matter of me playing around with PD and finding one key piece that I missed, MULTI TRIM. Once I found that option, as you described, I was able to create uninterrupted mini clips within the main clip, basically setting start and stop markers. Once my MULTI TRIM was done and I hit done, it applied those markers and create multiple mini clips on the timeline, and most importantly, the clips flowed one into the other. If I were to leave the speed normal at that point, each mini clip would play into the next, as if it were the original clip.

Then from there all I had to do was select each mini clip, right click and go into Edit Video => Power Tools, and there I had the option to change speed, whether I use the slide bar to slow down or speed up, or the slow motion option with drop down speeds.

Tried it and it worked perfectly. So glad I did not have to deal with plugins and addons to accomplish this, as I really like the feel, flow and layout of PD. This powerful feature was there all along, just needed to understand how to do MULTI TRIM first to get a continuous flow to start out.

Thanks again guys for all of your help !!! Great community of people here.

Neil

Thanks Neil (and Stevek) for your replies !!!

Neil #2, what you just described (high speed Benny Hill type video) is easy, and I understand how to do that. You just increase the playback speed for your clip and done. But that is not the effect I was looking to do, at least not completely. I think Stevek understood my desired effect, and I think I know how to describe it better now.

Imagine that same tent video, where you playback high speed a portion of it, and then as soon as you approach the front of the tent in your video, you slam on the brakes, MATRIX style, run a portion of the video slow motion as you walk by the tent, and when you reach the other side of the tent, wham, back to high speed playback. So you get that MATRIX (movie) effect.

If you look at the car video from my original post, you will see that effect really well done. What I was trying to do was avoid having to use portions of the same clip over and over again, one at high speed, another at slow speed, another at high speed, and keep going like that, with the nightmare of having to line up and sync the video clips at exactly the right point to make it look seemless.

Stevek talks about using markers to help splitting the clip, so even though several iterations have to be used at different speeds, at least the flow of one clip to the next would be properly matched.

I am not in front of my computer now, but are you saying that there is an option to split a single video clip multiple times with markers, and then assign a unique playback speed for each of those splits ?? If yes, then that would address this topic on how to create the video motion I am looking for. But somehow, I am questioning if that is even possible, to create multiple points or splits on the same video clip, with different speeds.

Will have to dig more into this split option you are talking about.

Thanks !!

Thanks so much for those links, but that is not the effect I am looking to create. Perhaps stop motion is not the correct terminology to use. I don't want to do a Tim Burton piece, where you assemble a bunch of pictures with specific pre-set times in between each, to turn the pictures into a stop motion video.

What I would like to achieve is exactly what is in that car video within this thread, where you may FFW high speed for a specific amount of time, and then wham, slam on the brakes and you're in slow motion, then wham high speed again, then wham slow motion again.

What I am trying to figure out, is with the exact same video clip, how could I make one portion of it play high speed, and then one portion slam into slow motion right after, without having to use 2 copies of the same clip at different speeds and have to line up the 2 copies for a continuous flow.

Again, the car movie included in this thread sums up what I would like to achieve. I thought I would ask here first before bugging the folks over at CyberLink, I am sure there must be an easy way to do this.

If it were up to me, I would ask (beg) CyberLink to add this as a video effect, where you drop a video clip on the timeline, and it would allow you to define multiple playback speeds for that same clip, so that you could do the effect I am talking about. Of course PD would have to allow you to define multiple points where the speeds change, ideally with drag and drop markers.

I can't be the only guy in the PD community trying to achieve this effect.

Thanks
Neil

Hey guys,

I realize this might not be an easy answer to detail, but I am looking for a fairly easy way to do stop motion video, similar to this car video below. I have used PD extensively, and the only thing I can think of that would achieve this would be to painstakingly chop up the video into smaller parts, playing with the playback speed for each part.

What would be nice would be to have some sort of stop motion effect, where one can choose if you start fast or slow, and then choose the center point of the speed change. Not sure if this is possible, but curious to hear back from PD users if you have tried this effect yourself, and what steps did you have to do to get it to look like the video below.

Thanks so much for your time in answering this !!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GQVhMeoayo

Jackpot ladies, jackpot. I am the one who started this thread, and here is my conclusion, which pretty much lines up with Andrew's findings. When I had issues with the jumpy pan & zoom effects in PD7, I decided to go and use my older Core 2 Duo. I never got around to posting my findings until now. Basically, everything was very smooth. At first I thought I would just install the basic PD7 without any upgrades, and that would do the trick. But since I started my project with the upgraded build of PD7, it forced me to take the update again in order to load up my project. So I did, and honetly, left out the pan & zoom effect until the morning of my event. I decided on a whim to give it a last whirl and see if I added one pan & zoom effect at a time to one photo at a time, and see what would happen. And kept adding until I was able to batch add the effect to every shot. And it played back and rendered super smooth on the Core 2 Duo.

So Cyberlink, if you guys are reading this, which I sure hope you are, you need to test the effects against the family of Quad cores. More specifically, add about 100+ shots, then transitions, then music, and once you have all that together, try to add the pan & zoom effect to all the shots and then render. You will instantly notice the jerky, choppy movement while it pans and zooms....

On a side note, the transitions never gave me an issue, but perhaps that is expected.

Thanks everyone for working thru this issue with some of us. I do hope Cyberlink come out with a patch for this issue...

Neil

Holy cow, thanks guys. I mean, you may not have resolved my issue, but never thought a bunch of you would take time out to go through the length of effort to reproduce my problem. A million thanks for that, very nice of you !!!

Having said that, I tried it all, and with the same results. What I will do is start the entire project from scratch again, with minimal to no applications running in the background, although like I said before, tons of CPU and memory to boot. Then I will produce the video, and let the video speak for itself by uploading it to YouTube for all of you to see.

So if I can get that done by tonight, I will repost. Like some of you said earlier, could have something to do with the newer build. Maybe I will need to reinstall again....

Thanks guys
Neil

And of course, my assumption was correct. I highlighted all the pictures, right click, remove Magic Motion from all the pictures, which brings it back to a basic slideshow. Run the video montage, and the pictures are fine, they sit on the screen without any jerky movement. Of course there is no movement effects, so I would expect the pictures to sit still.

At least the pictures fade into one another, and not pop one after the other, so worst case, my presentation goes without pan and zoom effects, but it would have been nice to have.

My next test will be to apply pan and zoom effects to only a few pictures to start with, and see what happens with those, and if the jerkiness comes back. THen I will add more and more if it's stable, to see where the tool can't handle it anymore and introduces the jerkiness...

More to come...I hope someone from Cyberlink is reading this post, so that they can use these tests to fix this bug, assuming it ends up being a bug...

Thanks so much for your time !!!

Neil

Sorry, that would help wouldn't it. My build is 7.0.2429a...

To recreate the issue, take a bunch of pictures, ideally over 100, drag them into the timeline, then choose one picture to bring up the Magic Motion icon (2nd icon under the magic hat) on the far left side. You can choose any motion effect, but I chose the random one to have a variety. Then hit "apply to all".

Perhaps to slow things down even more, drag a couple of songs in there for the duration of the montage.

That is basically what I am trying to pull off here. The playback should show as jerky for most of it. My guess is that if I remove the pans and zooms, the picture would sit there stable and steady without movement, so somehow it's how the pan and zoom effect is affecting the picture.

Like I said, it looks like you're running an old 8mm video reel, very jerky.

I rebooted my system, thinking maybe there were some stray processes running in the background, slowing things down (although the Quad CPU would be less affected), but no change, same jerkiness during playback, which also appears during rendering...

Thanks
Neil

First off, it's not the PC, Quad CPU, top of the line everything...

I assembled a 150 picture video montage, complete with pan and zoom effects for each picture. To my surprise, when I playback the video before producing, the video was jerky, as if I was playing it off an old VHS cassette, with the pictures jumping.

I decided to produce the video montage in every possible format, and then tried to play it back on every possible player, and got the same results.

Anybody else run into this ?? I have a presentation to do in a week, and need to get this bug worked out. Please advise.

I hate to do it, but I might have to rip out all the effects, and just run the slideshow dry, sucks, but no choice.

Hope you gurus have something for me, would be forever grateful..

Neil