Messages posted by tescosfinest

Thanks playsound - what about the disc menus though? What software do you use to create the DVD?

Hi there,

I have a 2hr 30min project which I hoped to burn as a 8.5GB DVD. At HQ - Best Quality, powerdirector reckons it'll be too big for the disc at 9715MB. The only other quality option is "Best fit", which I select, produce and burn with. However the quality is very poor, the resolution has been noticably dropped - the 'jaggies' are clearly visible to everyone. Looking at the vob files it seems the resolution has dropped to 352x576 instead of 720x576.

What I really wanted smartfit to do was just drop the bitrate a little, not the resolution.

Unfortunately this is a wedding video, so I can't really just cut out 30 minutes of footage to make it fit. Anyway it seems incredible that I can't burn a 2:30 video to a dual layer disc.

Why can't I control the bitrate manually like I can under "Produce"?

Any help would be really appreciated!

Andrew

In compare view surely the point is to select photos you want to reject (for deletion) or flag (for keeping). It seems strange then that hitting S or X flags both photos in compare view - surely X should flag the candidate for rejection and S should flag the current (for selection). Currently as the shortcuts set the flags on both photos I have to grab the mouse and click on the ridiculously tiny flag icons under the image making the compare view next to useless when going through a large shoot. It's quicker to just use single image view as then you can use the keyboard completely.

Any chance of changing this behaviour in an update?

Also - any way to see release notes of updates without buying the software? I couldn't buy the software with this feature the way it is....

Thanks!

Hi - does anyone know if this is still a problem in the retail version? My trial is coming to an end and I still haven't been able to really test the software without my full library in there!

Thanks!

See attachment for example. Here I've tried to import a small folder, and only half the images get thumbnails and when I press Import it freezes and has to be killed.

I can't use PhotoDirector as I can't get my collection to import. It seems to choke in a number of folders. CPU ratchets up but the import appears to get stuck. If I try the import again, the import wizard hangs during the phase where it removes those images already imported. Again the CPU seems to be stuck in a loop but the UI freezes for ever.

Is this bug fixed in the main application as otherwise it seems like a good tool.

Andrew

Thanks guys for the feedback and ideas.

I've decided to shoot in 1080 but depending on light levels I'll downscale some indoor footage to 720p. Movies taken in the evening can appear very grainy and 1080 quickly draws attention to the grain rather than the detail. Downscaling these to 720p actual seems to reduce the grain 'distraction'!

Thanks again,

Andrew

Thanks guys - will try CLVS. Added camera details to the post you suggested - just waiting for FTP details to upload clips.

Andrew

Just a quick conundrum - having given up trying to get SVRT working correctly I tried switching it off to see what life would be like without it. I got some surprises. I am using ATI hardward acceleration and without SVRT what used to take maybe 4 minutes of processing would take 13minutes. However.... if I drop my project res to 720p all of a sudden it drops way down to just over 4 minutes, quite comparable to using SVRT!

What I'm confused about is that my source footage is in 1080p so surely downscaling to 720p should be giving my system more work to do not less as it has to scale each frame first before encoding? Why such a dramatic increase in performance?

Andrew

Hi everyone,

I'm just starting out with a Canon HF 200 and am shocked at how much disk space it eats up. I've been shooting at 1920x1080 however now that i sit down to edit it, I'm starting to regret it! I made a 6 minute clip of family footage and it produced at 1Gb in 1920x1080 24Mbs.

I started playing with lower settings and noticed that 720p seems quite good quality and with a much more respectable 248Mb. (Interestingly when I went down to 720x576 the quality was noticably poorer but the file size was larger at 254Mb! Go figure!)

What resolution do other people use for routine family footage? I don't want to regret not doing 1920x1080 as disk space is always getting cheaper. Perhaps in 5 years 25TB disks will be the norm, however right now these massive files are a pain for backup, transfer, processing and storage.

Andrew

Quote:
I've made a custom profile matching the audio type from my source files and am trying a render now to see if that's the trick!
Andrew

Sorry to report that the audio 'ticks' are back with my experiment. So it seems I have a choice between audio with 'ticks' between clips or audio where the background hiss appears to be amplified and played down a cardboard tube!

Anyone any ideas for how to get rid of what I shall call the 'toilet roll' effect when making 5.1 audio from stereo source??

Andrew

Thanks Jeff and Andrew,

Ticking on 5.1 has solved the problem however now the audio sounds badly compressed. Not sure if compressed is the right word though - it's kind of like someone has played my audio in the bathroom and rerecorded it! I have noticed however the standard 1080 24Mbps profile uses 5.1 channel audio whereas my source clips, while using Dolby 'compression', are using the stereo channel.

I've made a custom profile matching the audio type from my source files and am trying a render now to see if that's the trick!

Andrew

Hi Andrew,

If it was just a case of each clip being at slightly different volume levels that would be ok, however the problem is that for the first and last 2 seconds of each clip the volume is slightly louder than the main body of the clip even when there are no transitions or titles. PD has to render these portions without SVRT to ensure the clips swap cleanly. I can also notice the audio boost effect if you add a title or transition.

The effect is so noticable in my case I can't use SVRT - with the option enabled it distracts the viewer with little volume increases and decreases around each clip boundary! I certainly wasn't trying to be misleading with the title of the post - it's just true in my case I'm afraid!

I do use a Canon but am using the 2508 build and as I understood it the problems with Canon where with the video encoding. Surely the audio can't be so different as to cause this effect?

Has anyone else experienced this problem?

Andrew

Quote: Ideal for this purpose would be to have two cameras running constantly. One dropped into the main track the other into the PiP. If they synch OK then adjust the PiP size etc and then start your PiP splitting/editing. In this way, your positioning needs only to be done once.

Thanks Adrian - This approach makes sense, although it still won't allow for SVRT during the pip clips. Ah well, you can't have everything!

Andrew

Hi all,

I've discovered another flaw that makes SVRT unusable. I understand that PD needs to process around cuts, transitions etc. however the audio in the processed segments seems to be slightly higher than the audio in the original (and SVRT processed) segments. It's not higher by any significant amount but it's very distracting as it's very noticable especially if you've a movie with lots of cuts.

Is there an option to deal with this or do R&D need to take a look? Has anyone else experienced the issue?

Andrew

Quote: Based on my testing I think if you go to the preferences > Produce Tab and tick "Allow SVRT on single IDR H.264 Video" will allow SVRT to be used through split clips for my Canon 1920x1080, 24Mbps clips. It also appears to allow SVRT to be used after transitions applied between clips.

Not totally sure of the potential downfalls or if it truly allows SVRT to work in all situations. I've test transitions (various durations), color blocks, titles, pics in the middle of a split clip and it has not failed yet. Also tested the same list above between two non split clips.

Jeff

Jeff, thank you so much - that sorted the issue for me too. I'm not quite sure why this is buried away in preferences or like you what the pitfalls are but I'll keep this option on unless I find any other problems.

Thanks again,

Andrew

Hi there, I appreciate the fix in build 2508 for Canon users, however it still has a major flaw! If I split a clip on the timeline into pieces SVRT will only apply to the first piece. A quick test to confirm:

Drop in a clip several minutes long.
Split the clip into three pieces on the timeline
Delete the center piece
Produce the movie

Unless my system is unique you'll see that SVRT works on the first clip but disables on the second.

This is a disaster as I bought PowerDirector for the SVRT feature. I edit wedding videos where one long continues shot get's broken down into dozens of pieces and transistioned together so it's effectively useless now.

Can R&D investigate as this seems like a fairly major bug?

Thanks!

Andrew

Hi guys,

I have a similar need - a wedding video I've shot has two cameras and one audio. I want to line up the one camera as the master video and the second camera in the pip track and then 'cut away' slices of the pip track to flip between the two camera angles. This is great however the pip track makes things difficult in 2 regards:

1) You have to carefully set the scaling of the pip track as it defaults to a small box
2) SVRT isn't available as it thinks the video is modified even though I've tried to scale the pip box to full frame. As at least 50% of the movie will be the pip track this makes rendering much longer

Is there no way to create a proper second full frame video track? Pip tracks seem a little too fiddly for the purpose of multiple camera angles.

Appreciate your thoughts,

Andrew