Hello everyone. I'm writing this as a helpful FYI with a solution that I found worked like a charm and is also very simple. This is about the error message:
"Production unsuccessful. Please ensure your graphics card driver is up to date...." and then mentions having the most recent versions of Windows Media Player and also QuickTime.

I fixed this problem by deleting the custom MP4/H.264/AVC profiles I'd created, and then just re-created the one profile I needed at the time. I did this after using one of the H.264/AVC/MP4 profiles that already came with PowerDirector, and there was no error message then. The error happened only when I used a Custom AVC/H.264/MP4 profile that I made. This was enough to tell me that QuickTime was just fine, just like it had already been before this cuckoo glitch of an error message happened. And Windows Media Player is installed automatically with Win10 & the Windows Update process is very thorough to make sure various things are up-to-date because it has come a long way in progress since Windows 95 when that was the very first Windows version that had automatically detecting updates.

I've been into computers since the early 1980's and Windows since the mid-1990's and I've become very familiar as time has progressed with the various increasing ways as the Windows versions have progressed, of how oddball glitches can look on the surface like it's a problem with one of the "regular normal" ways of fixing problems, such as the drivers or an older version of a program like what's mentioned in that error message. But no, an oddball glitch is just that because there is no logical pattern or reason for it happening, and that's proven by it happening unexpectedly when nothing has been changed that the error message says the program depends upon. Which then means that nope an oddball glitch isn't going to be fixed by those typical usual solutions, and it's a waste of time to try since nothing about them and their files has been changed. Nothing has been changed with the video/graphics drivers so even that is a waste of time to work with since PowerDirector was working just fine with the exact same graphics driver that is still installed now as before.

It's an oddball technological glitch and what makes it straightforward to understand as an oddball glitch is that none of those things mentioned in the error message as possibilities have been changed. So then, since the error happens when wanting to produce an H.264/AVC/MP4 file using a Custom profile that I made, a sensible thing to test is whether or not the error happens using one of the H.264/AVC/MP4 profiles that already comes with PowerDirector. And no, the error didn't happen and the Produce process worked fine.

And that's where it's an "oddball glitch" because on the surface it has no sensible cause, because somewhere in how the program works with Custom profiles, the data for the profile got corrupted and caused PowerDirector to perceive the problem was with the graphics driver or MP4 ability of QuickTime or WMV ability of Windows Media Player. So then, since I only have a couple of custom AVC/H.264/MP4 profiles, I just deleted them all and created a brand new Custome profile, and it's working fine again.

Something else that tipped me off to investigating that the problem might be with my Custom profiles, is that in another discussion thread about this problem, the Registry key of:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Cyberlink\CES_FunctionLogger\Data

is mentioned and all values in that key should be set to zero. When I checked my own Registry, 2 of the 3 values there were 1 so I changed them to zero, but it didn't solve the problem. But it did for someone else and maybe others who read that message post too, which also adds to the credibililty that it's an oddball technological glitch. Yet another message thread about this annoying error message mentions still other Registry keys where someone changed something and it fixed the problem, adding still more credibility to this being an oddball techno glitch.

What caught my eye in the Registry key I gave above though, is that only one of my Custom AVC/H.264/MP4 profiles was there instead of both and that struck me as being technologically incorrect which, to me, might be enough to cause this oddball glitch error message. However, I don't know if all Custom profiles are supposed to be listed in that key so I was just making my best educated guess. So that's when I tested using one of the H.264/AVC/MP4 profiles that comes with PowerDirector, and there was no error that time, so I deleted my Custom MP4 profiles and started over by re-creating the one that I needed at the time, and it worked.

What all this means is that somewhere in memory right after the "Start" button is clicked on for starting the Produce process, there is corrupted data or data being somehow perceived by PowerDirector in an incorrect way, causing a yucky bummer result. All of these different message postings with the various symptoms and/or solutions that people are writing, should be gathered together by the PowerDirector programming folks to make deductions of things to be watching for in memory at that point in time.