I don't recall seeing anything like this, but these days I only work on one new project every few months and it seems like what's happening might need a lot of use to trigger.

I can think of two things to try - not to solve the issue, but more of a way to see if you might be able to narrow down where the problems are occuring.

First, does toggling this setting make any difference?



Next, does using File | New Workspace, then File | Open Recent projects and reopening your current project behave like closing and reopening PD? How about File | New Project, then reopening your current one? That step will clear the media library, whereas New Workspace will keep the existing content.

I've seen this issue occur for many PD releases too, I don't know what triggers it, nor an easy cure. I'm not sure it has to do with memory management. I think it simply has to do with timeline management and asset association. I typically only see it when I have lots of assets in the timeline, 50-100 unique clips, pics appear more problematic. I simply think PD gets messed up on what goes with what in the timeline. Kind of like this issue too, https://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/posts/list/118992.page#post_box_448074 just poor timeline content management. Whether memory or just some edit causes issue I don't know. As such, it's very difficult to define a short problem model for CL to replicate, it really needs to be handled with good programming up front and complex project QA.

I'm not sure what pref setting continuous thumbnails on video clips has to do with your still images, but I guess maybe. I never check this feature as for me it causes issue too with video files. Under some circumstance one video file will have thumbnails of a totally different video file. Again, for me, never happens on an easy timeline, it typically takes lots of assets and then mismanagement will occur. And no, I don’t use shadowfiles or preview render as they all cause periodic issues too.

Jeff

Thanks for the reactions.
The change of “enable continuous thumbnails….” Have no effect. Not to be expected though because it changes the behaviour of the thumbnails of a video clip in the timeline only
The way I open and close and change projects does also have no effect. So, both “New”, “open and Add”, and “Open and do not add” have not different behaviour. Specially the NEW would, I would recon, clear the project space and rest the lot, but it does not. Which -to Jeff’s point- indicates (I agree) that this is mismanagement of thumbnails in the program, that needs to be tackled, because it eventually may lead to very unexpected program behaviour and crashes, and maybe it does do that already…
I have yesterday shared a screen recording of thumbnails going astray in the media room. The recording included a lot of information, Cyberlink had asked for, including of my system. I have pointed out that my system and the drivers etc. have nothing to do with this error, because I see this happening already for many versions of PD. Also I make sure that my systems is very much up to date in all respects. Cyberlink support came back to me today (I must applaud them for their fast reactions!!) thanking for the information, suggestion to update the drivers and sending the DXDiag etc. again. They have not looked at the information and not understood what is happening.
I will include a small piece of the screen recording here in the forum too, this shows how wrong the thumbnails are shown in media rooms, just after 3 “projects with about 50 images”, which I opened and re-opened (this new project in between). No example of thumbnail errors in my timeline this time, that happens a lot too. So Cyberlink should be able to reproduce this error itself too.

Quote Thanks for the reactions.
The change of “enable continuous thumbnails….” Have no effect. Not to be expected though because it changes the behaviour of the thumbnails of a video clip in the timeline only
The way I open and close and change projects does also have no effect. So, both “New”, “open and Add”, and “Open and do not add” have not different behaviour. Specially the NEW would, I would recon, clear the project space and rest the lot, but it does not. Which -to Jeff’s point- indicates (I agree) that this is mismanagement of thumbnails in the program, that needs to be tackled, because it eventually may lead to very unexpected program behaviour and crashes, and maybe it does do that already…
I have yesterday shared a screen recording of thumbnails going astray in the media room. The recording included a lot of information, Cyberlink had asked for, including of my system. I have pointed out that my system and the drivers etc. have nothing to do with this error, because I see this happening already for many versions of PD. Also I make sure that my systems is very much up to date in all respects. Cyberlink support came back to me today (I must applaud them for their fast reactions!!) thanking for the information, suggestion to update the drivers and sending the DXDiag etc. again. They have not looked at the information and not understood what is happening.
I will include a small piece of the screen recording here in the forum too, this shows how wrong the thumbnails are shown in media rooms, just after 3 “projects with about 50 images”, which I opened and re-opened (this new project in between). No example of thumbnail errors in my timeline this time, that happens a lot too. So Cyberlink should be able to reproduce this error itself too.

Just a workaround suggestion to try for that media room display issue. You might modify the PD interface window restore down to be rather different in size than the maximum, when issue is present, try restore down, followed by maximize and see if the screen areas are properly repainted.

Jeff

Quote

Just a workaround suggestion to try for that media room display issue. You might modify the PD interface window restore down to be rather different in size than the maximum, when issue is present, try restore down, followed by maximize and see if the screen areas are properly repainted.

Jeff

Thanks, yes I have tried this. Does not help. The thumbnails are consequently displayed throughout, also -as mentioned- in the timeline, but not in the preview screen, where the real thing is shown.
My current workaround is to save the project, restart PD and open the project, everything is okay then, until some thresshold has passed...

Quote Thanks, yes I have tried this. Does not help. The thumbnails are consequently displayed throughout, also -as mentioned- in the timeline, but not in the preview screen, where the real thing is shown.
My current workaround is to save the project, restart PD and open the project, everything is okay then, until some thresshold has passed...

Hopefully CL will have a serious look at the issue and make some true changes to address the ongoing issue. Kind of doubt it based on history, but wishful thinking. So many persistent long-time issues that marginally get addressed but appears never really corrected and often appear later again.

Reminds me of the simply green check in the media library if an asset is used. Never worked correctly in a prior release, many users provided input, examples, took around 4 patches to "fix". When the next major release came out, issue was back again, user input scenario repeated. Only sloppy attention to any details, poor program release managers, lack of QA code, can explain such experiences.

Jeff

Update:
I received a reaction from Customer Support (good reaction and reasonable fast response, thanks Lilian, good show!)

The result is less so: they are not able to reproduce the error and because no other customer have resported this it is very likely that it is my system (although they believe me that it happens to me on various systems and various operating system versions and various PD versions). Can I send a packed project so that they can try?
I will try to collect a package and if succesful will share that with them and here with you so that you can also test and report.

Here is a video file that I shared with Customer support. It shows that I open PD and a large series of images and that after 2 or 3 times the rooms and/or the timeline thumbnails go astray

and here is the packed project with the image files (duplication of the standard PD images), for those of you who want to try. I am really interested to learn whether it is me and all my systems setups who is doing something wrong, or.....

Just to be complete:
I have tested the thumbnails issue just now with version PD365 21.5.3015.0, which appeared today. And the issue is still there, even faster then before (tried to load the series of images twice...).

(Note: this version did not install properly via the CAM, PD did not start, giving a message that something was missing...), manual installation did work though).

Warry, thanks for posting all the details and sharing the screen recordings and packed project!

I've done some testing and don't see anything unusual, but I'm also not clear on what you're doing that seems to trigger the issue. Is it simply browsing to different rooms, or do you need to make some kind of timeline edits first?

Anything you can find as far as specific steps other people can take would make it much easier to try to replicate

It is on and off, but I always get wrong thumbnails eventually, what I (have to) do is load all the images >200, add these to the timeline, tab to see the sorting screen and sometimes swap an image from place. And reload the images again from disk, either with a new project start before it or not...

I believe that the repetition of addition of that amount of images is too much for the software. And as you can see in the screen recording, it happens in rooms but also in the timeline. Not predictable, but the issue happens all the time....
the browsing in the rooms may be part of the cause, but I do that the check whether thumbnails are still okay...

as said before, I have this issue already for a number you years/PD versions. I have had windows 10 and 11 systems, laptops of various kinds, disks, memory sizes etc. My current system is (fully up to date) W11, 13900HX processor, NVidia 4060, 32Gb RAM, 2x Samsung 990 Pro 1Tb disks.

if nobody has this issue, frustrating but fine... My work around is to save the project, to close the program and restart it.

As I said, it's happened often, many versions. Here is a sample of the issue, very easily to replicate, just takes time. CL didn't give you do diligence when a basic user can take your files and replicate.

If using RGB display in pref, you might try YUV, from my experience, it has less issues with this particular anomaly but can have other issues.

Jeff

Quote

If using RGB display in pref, you might try YUV, from my experience, it has less issues with this particular anomaly but can have other issues.

Jeff

Thanks Jeff! Did do some testing with YUV, and it there does not seems to be a difference.

The choice between RGB and YUV always puzzles me a bit. The manual says that YUV improves the performance of the display compared to RGB? Does that still apply these days? It also says that the timeline preview may looks different from the library preview if so set the display to RGB.
Anyway, thumbnails still get confused by the latest PD version. Customer support is lookign at it, Lilian came back asking for the DXDiag file and a packed project again, I will point to the subject in this forum. We'll see what happens.

Quote The choice between RGB and YUV always puzzles me a bit. The manual says that YUV improves the performance of the display compared to RGB? Does that still apply these days?

Too bad it appeared to make no difference for you, I’ve typically observed less frequent thumbnail issue, oh it still occurs though. I don’t use PD365 so have no experience there, but you indicated PD365 21.5.3015.0 makes the issue worse. If just your platform at issue as CL wants to suggest, why would this be an observation?

CL first incorporated the YUV/RGB pref setting in PD18, so 2019, what big technology advance in software/hardware/OS/compilers do you feel has taken place that PD365 incorporates that makes the option irrelevant these days? Since I often get user rebuked by a couple when commenting on such settings, maybe you can ask CL to provide resource references for applicability of the RGB/YUV setting as it pertains to PD365 for absolute clarification.

I hope CL support resolves the issue for you, my guess, "case referred to engineering team" at best will be the response you'll get.

Jeff

Hi Warry & all -

I've been following this thread & trying to replicate the issue using both PDR365 & PDR21 on different PCs. I've now downloaded Warry's packed project and trying it with that, but I'm yet to see the "wrong thumbnails" issue here.

Jeff - you said "very easily to replicate, just takes time" - do you mean time working on the project? Not doubting what you're saying because - yes - similar issues have been raised before.

I'll keep at it.

Cheers - Tony
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Quote Jeff - you said "very easily to replicate, just takes time" - do you mean time working on the project? Not doubting what you're saying because - yes - similar issues have been raised before.

It's kind of hard to doubt an attached pic of PD21 GUI with trouble thumbnails with Warry's pics in the timeline.

Since it is Warry's test case for CL to replicate, I followed actions similar to Thumb001a.mp4 that Warry also provided to them.

My statement, "just takes time" because you may have to do actions like what's shown in Thumb001a.mp4 maybe 2-15 times before issue occurs. I just attempted another replication of the issue and after about the 6th iteration the issue appeared in the Particle Room this time as shown in the attached pic.

Jeff

Wow, this topic has drew so many feedbacks here and made me think there are some serious and blocking problems occurred in powerdirector before I really clicked into this post.

I just tried the project Warry uploaded. I cannot replicate the same issue after trying them several times.
I would rather have to say, it is could be a dumb task to repeat the same and these miscellaneous steps just for replication.

I can understand it could be an annoying condition for Warry if he needs to create lots of video projects that contain large amount of pictures frequently.

But, just like what optodata and ynotfish tried out, it has indicated that the issue Warry mentioned is not an easily replicate-able case.

@Warry, if you've contacted cyberlink, although they indeed tried to help you out, I still don't think you will get a satisfying result in this case.


Just a friendly reminder to you.

Just to be clear: if you don’t see any issues with the thumbnails in timeline and/or the rooms, that is great, because that is how it is meant to be.

And indeed I don't want ot make this bigger than it is.

Yesterday I bumped into the issue after a second load of many images (the example set I submitted).
Today, working in normal routine editing it took several projects before I saw thumbnails on places where they should not be. (I restarted the program and continued the work.)
I also noticed (new to me) that I was not able to select all media files in the media room with Ctrl-A. The option – for obvious reasons- has switched off for all the rooms, but should work in the media room. It did not, nor did the multiple select (holding the Ctrl key, and/or the range selection with the Shift key). (It all worked again after restart.)

So something is wrong, but don’t worry if you don’t have it. And if I was the only user with the issue, I would -like CL- be happy to conclude that it must be my system. However, if more users have the same experience, my suggestion to CL remains: have a look at this because it may potentially be the cause of something bigger or wider, like some of the other flaws that have been reported here over time.

I was in contact with CL support, who have been very responsive.