I just bought a copy of PD9 a week ago - after using Windows Movie Maker for a while. So please bear with me as I am a newby. I've been teaching myself how to use the program so I think I'm geting to grips with it and it's great.
My big disappointment however, is that when I put images or movie clips from my library into the timeline, the quality is immediately vastly degraded. In a slideshow I've used original .jpg images with a resolution of around 4000x3000, and also tried smaller resized ones. Same thing happens with the Powerdirector sample images. They look great until they go onto the timeline.
Today I tried stringing together 5 short movie clips (.MTS files) each one is originally 50-100MB in size. The finished video is around 5 minutes long. In preview the quality was terrible, blurry and pixilated, so I produced it to see what happened. The saved PDS project file was 192kb and the whole 5 minute movie when produced was only 4.9MB. It is unusable!
As a test, I did the same thing in Windows Movie Maker, which produced a movie that is 200MB and looks great.
It seems to me that Powerdirector is somehow compressing or optimizing the files when they are placed into the timeline. I've been through every setting I can find but can't see what I'm doing wrong.
Does anyone have an answer to my problem? I'd really appreciate some help. Toshiba Satellite A100-062
15.4 " Toshiba TruBrite® WXGA TFT display
Genuine Windows® Vista™ Home Premium Edition (32 bit)
Intel® Centrino® Duo Mobile Technology featuring Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor T5200, Intel® PRO/Wireless 3945ABG
network connection and Intel® 945GM Express chipset | clock speed : 1.6 GHz | front side bus : 533 MHz | 2nd level cache : 2 MB
4 GB : DDR2 RAM (533 MHz)
160 GB Hard Drive (50 GB free)
Intel® 945GM Express chipset (with latest update)