New user problem -- Crash during "Produce"

Tony2323

Newbie Joined: Jun 21, 2011 16:14 Messages: 11 Offline

Solved by

Jun 26, 2011 10:57

Hello everyone.

I've spend several frustrating days becoming familiar with PD9, and have run up against an unusually large number of bugs. In this, and subsquent posts, detail thse in the hope that the answers will help others. My first impression of PD is "Why on earth did they let this one leave the lab without testing it first". I was almost ready to bag the lot until I found this forum. Looks like there are several enthusiastic users here, which is not surprising seeings as the features of PD, when they work, are just grand! OK, on with the problem.

I set myself the task of producing a "Wedding video", consisting of a 33 minute slide show (still photos, "Magic Movie"'d into an interesting video), a separate 8 minute slide show (using the "Slide show" generator), and a 30 minute video. All were to have chapters and subtitles.

I failed at the first hurdle. Producing the 33 minute slide show in MPEG-4/Best quality/NTSC failed at the 13:19:15 mark with the message "Media Source Error". It took about 2 hours to reach this point. There was nothing at all atypical about the picture it was processing at the time. I repeated the operation again, from a rebooted machine with *just* PD9 running and it failed at the same point.

So I tried "High Quality". That failed at the 30:42:04 mark, which is no good if your movie is 33 minutes long. No problem at all with WMA files

Technical support, as others have found, are no use. Their response to this detailed bug report was to copy out the manual on how to produce a movie with MPEG-2. Clearly, they are not the people to make bug reports to.

I subequently learned that my recently-downloaded version was 2701, and so upgraded to 2930. This, too, failed at the 13:19:15 mark (Best quality), but with the far more informative "Error makinig movie" message instead. Trying MPEG-2/HD MPEG-2 1080i also fails at the 13 minute mark. Same place.

So, then, is there something in my configuration stopping "Produce" from working? Do others have problems with long movies? Are there work-rounds?

Thanks,
Tonu

So

Filename	DxDiag64.txt	Download
Description	diag 64
Filesize	32 Kbytes
Downloaded:	217 time(s)

Filename	DxDiag.txt	Download
Description	diag 32
Filesize	32 Kbytes
Downloaded:	191 time(s)

BarryTheCrab

Senior Contributor Location: USA Joined: Nov 06, 2008 22:18 Messages: 6240 Offline

Jun 26, 2011 11:18

I see you have an integrated video card with a 2 year old driver, and the video card is entirely too weak to do a 30 minute HD movie anyway.
If you look at my specs for the DM1, that is a bare minimum, and I generally don't edit anything over 10 minutes with it. Sorry, but you need new hardware.
With a true dedicated video card, you will get the benefits of GPU or APU processing on certain file-types and editing.
One thing you can try is to make your project into 2 or 3 separate projects, produce each one and then join them in a new project. The hard work of producing will have been done in smaller chunks, and you can then "glue" them together, it's less demanding. It might work, but...you really need to get a card (if you have a laptop, you're stuck).

This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at Jun 26. 2011 11:24

HP Envy Phoenix/4thGen i7-4770(4@3.4GHz~turbo>3.9)
Nvidia GTX 960(4GB)/16GB DDR3/
Canon Vixia HV30/HF-M40/HF-M41/HF-G20/Olympus E-PL5.
Tape capture using 6 VCR, TBC-1000, Elite BVP4+, Sony D8 camcorder with TBC.
https://www.facebook.com/BarryAFTT

Tony2323

Newbie Joined: Jun 21, 2011 16:14 Messages: 11 Offline

Jun 26, 2011 14:31

Quote: I see you have an integrated video card with a 2 year old driver, and the video card is entirely too weak to do a 30 minute HD movie anyway.
If you look at my specs for the DM1, that is a bare minimum, and I generally don't edit anything over 10 minutes with it. Sorry, but you need new hardware.
With a true dedicated video card, you will get the benefits of GPU or APU processing on certain file-types and editing.
One thing you can try is to make your project into 2 or 3 separate projects, produce each one and then join them in a new project. The hard work of producing will have been done in smaller chunks, and you can then "glue" them together, it's less demanding. It might work, but...you really need to get a card (if you have a laptop, you're stuck).

I did as you suggested (see subsequent posts). Thanks, although it seemed like the only solution (which as you can see caused other issues to surface).

My hardware gives quite reasonable response. Why do you think that upgrading the video card will solve what seems to be a straighforward software bug?

Carl312

Senior Contributor Location: Texas, USA Joined: Mar 16, 2010 20:11 Messages: 9090 Offline

Jun 26, 2011 16:07

My hardware gives quite reasonable response. Why do you think that upgrading the video card will solve what seems to be a straighforward software bug?

Because Powerdirector 9 depends very heavily on the Video card to produce videos. The Video card is not just a display device. It is also a hardware rendering device.

Also Powerdirector 9 must have nearly 100 GB of free space on the Program drive. There is a ton of temporary files produced while assembling a Video, the longer the video being assembled the more space needed.

The real fault of Powerdirector is the fact that the error messages are too general, and don't say the actual failure.
It takes experience with the program to learn the quirks and how to work around some of them.

Video Editing is the most work your computer will ever do, Video editing will show up a weak computer very fast. Carl312: Windows 10 64-bit 8 GB RAM,AMD Phenom II X4 965 3.4 GHz,ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB,240GB SSD,two 1TB HDs.

Tony2323

Newbie Joined: Jun 21, 2011 16:14 Messages: 11 Offline

Jun 26, 2011 17:19

Quote:

My hardware gives quite reasonable response. Why do you think that upgrading the video card will solve what seems to be a straighforward software bug?

Because Powerdirector 9 depends very heavily on the Video card to produce videos. The Video card is not just a display device. It is also a hardware rendering device.

That's interesting. Nice symbiosis.
But surely there is a software fallback method if my video card doesn't support rendering? I suppose there could be an error in the firmware causing the issue, but there are no other indications of trouble (like an entry in the Event Log).

Thanks so much for your feedback and help.

James Dotson

Senior Contributor Location: Tennessee Joined: Aug 24, 2009 20:40 Messages: 3066 Offline

Jun 26, 2011 18:29

Video rendering is heavily dependent on your hardware. If the graphics card is not fast enough it will go to the processor. That's why CyberLink recommends a quad-core processor for working with HD video. __________________________________
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