I see the template just fine in the registered version (see pic) PD 64 Bit-Win10 64 Bit-32GB RAM-80TB HDD
Sony FX6 - 500Mbps 4k/50p AVC-I HLG
Canon XF400 - 150Mbps 4k/50p AVC
GoPro Hero6 Black
Pana HS700-28Mbps 1080/50p AVC (High@L4.2)
Canon HV20-HDV 25Mbps 16:9 1440x1080/25p MPEG

Quote: I see the template just fine in the registered version (see pic)

That is the DV-AVI template. I have that option in the trial (but sadly it produces blocky output). I was looking for uncompressed AVI.

Hi Caesium -

I'm not sure how it produced a blocky file. Isn't the file & format the same as your original? Could you post a screenshot of the blocky video?

Using a sample AVI file (downloaded from the VLC forum) I produced to the same profile jmone showed in his screenshot. To me, it looks just like the original.

Attached are side-by-side MediaInfo reports for the original clip & the PD produced one.

Cheers - Tony
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I am seeing a blocky grid pattern over all PAL DV-AVI exported from PowerDirector 11. It may be necessary to enlarge the video to full screen in a video player to see it, but it is very noticeable. The same grid does not appear in video exported from other software I have.

I have noticed that PD11 will always re-compress the DV video, even if no effects have been applied to the video. I have fed different source videos into PD11, some with Microsoft DV codec, some with Canopus DV and Mainconcept DV. Each time I drop the video on the timeline in PD11 and then produce it back out as DV. It always re-compresses the video. It always has a nasty looking grid of faint blocks overlaid over the video.

Is MOV a type of AVI?
There is a more extensive menu in the MOV UI.
In PD 32 bit, other AVI codecs worked, like DIVX, but AVI never seemed to get much attention from tech.
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

MOV is MPEG 4. I was under the impression that the AVI used in PD is uncompressed. I don't know id custom profiles are possible in AVI, but maybe a constant bitrate would help. I used to have that trouble in images with a large area of solid color. It would try to compress so far that a black background would look like a checkerboard. __________________________________
CORNBLOSSOM

Quote: Is MOV a type of AVI?
There is a more extensive menu in the MOV UI.
In PD 32 bit, other AVI codecs worked, like DIVX, but AVI never seemed to get much attention from tech.

The MOV sizes, like the other AVI sizes are unsuitable. There is no 720x576. The nearest size is 640x480. Which would be a 20% downscale and would be square pixel and de-interlaced. The custom size button is disabled. There is no way to change the pixel aspect ratio or set the interlacing. Normally in other software, one would leave DV as DV. As the quality loss would be very minimal on each DV encode. But in PowerDirector 11, the DV encoder is very poor quality or broken. I might look at PD10, see if it works better.

To highlight how bad the DV encoder is in PD11. I encoded the same video over and over, for 10 generations. Loading the save file back onto the timeline and then re-encoding it again. With DV you should be able to do this at least a dozen times before any degradation is noticeable. The screengrab from the PD11 video looks really bad, see my image attachment.

OK - I pulled out my old DV-AVI stuff (which I had editited in another brand editing app) and you are correct. There is no way in PD to enable SVRT (eg "Smart Render") so PD will re-encode the entire stream. And yes the Macro Blocks are evident and there is no way I can see where you can tweak any settings for the encoder than PD uses.

This will not be of much help, but due to falling compatibility I did re-encode all my DV-AVI (both 4:3 and 16:9) to a very high bitrate h.264 using the following custom profile and I think the results are good (eg the files size is about the same as the original DV-AVI stuff). I've had to tweak this slightly for PD11 (due to a B frame issue) but give it a go.

& <Class>AVCHD <Name>DVConvert <Description> DV Convert <Output FileName> <DescID>11108 <NameID>11109 <Group>2 <File Format Class>13 <Video Format Class>8 <Audio Format Class>3 <Stream Flag>3 <Field Order>1 <Attribute>10083 <Video BitRate>22500000 <Min BitRate>11250000 <Max BitRate>23000000 <Video Quality>0 <Video Width>720 <Video Height>576 <Frame Rate>25.000000 <Profile Level>65357 <Pattern>IPPPPP <Pre Processing>0 <Resize>1 <Flip Video>0 <Speed Quality Indicator>6 <Interlacing>0 <Encoder Mode>6 <App Type>2 <Dynamic GOP>0 <Deblock>1 <EntryMode>1 <Encoder Type>4 <Audio Layer>2 <Audio Mode>2 <Audio BitRate>1536000 <Audio Channels>2 <Audio SamplesPerSec>1 <Audio BitsPerSample>1 <Misc>0 <SamplesPerFrame>0 && PD 64 Bit-Win10 64 Bit-32GB RAM-80TB HDD
Sony FX6 - 500Mbps 4k/50p AVC-I HLG
Canon XF400 - 150Mbps 4k/50p AVC
GoPro Hero6 Black
Pana HS700-28Mbps 1080/50p AVC (High@L4.2)
Canon HV20-HDV 25Mbps 16:9 1440x1080/25p MPEG

FYI - all the custom Profiles are stored in a text file (edit with notepad) call Profile.ini normal in a hidden path C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Roaming\CyberLink\PowerDirector\11.0

You can create your own through the PD11 application using the "+" button under the H.264 AVC profile page but as you will see you don't get access to tweak all the settings. I created mine this way then went in to the Profile.ini file with Notepad and increased the Video Bitrate, Min BitRate, MaxBitrate and changed the Pattern. The rest I left the same. PD 64 Bit-Win10 64 Bit-32GB RAM-80TB HDD
Sony FX6 - 500Mbps 4k/50p AVC-I HLG
Canon XF400 - 150Mbps 4k/50p AVC
GoPro Hero6 Black
Pana HS700-28Mbps 1080/50p AVC (High@L4.2)
Canon HV20-HDV 25Mbps 16:9 1440x1080/25p MPEG

I was going to mention the ini customization "hack" to you, for the re-sizing, you knew it, though. I get everything but the pattern, patterns are mentioned here from time to time, but I am totally in the dark over what they represent, and how anyone might know what to alter. In other words, what the Sam Hill is a B frame issue? A link to a good explanation will suffice. I'm looking now...
Oy, I found a Wiki on "interframes", 2 paragraphs in my entire central nervous system began to hurt and I had to start drinking. 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

Ok, Intra Frame compression (like used on DV) is where each frame is compressed without referencing any other frame and was one of the first techniques used (it is useful to think of this like a series of individal JPEG still pics). The downside is that it can take up alot of space for a given quality, but on the upside it is relativly simple.

The thing is in many video frames the picture does not change much from Frame 1 --> Frame 2 --> Frame 3 etc. Imagine if you only had to record the "differences" between the frames. This is where Inter Frame compression can make a big space saving without sacrifcing quality.

So what we now have is the concept of of Group of Pictures (GOP), where the very first frame is a traditional I Frame. Following the I Frame we can now have P (Predictive) Frames) that references the bits that have changed (and these are half the size). Pushing the maths along, they also have B (Bi Directional Predictive) Frames that sit between the I and the P frames (and these are one quarter of the size). PD11 uses a pretty std long GOP of IBBPBBPBBPBBP on many of the encoding profiles and if all goes well you should get good quality for a low file size. More at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter_frame

Unfortuantly PD11 currently has a bug with how the B frames are calcualted resulting in artifacts, so I edit these out of the GOP to just have IPPPPP which while a bit bigger looks good. PD 64 Bit-Win10 64 Bit-32GB RAM-80TB HDD
Sony FX6 - 500Mbps 4k/50p AVC-I HLG
Canon XF400 - 150Mbps 4k/50p AVC
GoPro Hero6 Black
Pana HS700-28Mbps 1080/50p AVC (High@L4.2)
Canon HV20-HDV 25Mbps 16:9 1440x1080/25p MPEG

Only DV-AVI type I works with SVRT, DV-AVI type II does not.

Do not display DV-AVI 720x576 or 720x480 at full screen or other high definition resolutions. That will surely result in inferior quality and pixelated video, That's not suitable for judging quality. Gateway DX4380, AMD A8-5500 Quad Core 3.2GHz with ATI Radeon HD 7560D; 16GB RAM; 1 TB SATA 7200 RPM; Windows 8 Pro 64-bit; PDR11, PDVD12.

Back on topic, C-137 - it seems from your testing the PD DV encoder is poor. This worries me as the h264/AVC encoder also has major issues (with B Frames). To me this is frustrating as the core of any Video Editing package should be a solid, high quality encoder (and it is not as if DV is some "new" fangled codec). I have no idea if Cyberlink writes their own encoders or buys them from another company but given DV is "old" I'd be surprised if you get much tracktion from them on this.

Then again Dafydd would be the best placed to advise (the rest of us are just users). PD 64 Bit-Win10 64 Bit-32GB RAM-80TB HDD
Sony FX6 - 500Mbps 4k/50p AVC-I HLG
Canon XF400 - 150Mbps 4k/50p AVC
GoPro Hero6 Black
Pana HS700-28Mbps 1080/50p AVC (High@L4.2)
Canon HV20-HDV 25Mbps 16:9 1440x1080/25p MPEG

I am thinking PowerDirector maybe internally upscaling DV to HD on the timeline, then downscaling it again on export. It is odd that when you start a new project in PD, the only settings are a choice between 4:3 or 16:9 (and PAL or NTSC in the preferences). What size of video is the video on the timeline? In Premiere, for example, you have to choose project settings which govern the size of the video on the timeline, there are no project settings in PD. It is like a one size fits all environment?

I would be interested to try a much older version of PD when DV was the dominant video format and HD did not exist. Maybe the DV encoder was working back then.

I have just finished testing with PD10. It suffers from the same poor quality DV encoder as PD11. I also tested it with some NTSC DV video and that was exported as bad as the PAL DV.

PD's preference makes more sense to me, as really on a timeline all you really want to set is what the number of Tics you want to see so you can get frame accurate editing (eg 25,30,50,60 fps).

The rest is then what output you want PD to encode to, Frame Size, Encoder, Container, etc etc. That way you can have one project then create mutiple outputs for various uses (eg Full HD, one for DVD, one for Phones, or the Web etc).

Anyway, back to the DV Encoder... I don't think PD is doing a DV to HD to DV conversion as such, but like all editing packages (that are not using some form of Smart Render) PD will be decoding and (I guess) render the file into YUV2??/RGB?? color space so any effects etc can be added for encoding it back to DV (hence genertational loss). I've just got a feeling that the DV Encoder (and possible the DV Decoder) is just not very good as those macro blocks are not a great look. PD 64 Bit-Win10 64 Bit-32GB RAM-80TB HDD
Sony FX6 - 500Mbps 4k/50p AVC-I HLG
Canon XF400 - 150Mbps 4k/50p AVC
GoPro Hero6 Black
Pana HS700-28Mbps 1080/50p AVC (High@L4.2)
Canon HV20-HDV 25Mbps 16:9 1440x1080/25p MPEG

Hi,
The DV capture and render selection is unlikely to be changed.

1. Please state clearly where you have obtained a 50i dv-avi 720x576 video from, camera make model please or name the source?
2. Please provide a diagnostic file(s) of your system, will help assess the capability of your set up to process the footage?
3. Please provide a 5 second video sample file direct from source and unedited, attach to your reply? This will allow members to assess the footage you are commenting on and to replicate your issue.

I'm not aware of a consumer level DV camera recording 720x576 PAL footage in anything other than 25 fps (interlaced). I would be very interested to know what camera you have? The 50i spec was not part of the DV-avi make up and has never been mentioned on the PDR forums previously when DV was at it's zenith.

Dafydd

You are reading way too much into the 50i. The 50i is terminology I borrowed from PowerDirector. If you look at the Profile name on the AVI tab in PD11, you will see DV-AVI described as "DV-AVI 720x576/50i (25 Mbps)". I guess here it means 50 fields interlaced. I copied that description.

The footage I used is just standard PAL-DV 720x576 at 25fps. I exported it out of Premiere CS5.5 as Microsoft DV. I am using Win7 64-bit. I have also tested with a Canopus DV file (CDVC) exported from Canopus Procoder as well as a DV file exported from avanti/ffmpeg. All my DV files look great, no grids anywhere. I just can't get DV to export back out of PD without some nasty degradation.

I was wandering if PD is using a system DV codec or an internal DV codec? I think I will try installing PD11 on a WinXP machine, to see if it makes a difference.

Attached is the video report from g-spot. This is about the file I used in the tests. If you still want some video, I will upload a few seconds.

HI

Did you ever get any resolution over this as i am having the exact same problems of blocky artifacts when re encoding to avi?

I really like the PD11 program for editing and effects, but the actual production quality is far inferior to other editing software.

Quote HI

Did you ever get any resolution over this as i am having the exact same problems of blocky artifacts when re encoding to avi?

I really like the PD11 program for editing and effects, but the actual production quality is far inferior to other editing software.

This is still happening in PD14 as well. I am not confident that something like this is even fixed in PD21, which appears to be the current version based on the all the "modals" Cyberlink is popping up on me!

Frustrating as heck because I have DV-AVI based Hi-8 and Digital tapes going back to 2003 that I captured that I now need to edit. The dots in a grid are very ugly and I have not found a way to get rid of them. I guess I am stuck with video files where someone video'd 10 minutes of the camera lens cap on, but forgot to stop the recording!