I just switched to PowerDirector 12 after using Studio 15 for a couple years. So far it has worked fairly well, but I have run into a few issues.

Question:

1. My finished video is 17 minutes long. Unfortunately, it takes over an hour to render it. According to Windows task manager, it's only using 30-50 percent of the CPU load, and only about 2GB of RAM? I tried rendering to a different hard drive thinking the drive was being overloaded, but it made no difference. I have a lot of transitions (fade), but practically no effects. My system is Win7 Home Premium 32-bit SP1, i5 2500K@3.3Ghz, 4GB RAM, 2TB hard drive and 1TB hard drive. Why is the rendering so slow?

Wishlist:

1. PD12 should save the zoom level I have set up on the time line. Every time I open PD12, it goes back to showing the full video. This means I have to zoom in to my desired scale every time I start PD12. Annoying.

2. On several occasions I have somehow created very short clips (scenes, or whatever you want to call them). These are usually just a few frames in length, and don't show up on the time line. The only way I know they are there is if I try to place two clips next to each other and am unable to apply a transition. I can also see a short blip of video when I play it back. It would be nice if PD12 let you set a limit for the shortest clip. For instance, I will never want a clip less than two or three seconds. Ideally PD12 would prevent you from creating a clip this short, but at least it would show up on the time line if it did.

Bugs:

1. In a few random cases, I get a weird "echo" in the audio. I'm just using a single video track and a second MP3 song for background music. I haven't determined what causes it, but it usually starts when there's a transition. Sometimes I can fix it by muting the clip on my main video track, but not always. Of course, I don't always want to mute my main track either. I converted one of my songs to WAV format before editing, and didn't notice the problem anymore. But, it's really random so I don't know that it's really solved.

2. I created a couple of titles at the end of my first video. Basically just some static text and a photo I added to the title screen and scaled to size. When I render (produce) the video and play it back, the image flashes wildly, while the text displays normally? There are a couple of ways I can work around this, but it shouldn't happen in the first place.

3. When I use SVRT to render (produce), the final video is unplayable in VLC. It says the h.264 format is unsupported? I have no problems if I export with hardware acceleration instead. For what it's worth, I didn't notice any difference in speed rendering with SVRT anyway, even though the output format is exactly the same as the input files (I encoded the source files with the same setting in PD12).
Anthony Watson
www.mountainsoftware.com
www.watsondiy.com