Hello forum,

I have been trying to edit and produce a large video all night and it keeps crashing on me. The video is 40 minutes long and it is a mix of a person talking with slides put on top of the speaker at different intervals (the subject is just elaborating on his powerpoint presentation)

It is a little late for me, and I can run some diagnostics and provide screen shots if my problem requires more information. I have spent time searching the forum, and I found many threads on 'crash when editing' and 'crash when producing', but I think I have it narrowed down to one track that I am using to blur the background.

High level info: I have a Windows 7 Pro x64 box with 24GB RAM and a Core i7 processor. I have a mirror array of two SSD's for my Operating system (which hosts PowerDirector), then a RAID5 array of 6 velociraptor drives to store my video/photo/audio/etc files. I have made dozens of videos and this is the only one where I'm getting a consistent crash rate. I have made copies of the file and opened up the PDS xml file and edited the track in question.

Here is what is happening:
I have a track that is entirely 'blur scroll' effect. It is the effect where you can blur the background, but have text scroll across the screen that is in focus. I'm using this effect to blur the background (the speaker giving the presentation), while the slides are being shown. Granted there may be a better way to do this (I just need the background blurred when showing a slide, and no blur when I'm only showing the presenter), but the method I'm using is crashing PD11.exe.

I don't want any text to scroll when I blur the background. At first, I just made a bunch of empty effects and it worked wonderfully. Then after making 15-20 copies of the effect and installed them into my timeline, it randomly crashes. Here is the weird part....when I open it back up, the scoll effect has replaced the blank text with Chinese letters or other ASCII characters. It is mostly Chinese letters (or it could be another southeast asia language - I can't tell). Regardless of what language it is, I now have letters scrolling across the screen when it should be blank. I have tried going in and replacing the unwanted letters with one space, and I have also tried removing the letters and just using no text at all. The last thing I tried was making a whole new track, copying the one good effect over and over and just trimming the size. All three of these methods cause PD11 to randomly crash. It will crash at one of two spots. Either 1. WHen I try to change the text of the effect or 2. WHen I try to produce a video in MP4. It also crashes for MOV and AVI.

I have tried editing the XML file to remove the unwanted letters and then opening the file, but it still crashes.

Any ideas? I've attached some screen shots of what is happening.


Thanks,
Michael