* Update *

I left it for about 10 mins on this and it finally found the camera.

I guess PD7 on my machine is just slow. It still takes about 6 mins to load up (after a reformat and clean install of Windows before anti-virus and firewall installed).

It's a quad core (Q6600) with 4gb RAM running Vista 64 so shouldn't be too sluggish .

PD7 crashes and hangs, I am beginning to discover, are not always crashes and hangs. The program merely takes a long time to do whatever it is doing, and the programmer never thought to show any type of progress bar. I have found on several occasions that the program is merely transcoding, making a proxy, doing an import, or whatever it has to do, and will, for a long time appear dead. This is a very serious fault in programming, but atleast one which is easily fixed with a simple thermometer display, and also by a very patient user until it is fixed.

For whatever it is worth, I have the fastest quadcore being made, the Extreme QX9650, and some PD7 activities still take a very long time. I just wanted to point out that they will, in some cases, eventually complete, and not to immediately assume a hang or crash when the program appears to be dead / not repsonding.

Like many things in PD7, the people who designed and built it have an extremely hard time communicating what they are doing.

Hope this may be of some help.

Larry

And guess what, I am trying the version 9 trail and it does the same thing. Hangs at 70%. But unlike your case, it isn't doing a thing. Checking CPU usage and it is 0%. No disk activity, no CPU use, just sitting there all stupid like at 70%. I think it likes that number. Obviously indicates a stage in the process. Gets to 70% in a couple seconds, and never goes further.

It has been literally several years since my prior post, and 2 major revisions of Power Director with countless patches in between. The latest rev seems to run without hangs in nearly all the many times I have used it. I suggest posting this in the newer PD9 area and letting the folks there provide guidance. Also contact Cyberlink support.

Despite glitches and occasional issues, PD9 is a solid program and well worth the price IMHO.

Good luck,
Larry

Hello,

I did write a note on the PD9 folder but no response, and I opened a support ticket and am waiting for a response. For now, I only need the product for this one single task which it can't do. I am going to try and find some other free trials today for competitive products as I don't know if and when this particular problem will be solved as it seems to be persistent. Thanks Larry.

Sorry to hear of your frustration Lew. I have been, at various times, either strongly defending / recommending Power Director and at other times damning it and cursing at its problems. It has become a very capable, low priced, and quite stable product in my view, and I own and use many other editing software packages. I only edit AVCHD/h.264 which is extremely stressing / demanding compared to the HDV and standard def video I used to do. I still prefer PD9 to Sony Vegas Pro 9, Edius, Corel Video Studio X3, Adobe Premiere Elements, and Nero Vision, all of which I own and use as well. The only software I have found which runs faster and with less fuss is TMPGE Video Mastering Works 5, and it has far less capability compared to PD9.

I am surprised that the forum members have not offered suggestions if you posted in the PD9 area. They have been very beneficial for problems I encountered over the several versions I have owned of this software.

I would be glad to try and help you work around this issue if you want to get into detail about where the hang occurs. Perhaps I might be able to help.

Larry

Something is really screwed up here....

I can't create a topic. I realized my note in the PD9 forum was a response to someone else with the same problem. There is someone else there who said they used a non-Cyberlink solution I tried to PM. When I tried to PM him it brought me back to my profile page. When I tried to create a new topic on the PD9 forum, it also brought me back to my profile page, as if it was screwed up. It said the only fields I needed to fill out was my name and email which I have done and I can log in and log out with it, but I can't PM nor can I create a new topic?????

How can I have a signon good enough to respond, good enough to received notifications, but not good enough to create a topic???? Seems I would be logged in or not logged in, but not some limbo state I am in.

Anyway, the person who has the same problem in the PD9 directory hasn't gotten an answer from Cyberlink and my response to his complaint has still been ignored, as has his problem.

A person who did respond to him said they used a non-Cyberlink solution as I am guessing they are still having the same problem.

I am going to go back and capture what I wrote on his topic and add it here. Thanks!

OK....the other topic in the PD9 directory is called:

I'm having trouble CAPTURING a VHS movie.....

http://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/posts/list/16133.page

And what I wrote there is this:

"I am trying to capture some of my old video collection using the very popular Canopus ADVC-55. I am trying to figure out what product to buy, and this one has failed big time. I saw the identical error message on an earlier version. Says it is initializing the digital device, gets to 70% and never proceeds from there. There is nothing for it to initialize, I will be sending a video stream. It has nothing to do but capture.

I am looking for software that can crop the video input to remove the black bars on the side and the "tear" on the bottom. I know a guy with Dazzle and whatever software that works with it, but he doesn't have this issue. I was hoping this software would be even better than his, but it won't even work."

When searching for my own answer I found this string.

I don't know what else to add to what I wrote above. I have the A/D converter between the S-VHS player and the computer connected with FW. As mentioned in this message string, it gets to 70% and stops and never continues further. There seems to be something that happens at 70% that fails for my configuration and failed here too.

PD9 might be the next best thing to string cheese, but if it can't accept a simple DV feed on the FW port something is really wrong.

I have downloaded and installed Adobe while waiting for help here. Haven't tried it yet, but I am hoping it will at least accept my DV stream, unlike PD9. Seems odd that the "free" Windows Movie Maker can accept my video stream, but it kills Cyberlink.

Thanks Larry!

I also mentioned that in addition to responding to the other string in the PD9 part of the forum, I opened a ticket with support. No response there or here.

Seems they want me to spend my $$$ elsewhere.

Pretty pathetic when companies rely on other users like you to provide support for their products instead of the company itself.

Thanks again Larry....

The Canopus is a solid A/D converter, and should be easily handled by PD9 or other programs. I will assume that yours is working properly and that the Windows driver for IEEE 1394/Firewire must be working properly since other apps are able to see the device and accept the video feed.

It might be useful to start PD9 and go to the Capture tab WITHOUT the Canopus connected. See if the program can get to screen where it shows the 8 buttons which allow selection of various capture devices. THEN, once you have reached that screen, CONNECT the Firewire cable and see if PD9 goes through the "Detecting Device" step where the thermometer / progrerss indicator appears. I assume this is where the hang has been taking place.

Perhaps by altering this sequence as I describe the program can mount the Canopus device and begin to see and use it?

Good luck and let me know if this is helpful in any way, Lew.

:arry

Cyberlink and others who sell this type of software are truly pathetic in their support, and compound the problem by releasing software before it has been adequately tested. I have encountered the very same issues with slow, non responsive support from Corel, Nero, Magix (especially Magix) and others who offer video editing software in the $100 price range.

The fact that the support and development people have weak English skills doesn't help either.

I am at a total loss as to what the issue is with your forum "limbo". I share your opinion that you should have all functions but perhaps there is some intermediate state for new users? I highly doubt it.

Larry

Hiya...you solved one problem

I tried your method. I launched capture without plugging in the converter. Sure enough, the screen came up with two options enabled, microphone and AVHCD or whatever the far right one was. Then I plugged in the converter and it "enabled" the DV capture option. Since it works in the "plug in after" method, tells me there is something wrong with how they scan the devices on launch. I wouldn't want to have to connect and disconnect my devices to launch PD however, so an interim solution would be that, interim.

First of all, I am still getting "tearing" on the bottom of the video which I am not surprised to get, but what I was hoping the program would offer is a cropping function.

In addition to the "tear" at the bottom of the video, there are black margins on the right and left of the image. This other guy I was talking about using the Dazzle product says the software with his program has trim settings that allow him to trim off the black edges and presumably could also trim the tear off the bottom.

At first I thought the "tear" might be in a non-data area below the screen, but the "tear" is in the content area.

I am using a S-VHS player that hasn't been used much, but that isn't to say the heads could be dirty. I found it has a manual tracking adjustment and I changed that, but it didn't affect the tearing on the bottom.

I only have one older VHS machine...a really old one that ate a tape the last time I tried to play it. I never opened it up to get my tape back.

I don't want to have to buy a new VHS player to copy my tapes...hmmmmm....

Thanks so much!

Glad to hear that my strategy worked, Lew. Regarding the crop issue, let me make a suggestion:

The head switching noise in the bottom of the frame is normally concealed in older TVs and monitors due to the deliberate use of "overscan", thereby putting the extreme edges of the video frame outside the viewing area of the display. This was done in recognition of the fact that horizontal and vertical sync and blanking pulses were not to be seen, particularly the smeared versions of them regenerated by VCRs. Newer displays are less forgiving...

Take your video clip and use the Modify feature of the PIP Designer to move the video around in the frame, and stretch it to fill the bottom or top as neccesary. By turning off the "Keep Aspect ratio, the height and width can be independently adjusted.

This is not exactly a "crop" but can achieve the same effect.

Let me know if this solves your remaining problem.

Best,
Larry

Hello again..

I don't know of any monitors that had overscan? Generally by definition your able to through external controls to move the image and center it so that even on the CRT technology, the image could fill the screen, but not over fill it so to speak.

From my knowledge of the earlier days was CRTs would decay over time and so the TV manufacturers built in about 8% overscan which would allow some shrinkage in image before a blank margin would appear. I think the modern term in analog video adage is "TV Safe".

Without having used this configuration before, I wanted to be sure I didn't have a tracking error or some other problem with the image.

What is unfortunate, is the "tear extends into the "content" part of the image. It seems the "tear" appears in two ways,

One is a "bar" about 1/24 the height of the screen, about 3/16 of the way up from the bottom. In the other cases, it is a true tear, where the bottom is skewed over to the side, about 1/8 of the width over. in either case, you can see that the skew or tear is in an area that is otherwise viewable content. I saw some portraits that had frames around them, in once case, a diagonal frame.

The frame went from the area above the tear, down through the tear, and other things could be seen. Not just replicated data, but otherwise "additional" content.

Being a lazy person typically, I had hoped the capture process would have the crop feature in it and I could directly output my video in a MPG or AVI format in one fell swoop.

A guy I know has gotten some DVDs that were originally VHS tapes. It is my understanding the original person has VHS tapes that is going through one of those combo units where the VHS tape is recorded directly to the DVD. I was told though, that when that is done, it has a black border all the way around. His output is 640, but I am assuming the original like other DVDs is 720. I don't have that much extra border on the sides, probably not enough to have to trim to 640. In fact, if the bottom looked nice like the top, I would probably ignore the black on the sides and would let it go at that.

I don't know what the PIP took is, but will check it out. I have don't nothing further with PD when it wouldn't capture. I did fire up Adobe to find out that it also had the tear, although it looked different. The image quality looked different, but it had a smaller portal for viewing the preview so the quality might have been the size.

I am just looking for the easiest way to make the highest quality output at the highest resolution from these tapes.

Thanks so much!

So much for that idea... I tried to launch PD twice now, and it crashed both times. What is bad about the crashes, not even Windoze Task Manager can kill PD. That forces me to do a shut down, but shut down never completes....as PD's failure to process the device scan, it won't let task manager kill it, and that won't let the computer shut down gracefully, forcing me to hit the reset button. No software should be that screwed up.

I am running a RAID...every time I have to hit reset to reboot, I am risking having to rebuild the RAID. That is what happened the other day the first time I had this problem. This time I ran PD with nothing else running, like mail, etc. When it crashed before, it blocked itself and all other programs that were in process.

Anyway....still no reply from support, or on the other message string, nor am I able to PM the other guy, or initiate a new message....stuck in limbo software, stuck in limbo support...

Back to Adobe or who ever's software will work.

Thanks so much!

I brought up the topic of overscan to explain why some edges of analog video may have been concealed by older TVs and monitors yet now appear "ugly" since the current displays do not hide such border defects. Your approach of cropping is an altogether sound and legitimate solution, and can be mostly achieved using the PIP Designer approach I referred to in PD9. Sony Vegas Pro has a true crop feature which can work better for this situation, but the software is several times the price of PD. TMPGE also has a very good crop capability, and their Movie Works 5 may be the "best" solution for you, all considered.

The conversion being done by the Canopus digitzes the analog video line by line, and some amount of noise in the head switching interval is making its way through. No doubt you are aware that VCRs use different heads for extracting the (helical recorded) video, some 4 heads, some 2 heads, and the VHS tape recording system was never especially great in this regard, even if the same machine which was used to record the tape originally is now being used for playback. Aging and wear and machine to machine differences along with tape stretch, capstan and pinch roller and belt deterioration and head wear along with the commutator brushes on the spinning head drum all contribute. Cropping is a good solution, all considered.

Regarding your PD8 crashes, I would attempt to install an alternate 1394/OHCI driver in Windows by deliberately removing / uninstalling the device driver, and then letting Windows once again discover the device and install a new driver. This is not merely disabling the device but rather removing / uninstalling the device which will force this to occur. Perhaps a newer driver version will help.

Also in the task manager, if you look at the running processes, and find the actual PD9 process called (I believe) PDR9.exe and you kill the process tree (right click).....you should be able to avoid all the restart crap entirely.

Good luck Lew,

Larry

Larry,

I wish these companies would support their products even half as well as the help you have been providing.

I don't know what software comes with Dazzle, and I frankly don't know if he was trimming during capture or afterwards like you are suggesting for PD9. Since the hardware and software for that solution are under $100 then that might be an alternative for content that doesn't need FW speed as I think it is a USB solution.

Just so you know, this is a VCR that has only been used maybe 5X ever and I opened it and cleaned the heads anyway and they were spotless. Likewise, the tapes I am playing are brand new out of the box. So there are no wear issues here, just how the VCR reads and displays the data.

I thought I had killed my VCR so I researched a replacement. Turns out my model number is in the range of the VCRs that are supposed to be the best, although my model wasn't listed, so maybe it is lower in quality than the others in that series.

I can remove and re-install the driver, but it does work with all the other programs and I should be able to check by the date or size of it that it is the latest, but thanks for the tip. You have a great troubleshooting mind While writing this note I checked the driver, and although it is old (6/21/06), using Windoze update util it said it was the latest. I did uninstall it, and will let it re-install on next boot.

Regarding Task Manager. I always try to kill the process vs. the application, but it wouldn't allow me to kill it either way, any of the times the program has crashed. It has been years since a program consistently hung my system like PD has. Other than Task Manager (application or process tab) is the only way I know of to kill a stubborn program. In case you might ask, I even tried Alt-F4

My suspicion is that PD is looking for a camcorder or similar device it can control and never finds one and never quits looking and doesn't know to time out or get on with it's life.

As an aside, before using the Canopus I tried with my camcorder, using it as the A/D device. That method produced the same problem on the bottom of the video stream which is why I tried the Canopus to determine if the tear at the bottom was being introduced in the conversion process.

Thanks very much for taking all your time to help!

Lew

Glad to try to help you Lew. I am a retired computer / electrical engineer with a lot of broadcast engineering experience so it is especially interesting to me to see how these video editing programs work. I own most of them, teach others, and am always updating to the new stuff to keep up to date.

Regarding the IEEE 1394 driver, Windows provides I/O to the application program (in this case Power Director) via a set of device calls to open, read, write, close, mount, unmount, format, etc. The driver may not be properly called (for example, a read attempt before it has been opened) and the offending program then hangs, beyond the ability of the Task Manager to terminate the offending process. The root cause is in the poorly written app, but the presence or absence of a newer and more mature driver which tolerates such errors may often "solve" the problem. For Firewire in particular, I was surprised to discover / learn that some software firewalls such as Zone Alarm and others also attempt to restrict 1394 traffic, defaulting to a mode where only some apps can use the Firewire ports and others cannot. I know it sounds bizarre. And indeed it is. I have "fixed" some compatibility issues with my older HDV camcorders which totally relied on Firewire to communicate with their capture app software by disabling the firewall temporarily, and, lo and behold, the app suddenly began to communicate properly with the camcorder Firewire port. I have no idea whether such an issue exists in your case since I do not use Power Director to ingest video (but instead bring all my HD video in via SD memory card files).

Regarding the noise impinging on the edge of the video frame, the majority of VCRs have some such flaws and rely on the monitor overscan of the earlier monitors to hide the defect. The fact that it shows up regardless of which capture device you are using is not evidence of a capture flaw so much as an artifact of the imperfect VCRs technology. I assure you that a 3/4" Betacam or 1" inch Ampex also has switching noise (since they all use a helican scan drum, switched heads, etc.) but you begin to see the flaws specifically if you look at all the active scan lines. Normally, in the analog era, you did not.

Once again, cropping will solve this problem.

If I were "stuck" as you are, lacking Cyberlink support / remedies, I would next look for a shareware or free capture utility, or use Microsoft's Movie software to ingest the video into an avi file. You can then use PD or other editing software to crop and otherwise adjust / cut / edit your content. I know this is a pain, a bad workaround, and a disappointment. You could try playing with your firewall, try starting up in Safe Mode with drivers enabled, or find an entirely different program.

No other thoughts come to mind. Good luck....

Larry

Hello again... I am a semi-retired network geek and am stronger on the computer side than on the video side.

I looked for a newer driver. It seems TI "owns" the driver and their site says the latest driver has been provided to MS and Apple for their products and they don't offer any more recent drivers. I did delete the driver and the old (2006) one came back. I also ran a program that checks driver status and it reported the driver as current.

When I was on the TI site, they referenced a 3rd party company that is apparently doing whatever is current relative to the standard. They said the 3rd party company, Unibrain has been entrusted with the code and has done their own thing, apparently where TI left off.

Unibrain has a free version of their driver which I installed. It replaced the TI version, however, when I enabled my FW device, it didn't "enable" it, i.e. I didn't get the normal Windows pop-up asking what program to launch. At that point I backed it out and went back to the default driver that Windows once again put back.

As far as the edge "noise", if I look carefully at the bottom of the TV (not a monitor), I can see a part of it, so the "noise" goes beyond the TV Safe area in infringes on the viewable part of the image. Seems if this is an ever present issue, they should have the content stop "above" it such that the content is not impacted by the noise they expect or know will be there.

As far as a firewall issue, if it works "properly" in Adobe and in Windoze Movie Maker, then I am hesitant to suspect the firewall. The firewall shouldn't hamper one program more so than the other as I assume they only make a certain set of calls regarding the port. Perhaps PD is trying to do something the others aren't.

As an aside, do you think all the programs capture the data with equal quality? That the capture portion of the process doesn't benefit in one program over another?

If that is the case, and saving in WMM would be the same as the other programs, then I could use it to capture, and then edit as needed. You still like PD for that step, so I will take your recommendation and try it.

BTW, one of my best friends is heavy in video...done work for the networks, Fortune 100, etc., but he is a Mac guy and doesn't know a bit from a byte and relishes in that fact

Thanks again kind sir!