- Remember where project files were last saved. PD doesn't do this at the moment, and it's worse when it crashes (as it does with the sometimes very damaged video files I need to edit in PD), I basically have to start over again unless I save just before a crash (maybe that would be a usability enhancement - on crash, save first )

open PD
Directors chair> Edit > Preferences
or
Alt+C on your keyboard

I'll look at the rest in a while but I think you need to check out the full capabilities of PD7.

Dafydd

G'day Dafydd, thanks for looking in on this...

I agree, I'm still learning, but I've been through much of the help which is great for general explanations but not always for the specific little details I was after, hence this thread.

The preferences page only permits import and export folder defaults (which is great!), not the PD project file defaults. They're never recalled, unless I enable "Load last project at start" - this helps a bit, as long as I don't accidentally save the project in the default export folder (been there, done that).

I noticed that PD also always starts in full screen mode, it doesn't save it's state at any time. Even shift-clicking on the close icon (windows shortcut) doesn't force the app to remember the state. THis isn't a huge deal, except that the GUI stays on top of everything when it's given focus, and I can't access my start menu on that display, etc, etc. The workaround is to hit the windows key (or as in my case, use Winstep Extreme's Nexus docks, but then that interferes with the PD GUI and vice versa). Or else I can wait until PD starts, then remember to click the maximise window toggle. PD does seem to remember the non-maximised state's size and position, so that's good.

I finally produced my first start-to-finish rescue DVD yesterday. PD crashed 61 times (that's after I started counting) during the 11-hour session, during edit, adding chapters, production, etc. (31 crashes during chapter editing (especially clicking just the "Add chapter" button), 13 crashes during template editing, 16 crashes during the production stage (it kept hanging at 2% and refusing to cancel when motion menus were enabled until I figured out how to disable them), plus assorted other hangs and crashes. None required rebooting, which is good.

While I created my first template from scratch, just opening the Create Disk tab could result in PD crashing while it initialised. So that wasn't a great day's work, but PD got the job done eventually. I'm sure that at least some of this is due to the shocking footage I was using (this was a data recovery from a drowned HD DVD camera so some of the clips had all sorts of problems in them).

I'm also interested in the way templates are edited. I couldn't seem to open an existing template (using the modify button) and just save it with changes, the editor kept forcing me to assign a name to the modified template. And the template library seems to allow multiple templates with the same title, which is confusing. I realise the template editor is a very different beast to the rest of PD, so this might still be just my misunderstanding the way that the template editing works.

My expectation is that I click a template in the library, click "Modify", modify it, and it saves the template back (or allows me to "Save as...").

It would be useful if the editor didn't reset all the menu text in the project DVD that's using that template. Whenever I changed a tiny template setting, PD reset all the text and all the menus and everything else dynamic was reset - I found it was such a frustrating experience! It took me 7 hours to create a single template with chapter menus. That includes the 13 crashes during template editing alone. Unfortunately, PD takes around 4 1/2 hours to produce a single 4.7G PAL DVD, so mistakes are costly and time-consuming, finding a problem during a burn results in an unusable DVD drive and PD crashed or hung when that happened. So I manually just kill the PD and PDHanuman service and kicked it off again after manually removing the unburnt DVD, etc. A fiddle, but still doable.

I also found that even if I select no sound for the various menus, after editing the template, sound is turned on in all menus by default, and I have to manually check each menu to ensure that sound is off before I master. Those settings aren't in the template (or at least, I couldn't find where the audio settings were in the template editor, and although I created the template from scratch I didn't enable sound on any of the menus).

A zoom function in the template editor would be SO useful too - on a dual display 1600x1200x2 layout, the editor screen is really tough to see accurately.

Little things like that are probably easy to fix in the next version, as long as I remember what happens, I can manually fix those problems when they occur.

The good news is that the final production looks really good, and since I can't edit HD footage any other way, PD definitely helped tremendously.

Despite the problems, I managed to create a multi-chapter multi-button layout template from scratch, and that says a lot for the ease of use of the tools! I even figured out how to multi-select various elements in such a way as to align them with my preferred object, which worked great once I discovered the order of selection and so on.

I'd definitely like to see an option for a standard windows GUI. The black is very pretty to look at, but it's really hard on my 45-year-old eyes, and the resource usage and performance really suffer - clicking some items took upwards of 10 seconds to select (this is a quad-core 2.6G system with gigs of physical ram free and massive disks and ultra-high-speed disk access and dedicated high-speed swap and user temp drives and nothing else running). That could be the video card, but I'd still prefer an option for a standard GUI with controls I can use more easily. I'm not keen on round shiny glitzy interfaces, they're only really relevant to me when they enhance the way the application is used, not when they're just layered on top of standard components. That's probably never going to happen, but I wanted to at least say it out loud once. In the nicest possible way, of course!