I've been working with PowerDirector 7 (v 7.00.2206) for three months now and although I love the software and ease of use, I continually struggle with the quality of the final output. Most people don't see anything wrong until I point it out to them, but I see it right away. My source is from a Canon HF100 HD camera. My single biggest complaint is the existence of motion interlacing (some call it motion artifacting or motion blur). I've seen all sorts of things blamed for this, but I can't get past it being something with PD.
Below I've posted two HD clips. In both clips watch the virtical pole of the easy-up (you can also see it in the kids running around). The original always has rock solid objects moving around (even if they are jumping around due to me moving the camera too quickly :-/ ) while the bad clip show obvious horizontal interlacing. I know the clip bounces around a lot. I used this just to highlight the difference between the original and bad clip. It occurs just as bad in clips with motion and the camera fixed on a tripod. Fast motion just accentuates the problem.
The No_Interlacing_sm clip is the original .MTS file imported into PD and trimmed down to minimize the clip size. I was very careful to ensure that SVRT was used so the clip looks just like the original.
The Bad_Interlacing_sm clip is a trimmed portion of a 30 minute project that had many multi-trimmed clips from the same source as above. Oddly, PD said it could use SVRT for some of the trimmed portions and not others (even from within the same source clip). After rending the entire project using a multitude of 1920x1080 profile settings, it became obviuos that the portions of the movie that were rendered using SVRT looked as crisp and clean as the original. But all of a sudding (due to trimming it appears) the movie would show all sorts of motion interlacing and then suddenly go away as SVRT started up again.
Another project I worked on using the same camera, but rending to DVD HQ showed the same issue (although not as obviuos due to the lower quality output).
I've tried modifying the TV Format setting to all three options. Choosing the wrong option for TV Format just seems to make things worse as it forces video rendering of all scenes.
It should be noted that this interlacing doesn't always occur It has proven to be very allusive to recreate from scratch from a single or few clips. However, it has been very consistent on large projects using many clips each with many small edits.
I also see the problem where voice and video get out of sync with each other, but I'll save that for another time after I've done some more searching on the forum.
Bad_Interlacing_sm.m2ts http://www.savefile.com/files/1852022
No_Interlacing_sm.m2ts http://www.savefile.com/files/1852068
System:
PowerDirector 7.00.2206
Core2 Quad Q9450 @ 2.66 GHz, 4 GB DDR2-800 RAM, ATI Radeon HD 3850 Graphics
Windows Vista 64 bit SP1
I appreciate anyone's wisdom on the subject.
Bill I. Intel Core 2 Quad, 4 GB DDR2 RAM, Vista 64 bit, ATI Radeon HD 3850, Canon HF100