PowerDirector Preview Playback Issues

Pascalli

Newbie Joined: Jul 30, 2015 05:31 Messages: 2 Offline

Solved by

Jul 30, 2015 05:40

Hello,

I am putting together a video compilation that consists of about 50 or so movie clips, each trimmed down to about 10-20 seconds of video and then sped up to 8x speed. I have one music track that plays throughout it. (It is a timelapse of our son over the past two years)

Recently, the file has started causing me issues when trying to view the preview. When I play the preview, the video will slow down and get choppy for a second, and then skip ahead (by 20-50% of the video length) and freeze. The music continues to play, and when it catches up with where the video is frozen, the video resumes and continues until it happens again.

This only happens on this file. If I publish the video, the published version does not have this issue. I have a copy of the same file from 1 year ago, before I added another year's worth of clips, and that one still works fine. Other video projects don't seem to have any issues. This makes me think it is something about this file specifically.

From other forum posts I have read, I suspected hardware issues, but the problem occurs on my computer and my wife's laptop, and when I look at resource usage there is plenty of spare memory and cpu capacity. Additionally, playing the preview on all of the lowest settings with hardware acceleration off doesn't seem to help at all. I have switched just about every video setting on and off to see if they were causing the issue. At this point, I don't believe it is a hardware capacity issue.

I have tried the following:

Re-importing the video clips.

Starting a new project and copying and pasting the timeline into it (issue occurred in new video as well)

Deleting sections of the timeline to try to see if any particular clip, transition, etc, is causing the issue (no effect)

I really don't want to re-do all of the work I have done on this project - I did a lot of trimming and editing on it before the preview stopped working.

Does anybody have any idea what might be causing this and how to fix it?!? Thanks!

Randall

Newbie Joined: Feb 18, 2015 18:14 Messages: 1 Offline

Jul 30, 2015 09:35

I have the same problem. I redid my project but now can not produce. Contacted Customer Support but yesterday 07-29-15 but have not received a response yet.

dvlourie1955!

Newbie Location: Peru, IL Joined: Jun 20, 2015 18:13 Messages: 3 Offline

Jul 30, 2015 09:52

Are you using Multi-Cam feature? If so, I found that if I reduce resolution in playback/preview window, things are fine...trying to use High HD Preview will drag most machines down to its knees... I have Quad Core processor 32RAM etc...great program but limted on even high end units....

Pascalli

Newbie Joined: Jul 30, 2015 05:31 Messages: 2 Offline

Jul 30, 2015 10:01

Nope - not using the Multi Cam. Even switching down to the lowest setting for the preview results in the same problem at the same magnitude.

Randall - if you come across a solution, do please let me know here.

CV27

Member Joined: Feb 13, 2011 13:51 Messages: 77 Offline

Jul 30, 2015 23:26

Quote: ... and then sped up to 8x speed. I have one music track that plays throughout it. (It is a timelapse of our son over the past two years)

Recently, the file has started causing me issues when trying to view the preview. When I play the preview, the video will slow down and get choppy for a second, and then skip ahead (by 20-50% of the video length) and freeze. The music continues to play, and when it catches up with where the video is frozen, the video resumes and continues until it happens again ...

Chiming in...

I have a ticket in with CL on an issue pretty similar to yours, speeding up clips (3x and 6x), then choppy, then forward while the audio keeps in sync. CL has acknowledged they were able to reproduce but said they would try to improve performance. Here's my reply:

I did some additional tests. Setting Shadow files Off and Full HD preview would be, I believe, the most performance demanding scenario. None the less, running under those conditions shows that:

1- CPU usage increase is about 3-5% on my system (from a PD13 idle state)

2- Memory usage increase is negligible, with about 10 GB still free

3- A peak of 5MB/s disk transfer, mainly read's (on a Samsung 840 EVO 1GB SSD)

There maybe other resource constraints internal to PD13, but the 3 resources mentioned above are usually the critical ones. It is difficult to envisage a PD13 performance issue in this case; I would tend to focus on a code logic issue.

SInce then, I've been using other enhancements, for example stabilizing, and I found PD13 to react strangely in edit preview mode, similar to the speed up issue.

I have a fairly well built system, so something is definitely weird. In the mean time, I've found that using 'Normal' Preview quality gets me out of trouble so far (don't use shadow files). I7-4770, 3.40Ghz, 16GB RAM, Asus Z87-Plus Z87chipset, Sapphire ATI Radeon HD7850 PCI Express-16 3.0 2GB, Samsung EVO 840 SSD 1TB