I know it's not the answer you're looking for but the best solution would be to work on your project in smaller pieces. Like 30 minute segments. And then combine the finished pieces later.

That's how pros do it, including the people in Hollywood. They would never risk assembling an entire feature film, including effects and transitions, on a single timeline.

PowerDirector can embed projects, so it's designed to just that. If you work on your project in 30 minute or less segments, you can then build a master timeline in which you use the project files for each segment as media for your final mix-down.

Otherwise, every time you open your project not only will you be having to wait two hours for it to open and load all of your effects, trims, transitions and adjustments, you take a serious risk that the whole thing will corrupt and you'll lose everything.

Again, this may not be the answer you're looking for, but it is a word to the wise. And (assuming you still have 100 gig or so free space on that SSD so the program so the program has room to spread out virtual memory) it will make everything work faster and more smoothly.

What is at 80% in your timeline? HP Envy Phoenix/4thGen i7-4770(4@3.4GHz~turbo>3.9)
Nvidia GTX 960(4GB)/16GB DDR3/
Canon Vixia HV30/HF-M40/HF-M41/HF-G20/Olympus E-PL5.
Tape capture using 6 VCR, TBC-1000, Elite BVP4+, Sony D8 camcorder with TBC.
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Hi,

There appears to be common thread that using shadow files with large projects seems to affect the project loading time.

https://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/posts/list/78279.page
https://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/posts/list/78740.page#323245

It may be useful to see if disabling shadow files makes a difference to the loading times.

Cheers
PowerDirector Moderator

Thanks, that really solved the problem for me. But what if I just permanently disable shadow files? I don't know why shadow files are needed anyway tbh!

Quote I had trouble opening a large project because it stayed at 80% update timeline data for two hours (!) before I could edit.

The problem can be simply solved by disabling the shadow file option when you start Powerdirector in the General Preferences..
After you have load your project, just enable shadow files again.

Quote Thanks, that really solved the problem for me. But what if I just permanently disable shadow files? I don't know why shadow files are needed anyway tbh!

I have shadow files disabled permanently. I don't need them and they're more trouble than they're worth.

Thank you Ron_6308 soo much for that solution it worked! Here are the exact steps Open Power Director and Navigate to the top menu, Select Edit->Preferences->General->make sure the checkbox next to "Enable shadow files (proxy files) on high res videos..." is unchecked. This solved my problem instantly!...And thanks to other great advice on the forum, I had to give you a star for solution found, my project was stuck on 80% and when I followed these steps my project loaded instantly, thanks you're a life saver.