Thanks for including the DxDiag results.

There's a slightly newer driver for your GTX 1060, and I also see that you've also got the nVidia HD Audio driver running. Unless you know for certain that you need that, you can download the latest nVidia driver and use Custom settings, then uncheck everything except the video driver (and the PhysX driver if you're a gamer), then check the Clean Installation option and see if that helps.

Otherwise, make sure you're using the HD preview mode (not the higher UHD or FHD settings) for decent quality video images and the least delay. There is a new preview rendering engine in PD18 and I think it does take some time to queue up, and I think that the HD preview mode is the sweet spot for general editing. In other words, use the higher resolution modes only when needed.

Finally, you've got quite the assortment of program crashes at the end of the report: Adobe, Resolve, AD10, but I'm not clear on if they're related in any way.

The two thing that stands out are the MS audio recording diagnostic (which is why I want you to remove the nVidia audio driver), and all of the Beta.Fish.AdBlock crashes. I'd suggest removing that browser extension, or at the very least, try closing Edge when you're editing in PD.

YouTube/optodata

DS365 | Win11 Pro | Ryzen 9 3950X | RTX 4070 Ti | 32GB RAM | 10TB SSDs | 5K+4K HDR monitors

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Quote I used to be able to edit with PD17 pretty quickly. The software kept up with me chopping and changing clips etc and was great.

After updating to PD18, it's slowed me right down. Just a few things off the top of my head...

1) The sound doesn't stay in sync on the time line. It appears in sync but when people talk, it's not in sync until I pause and restart the video
2) The software has to think for a second or two as I drag videos into the timeline
3) Having a video, titles and a colour board on the same timeline slows things right down.

This is just a few off the top of my head but really, I don't know why I'm experiencing these problems? I've uploaded my DXdiag so if anyone can shed any light on the situation, that would be fantastic.

Hi,
I have information that the installation of the Nvidia “Studio” driver might address the issue. Could you try that and report back to see if the problem is solved?

https://www.nvidia.com/Download/driverResults.aspx/151050/en-us

Thanks,
PowerDirector Moderator

For customer support related issues, please contact:
- Customer service: https://membership.cyberlink.com/support/customer-services.do
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Quote


Hi,
I have information that the installation of the Nvidia “Studio” driver might address the issue. Could you try that and report back to see if the problem is solved?

https://www.nvidia.com/Download/driverResults.aspx/151050/en-us

Thanks,
PowerDirector Moderator

I'm not that guy, but I also have this problem and I tried installing Studio driver for my NVidia RTX 2080 Max-Q and it made things even worse. Rolled back to Game Driver.

Overall usage of GPU during render and playback is not more than 5%, I wonder why not leverage GPU more? I tried with OpenCL and without - same same.

EDIT: Actually it started using internal GPU on my laptop and ignored GPU1 completely. I went and set the Performance GPU as a default for PD which made it use this external GPU (RTX 2080 max-q) but it didn't improve the performance. Also, any attempt to accelerate render or ever use "Optimize hardware" option is still triggering InteL GPU and not NVidia.

Interestingly enough, NVIdia COntrol Panel doesn't allow me to select NVidia graphics card for Power Director, despite any combination of setting for graphics cards in Windows itself.

And this morning I'm back to square one.
The audio (as well as video) is laggy during the editing. Everything is incredibly slow (it wasn't that bad but then something has happened), there is no sound when I open project. But the renderer and the program in general has started using external GPU at last. No that it's particularly fast (it only utilizes from 5% o 11% of it), but still.

There is no new Studio driver for max-q (mobile) cards as of now. Am I supposed to hope that those will fix issues?

Quote


Hi,
I have information that the installation of the Nvidia “Studio” driver might address the issue. Could you try that and report back to see if the problem is solved?

https://www.nvidia.com/Download/driverResults.aspx/151050/en-us

Thanks,
PowerDirector Moderator

Thanks for your help everyone but nothing has worked. It's now got to point that I've opened a 2 minute project from PD17 and it's pretty much unusable in 18. It's slow, choppy and things like titles and text don't appear as they should (fades don't fade, instead they appear)

I've got the preview quality on the lowest setting and even that isn't helping.

This is really frustrating as I've only been a subscriber to 365 for a month or so.

Quote Thanks for your help everyone but nothing has worked. It's now got to point that I've opened a 2 minute project from PD17 and it's pretty much unusable in 18. It's slow, choppy and things like titles and text don't appear as they should (fades don't fade, instead they appear)

I've got the preview quality on the lowest setting and even that isn't helping.

That's very strange. I haven't seen anything like what you're describing, and it would be very helpful if you could do three things:

1. Turn off the Hardware Acceleration options one at a time and see if any of them make a difference


2. Make a screen recording showing exactly what your editing experience looks like. There may be clues in simply looking at your timeline and watching how PD responds to the kinds of edits you're making


3. If you're comfortable sharing the source clips, use File | Pack Project Materials and upload the contents to a cloud folder, then and paste the link to it here. That way, we can test your actual project and see if there's anything about the clips or your particular edits that make PD run slowly on different systems.

YouTube/optodata

DS365 | Win11 Pro | Ryzen 9 3950X | RTX 4070 Ti | 32GB RAM | 10TB SSDs | 5K+4K HDR monitors

Canon Vixia GX10 (4K 60p) | HF G30 (HD 60p) | Yi Action+ 4K | 360Fly 4K 360°

Quote

That's very strange. I haven't seen anything like what you're describing, and it would be very helpful if you could do three things:

1. Turn off the Hardware Acceleration options one at a time and see if any of them make a difference


2. Make a screen recording showing exactly what your editing experience looks like. There may be clues in simply looking at your timeline and watching how PD responds to the kinds of edits you're making


3. If you're comfortable sharing the source clips, use File | Pack Project Materials and upload the contents to a cloud folder, then and paste the link to it here. That way, we can test your actual project and see if there's anything about the clips or your particular edits that make PD run slowly on different systems.

I've just tried turning off the hardware acceleration options (There are only two, is that right?) and it hasn't made a difference.

Here's a screen recording to show exactly what's happening. Hopefully it will show what's going on.

https://youtu.be/82LRHurb-ig

I'm happy to share the source files too. I'll do that this evening as it may take a while to upload.

Once again, I appreciate the help here! I've stuck with PowerDirector for many a good year and I was hoping that could continue.

Thanks for the screen capture. I see what you're talking about and I've sometimes seen the slight audio lag even with PD17, but the part at the end would drive me crazy. If you won't be making many changes to that part, you might consider using Produce Range to convert all those tracks (or the subset that best goes together) into a single produced video clip. That will solve the issue entirely.

You can also try using Render Preview for that section, but in my experience (and in older PD versions), that takes much longer and it also has to be redone if you make any changes.

YouTube/optodata

DS365 | Win11 Pro | Ryzen 9 3950X | RTX 4070 Ti | 32GB RAM | 10TB SSDs | 5K+4K HDR monitors

Canon Vixia GX10 (4K 60p) | HF G30 (HD 60p) | Yi Action+ 4K | 360Fly 4K 360°

I'm still having issues with this... It's very frustrating and I'm not sure what I'm going to do as I've got a wedding video to edit in October.

I've just tried playing the clip again, at the lowest resolution with the task manager open. It looks like PD18 is using 100% of my CPU. That can't be right, can it?

Quote It looks like PD18 is using 100% of my CPU. That can't be right, can it?

It absolutely can, and likely is, given what your screen recording showed. That's why I suggested using Produce Range to get rid of all that real-time processing and get a single, basic clip with all the edits contained in it.

If you're able to pack and share the project, that will help identify what specific the processing bottleneck is.

YouTube/optodata

DS365 | Win11 Pro | Ryzen 9 3950X | RTX 4070 Ti | 32GB RAM | 10TB SSDs | 5K+4K HDR monitors

Canon Vixia GX10 (4K 60p) | HF G30 (HD 60p) | Yi Action+ 4K | 360Fly 4K 360°

Quote

It absolutely can, and likely is, given what your screen recording showed. That's why I suggested using Produce Range to get rid of all that real-time processing and get a single, basic clip with all the edits contained in it.

If you're able to pack and share the project, that will help identify what specific the processing bottleneck is.

Here you go, see if this works.

https://1drv.ms/u/s!At7ZvnPIRpC7yN0RUQLIuv8CLUGZ2A?e=sz1FaJ

Once again, I do appreciate your help. I've raised a ticket with Cyberlink but so far, it's not proving very useful. I've just received a generic response but I've gone back to them with the original screen capture to see what they say.

Yes, I was able to download and test out the project. Like you I have a new, 8 core CPU, and PD has trouble keeping up with previewing, just like yours does. I also see the CPU utilization top out during transitions, and this happens whether I'm using the Intel UHD Graphics 630 built-in to my i9-9900K, or when I use my nVidia RTX 2070 (meaning GPUs aren't the issue).

I guess I've encountered previewing issues like this all the time, and I'm so used to seeing them that I pretty much use the following workarounds automatically. Basically, when there's too much going on in portions of your timeline for PD to keep up with it in real time, changing your workflow can make it more manageable.

In no particular order, here are the steps I use (and that each made a difference in previewing your project):

1. Close Edge. I know it sounds ridiculous, but you can easily test for yourself whether PD's preview improves when Edge isn't running. On my system, it was the difference between using mostly smooth HD and mostly smooth FHD previewing


2. Uncheck the enable box on the music track. For general editing, that made a slight, but noticeable improvement


3. Expect that PD will slow down across all transitions. This is especially true when there are multiple ones occurring at the same time on multiple tracks. To visually check these, set the preview mode to non-real time and watch them play smoothly in slow(er) motion


4. To get most of the video previewing in sync, be sure to stop whenever you hear the audio run ahead, then move the scrubber back to the start of the nearest Track 1 clip. I know it's not ideal, but it's very quick to do each time and it doesn't require any extra work


5. Take any sections where you're confident that the timing is likely correct, and then use Range Produce. Preview the new clip and then replace the existing timeline clips with the produced section. Make sure you have autosave enabled, and/or save the project with a new name after each new section is replaced so you won't ever lose the original clips if you need to make any future edits.

Here's a produced section of the final 34:07, and if you drop that in and remove/overwrite the existing content, PD will have no trouble previewing it.

YouTube/optodata

DS365 | Win11 Pro | Ryzen 9 3950X | RTX 4070 Ti | 32GB RAM | 10TB SSDs | 5K+4K HDR monitors

Canon Vixia GX10 (4K 60p) | HF G30 (HD 60p) | Yi Action+ 4K | 360Fly 4K 360°