Quote I would like to understand why using standard preview quality level results in an extremely poor play quality. My desktop computer is Asus MB, Intel X99 chipset, Intel Core i7-6800K @3.4GHz processor, 32Gb M2 SSD, separate HDD for video and scratch disk. Graphic card is an Nvidia G-Force gtx1060.
PowerDirector is set 25fps PAL and shadow files are not selected.

Imported movies are from Nikon D810 recorded at 1920x1080 25p. If I play any original Nikon MOV file in VLC they play perfectly. So why is the PD preview so bad?
Ian

Not sure what setting you refer to as "standard preview quality" but basically the options are:
Low > 160x90
Normal > 320x180
High > 640x360
HD > 1280x720
Full HD > 1920x1080

So, if you view your 1920x1080 framesize at a "Normal" preview resolution you are reducing the quality by 36X, hence the bad preview. You are basically display 1 pixel to represent 6 in both horizontal and vertical dimensions. If you preview in Full HD, more resources are required, but the preview quality should be good. If it's not, other issues exist.

Jeff

Quote

Not sure what setting you refer to as "standard preview quality" but basically the options are:
Low > 160x90
Normal > 320x180
High > 640x360
HD > 1280x720
Full HD > 1920x1080

So, if you view your 1920x1080 framesize at a "Normal" preview resolution you are reducing the quality by 36X, hence the bad preview. You are basically display 1 pixel to represent 6 in both horizontal and vertical dimensions. If you preview in Full HD, more resources are required, but the preview quality should be good. If it's not, other issues exist.

Jeff

Jeff,

I should have said that I already tried the higher quality levels. On getting significant playback slowdown I moved down to "normal" (okay so I said standard). I don't know what the other issues might be but am always ready to learn.
I work with Photoshop cc, Lightroom Classic and PTE AV Studio 10 and several audio processing programs. I know that video is an intensive operation but surely PD preview is not one of them?
Ian

Quote I should have said that I already tried the higher quality levels. On getting significant playback slowdown I moved down to "normal" (okay so I said standard). I don't know what the other issues might be but am always ready to learn.
I work with Photoshop cc, Lightroom Classic and PTE AV Studio 10 and several audio processing programs. I know that video is an intensive operation but surely PD preview is not one of them?
Ian

Preview can be very compute intensive, that's why the preview options exist. It depends very heavily on what your source footage is bitrate wise, say it's 100Mbps, much more intensive to decode for playback than a 10Mbps stream. Additionally, it's very hardware dependent. Another reason PD offers "Enable HD video processing", via shadow files as timeline playback is intensive and these lower resolution files are used for fluent timeline playback.

Jeff

Quote I know that video is an intensive operation but surely PD preview is not one of them?

No, it actually is. Depending on the resolution and encoding of the source clip, the specifics of your computer's hardware capabilities, and whatever timeline edits you've made, you can literally slow previewing to a crawl.

The more powerful your hardware and the fewer color changes, sharpening and other kinds of computationally-intensive edits you make, the more likely you'll be able to use the higher preview resolutions.

As Jeff mentioned, there are other strategies for getting PD to preview smoothly. Another method uses an intermediate codec like MagicYUV to greatly reduce the decoding load so that you can work at max resolution. The downside is that you have to convert the clips first, and you'll need a lot of storage space because the converted clips' file sizes can be 30x bigger.

Still there are plenty of options.

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