Missing audio waveforms

DavidXNewton

Newbie Joined: Feb 03, 2012 09:48 Messages: 6 Offline

Solved by

Dec 03, 2021 23:24

Hi, Cyberlink team!

I've been using Powerdirector for many years now, but there's a hangup that's been getting worse recently. I edit a lot of raw footage with occasional voiceovers, so it's important for me to be able to see where someone is speaking.

It seems that PD has become more and more reluctant to show waveforms in the timeline view - I've used some workarounds such as:

Removing the contents of the Cache\Waveforms folder

Using "Manually Delete" from the settings to remove temporary files

Using the "Regenerate Waveform" action in the right click context menu

All of the above in various combinations

There's no feedback on when a waveform is generating, which makes success difficult to gauge, but sometimes I can eventually make them appear. I thought I had got it pretty consistently recently by deleting the Waveforms folder contents then restarting Cyberdirector, but I'm having no such luck with this technique tonight. It's really a huge problem that might force me to seek other video editing options soon.

I'm running PD20.0 (with the 365 subscription) on Windows 10, and I usually work with MKV files with multiple audio channels (AAC).

Thanks!

optodata

Senior Contributor Location: California, USA Joined: Sep 16, 2011 16:04 Messages: 8630 Offline

Dec 04, 2021 01:11

This is a user forum, not CL tech support, although you may want to open a support ticket and share your packed project materials with them if none of the steps you've taken seem to be working.

This was a longstanding issue that was mostly resolved after this discussion in 2018, but it may be worth trying the 3 steps as described in my linked post to see if they might work now.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at Dec 04. 2021 15:48

DavidXNewton

Newbie Joined: Feb 03, 2012 09:48 Messages: 6 Offline

Dec 04, 2021 15:13

Aha - thank you for your response and sharing the experience! It's, er, definitely a surprise that this hasn't been addressed through so many versions of the software. I'll add the "empty library" idea to my list of techniques, but I'm as frustrated as you are that this issue is hanging around and greatly crippling a bit of software that I'd otherwise really prefer to stick with.

optodata

Senior Contributor Location: California, USA Joined: Sep 16, 2011 16:04 Messages: 8630 Offline

Dec 04, 2021 15:58

It seems like there might be more than one reason for this issue. If you read all the way through that discussion, you saw that it took a collaborative effort from several forum members to find a way to reliably create the issue and then get CL involved to finally find a solution.

There have been some reports of waveforms not showing up since then (including yours here), and the best thing to do is to report this to tech support.

If you're not familiar with how to pack a project, go to File | Pack Project Materials and save everything to a cloud folder on Google Drive or OneDrive and then create a shareable link to that folder and include that in your support request.

See this FAQ for more details, although you would only be sharing your project files with CL tech support and not with anyone else here on the forum.