Power Director improvement survey is online!

[Peter Pacai]

Cyberlink is running a improvement survey on Power Director!

Power Director is a good editing package. The biggest problem of Power Director is that it does not do AVCHD smart rendering. So it takes ages to render an AVCHD project even if you did only trimming and joining clips! With AVCHD smart rendering only the necessary parts are recoded so the editing process is much faster!

In the survey you can ask for missing feature I recommend that as many of us as possible asks for AVCHD smart rendering!

Follow the link below, and fill out the survey it takes only 1 minute!

http://cyberlink.wufoo.com/forms/powerdirector-improvement-survey/

[Larry Horwitz]

Peter,

As of version 2.2.2.7.c, AVCHD Smart Rendering SVRT has been implemented in Power Director 7 and speeds up the rendering time on my machine by roughly 9X.

The bad news is that it has a major bug which causes it to NOT smart render after the first transition or effect.

If you only place clips on the timeline and use PD7 to splice them together, the smart render will work correctly for the entire "movie".

Hopefully they will fix this bug soon!

Larry

[Peter Pacai]

Larry,

I downloaded the latest version of PD. Could you give me some instructions how to test smart rendering (it is not straitghtforward). I hav a Canon HF10 camcorder.

Thanks,
Peter

[Larry Horwitz]

Peter,

I assume you now have 2.2.2.7.c.

Place multiple clips on the timeline from your camcorder.

Use the menu option VIEW--->SVRT Information to show the details of smart rendering.

Use the attached JPEG to see what your screen will show after the settings are correct.

Make sure to select the correct Production Format (MPEG4 AVC) and Format (AVCHD 1920 X 1080).

Push the button labelled Update SVRT Info.

You will see a green bar showing up above all clips which will be smart rendered. If you modified any of the clips by adding, for example, a filter or effect, the bar above it will turn to one of the three other colors shown in the Legend above -- telling you that this particular clip will NOT be smart rendered.

Hope this helps.

Larry

[Larry Horwitz]

Also Peter, see 2nd attachment below which has both smart rendered as well as not smart rendered clips on the timeline.

Larry

[Peter Pacai]

Larry,

really thank you very much providing help in this matter!

I guess my problem is that the version I have doesn not allow to select under "Production format" "MPEG-4 AVC" any other resolution than "AVCHD 720x480".

I don't know if it is because I am having the trial version only or / and I do not have the exact version as you have.

I can help the trial version issue by buying the product :).

My version is 7.00.2305 which I downloaded 4 days ago I assume this is the latest. Which version number is higher what you state so in theory it should have the smart rendering functionality. If this version doesn't have the function, it is very strange. Then how to get that exact version you tested?

Thanks again and best regards,
Peter

[Larry Horwitz]

Peter.

Smart rendering for AVCHD was added in October or November, and was released as a patch called version 2.2.2.7.c.

I cannot explain which trial or retail NTSC / PAL version features you have but suggest you contact Cyberlink and ask them before purchase.

The NTSC retail version definitely has smart rendering, but no other version, trial / PAL may offer it.

You could try appliying the patch to your version to see if it works. The patch is at:

http://www.cyberlink.com/multi/downl...s_4_en_AU.html

If this does not work, Cyberlink's user forum is another good place to inquire.

Larry

[Juan Castle]

Originally Posted by Peter Pacai

I guess my problem is that the version I have doesn not allow to select under "Production format" "MPEG-4 AVC" any other resolution than "AVCHD 720x480"

Peter, you may need to change the Aspect Ratio in the Edit menu to 16:9 in order for the 1920x1080 option to show up.

[Peter Pacai]

Thanks for the advise.

I have found it out eventually! And now it seems to work! Rendering time went down from 8 minutes to 58 second for a 1 minute 50 second clip which is roughly the same what I get on Corel Video Studio smart rendering.

One other thing I had to fix: I save clips from the camcorder with mpg extension so I can have proper windows thumbnails. It seems that I have to leave them as mts otherwise svrt does not work.

I will check tomorrow everything again.

Rgds,
Peter

[Bruce Foreman]

Originally Posted by Larry Horwitz

Peter.


You could try appliying the patch to your version to see if it works. The patch is at:

Video Editing Software, Blu-ray DVD & Hi-Def Movie Video Authoring - CyberLink PowerDirector

If this does not work, Cyberlink's user forum is another good place to inquire.

Larry

The update patches will not work on the trial version. And if a purchased version is installed, the trial version must be uninstalled first and something like Wise Registry Cleaner run to remove "leftovers" from the trial version in the registry.

And build 2416 will be released soon.

[Larry Horwitz]

Thanks Bruce for the news regarding another update forthcoming. I am looking forward to it, hoping they will finally fix these remaining bugs. You never know with Cyberlink though...... the prior version Power Director 6 Pro was just filled with bugs and they never really fixed it. Instead they discontinued it and brought out a new release. Sorta like Microsoft with Vista......


In any event, I am delighted that Juan Castle offered the excellent suggestion to try changing aspect ratios to 16:9, something I had not thought of. I assumed that the trial version or Pal versus NTSC was the issue.

My experience with PD7 smart render has been about the same speed up of 8 to 9X, which is very much the same extremely fast performance as Nero or Corel with AVCHD. It is now a mostly working program, and they hopefully will get the smart render and menu designer fixed once and for all.

I assume the impending new build you refer to Bruce was indicated on Cyberlink's web site? I need to check that out.

Larry

[Mike Lewis]

Just received my copy of Power Director, installed it and ran the patch.
Added some 1440 H264 clips from my Panny SD1. I've just checked the SVRT stuff Larry talks about above. In fact, the updated SVRT line shows that my audio is going to be rendered even though the video isn't (it's yellow) I don't understand this since the Panny outputs 5.1AC3 which should surely go straight through?
Edit: looks to me as though PD Ultra, like Pinnacle, down mixes input 5.1 from the camera files into stereo! Certainly, on the sound track on the timeline, only 2 channels are visible.

EDIT: Please see my latest post on this. I am wrong here, PD does pass 5.1 through OK, even though it doesn't show up as 5.1 on the sound track display.

[Larry Horwitz]

Mike,

You might try the following Mike:

Go to Create Disk Preferences and set the default Dolby mode to 5.1.

Unlike my Canon HF100 and most other AVCHD camcorders, your camcorder captures 5.1 audio, and the Power Director 7 software can be configured to use it if you change the default setting.

See the attached screen shot showing the screen and check box you need to use.

Hope this helps.

Larry

[Mike Lewis]

Originally Posted by Larry Horwitz

Mike,

You might try the following Mike:

Go to Create Disk Preferences and set the default Dolby mode to 5.1.

Unlike my Canon HF100 and most other AVCHD camcorders, your camcorder captures 5.1 audio, and the Power Director 7 software can be configured to use it if you change the default setting.

See the attached screen shot showing the screen and check box you need to use.

Hope this helps.

Larry

Yes, this is already set on. But the clue lies in the fact that the sound track displayed directly under the clips on the time line is shown with only 2 tracks. PD7 is, like Pinnacle, at present incapable of handling the 5.1 camera output from the increasing number of cams that support it. I really miss it now after a downmix. So it's back to Sony Vegas Platinum I think, despite its lack of smart rendering. VS11 also handles 5.1 properly, though it still has its own smart render issue on AVCHD clips...
But I did submit this facility in my response to the survey.

[Larry Horwitz]

Mike,

It does force the inevitable question:

Why provide a user selectable option to select 5.1 instead of 2.0 if the program literally ignores the choice? I want to investigate this a bit further.

Sorry it does not offer an immediate fix.

Larry