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AVCHD Format Discussion
Inexpensive High Definition H.264 encoding to DVD, Hard Disc or SD Card.

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Old January 4th, 2009, 06:49 AM   #16
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Originally Posted by Larry Horwitz View Post
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
Ah Yes... That would be because I'm wrong...! Just tried this again to a .m2ts file, rather than a disk and it has retained the 5.1 track. My apologies... Maybe I clicked the 5.1 tick box later than I produced the DVD I tested...
Old age is a terrible thing you know. I'll keep PD on my list and explore it further ! Thanks for your input.
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Old January 4th, 2009, 07:06 AM   #17
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EXCELLENT NEWS Mike!

Very glad to hear that the fix was a simple matter and that 5.1 now is working.

Larry

BTW, as a retired, not very young, person, I truly understand your comment about old age.... (-:
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Old January 4th, 2009, 07:40 AM   #18
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I assume that the SVRT display says that it is not smart rendering the audio because the audio bit rate is probably not the same as PD outputs by default. I'll investigate how you change this, once I've checked what the input clips are.
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Old January 4th, 2009, 07:53 AM   #19
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Mike,

It's my impression that PD7 does not permit a change to the default 5.1 audio rate. If your SVRT theory is correct (and I imagine it is) then you may have no choice other than to allow the program to re-render the 5.1 audio from the camcorder rate to the PD7 5.1 rate.

Larry
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Old January 4th, 2009, 02:34 PM   #20
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Just playing with PD further. I note that if smart render is off, or if it is on and I include transitions, then I get some tearing on rapid horizontal movement which is not visible on the original clips. When smart render is working, with no transitions, then there is no tearing.
I agree the smart render bug is one that needs fixing!
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Old January 4th, 2009, 03:59 PM   #21
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I assume the impending new build you refer to Bruce was indicated on Cyberlink's web site? I need to check that out.

Larry
No, it's not. I helped out by doing a couple of the tutorial's now found on the Cyberlink Channel on youtube, and apparently I'm on the list of folks someone sends out links to the impending release in advance.

I think they look for a few of us to be "guinea pigs" and see if we start screaming and hollering when we run it.

I installed it last night and finished the 2nd rough edit of a 24 minute project. So far it seems OK but I didn't try any rendering yet.

I don't use smart rendering because I render to SD DVD for distribution and then to HD WMV for personal viewing in HD on my 42" TV using the new WD TV ,media player and thumb drive. I have no need to render to AVCHD.
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Old January 4th, 2009, 04:23 PM   #22
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Very interesting Bruce, and answers my question as to why I could not find a single reference to this new build in any scouring of the Internet I did after you mentioned it.

I have had exchanges with Dafydd Brevan who administers the PD7 forum and thought of contacting him but then decided I would be better served by waiting until it was announced in some official way.

The menu designer in the current 2.2.2.7.c. build is very much in need of repair, and causes many unexpected results and wasted time. I hope they have spent some serious effort and fixed it properly.

The smart render is so close to working properly that it would be a true shame if they left it unfinished.

It's mostly a very nice program with a reasonable price tag and a generally intuitive interface, with outstanding speed and AVCHD disk quality. It gives Corel/Ulead some very serious competion, as it also does for Nero, Arcsoft, and, arguably the lower end Sony and Adobe products as well. I really hope they get it fixed right in this impending revision, not for my own sake personally since I have all of the other AVCHD NLEs to play with here, but for the sake of most first time users who want a dependable, low cost, and fast and reliable product for AVCHD.

Thanks once again for updating me, Bruce.

Larry
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Old January 4th, 2009, 04:28 PM   #23
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Just playing with PD further. I note that if smart render is off, or if it is on and I include transitions, then I get some tearing on rapid horizontal movement which is not visible on the original clips. When smart render is working, with no transitions, then there is no tearing.
I agree the smart render bug is one that needs fixing!

Hopefully it will be in this next build of PD7. I sincerely hope that Cyberlink has the good sense not to do what they did on the prior version 6 deluxe....... fix most (but not all of) the bugs and release it as a new version for $69 to registered users. If they did, I would personally boycott them henceforth...
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Old January 8th, 2009, 11:17 PM   #24
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Very interesting Bruce, and answers my question as to why I could not find a single reference to this new build in any scouring of the Internet I did after you mentioned it.

I have had exchanges with Dafydd Brevan who administers the PD7 forum and thought of contacting him but then decided I would be better served by waiting until it was announced in some official way.
Your best off waiting. I finished a rough "progress report" copy of a 25 min project and tried to burn a disk for the organization to review, but no luck.

So I uninstalled PD7, ran a registry cleaner, and re-installed 2227c. It burned. I'm sending the project files to Cyberlink (at their request) and they will try to work the problems out. I think that's why a few of us get advance access. It gets broke for us and we don't scream and cry "foul" and Cyberlink gets a chance to make it work right.

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Originally Posted by Larry Horwitz View Post
The menu designer in the current 2.2.2.7.c. build is very much in need of repair, and causes many unexpected results and wasted time. I hope they have spent some serious effort and fixed it properly.
The menu setup for PD drives me nuts. It's not very intuitive yet if you search for Robert's explanation (if you can't find it I'll see if I can link it for you) you get an understanding that helped me immediately. All the work you do in the designer only goes into a template, then you have to edit the template in Author/Preview mode. That's where you get the menu saying what you want and working. Also, as I see it, you almost have to make "chapter" designations in edit mode for the "chapter pages" function to work. Compared to some others, PD menu application seems "different".

Quote:
Originally Posted by Larry Horwitz View Post
The smart render is so close to working properly that it would be a true shame if they left it unfinished.

It's mostly a very nice program with a reasonable price tag and a generally intuitive interface, with outstanding speed and AVCHD disk quality. It gives Corel/Ulead some very serious competion, as it also does for Nero, Arcsoft, and, arguably the lower end Sony and Adobe products as well. I really hope they get it fixed right in this impending revision, not for my own sake personally since I have all of the other AVCHD NLEs to play with here, but for the sake of most first time users who want a dependable, low cost, and fast and reliable product for AVCHD.

Thanks once again for updating me, Bruce.

Larry
You're welcome. They will eventually get it right. I was stationed on Taiwan twice and have a lot of respect for the Chinese/Taiwanese work ethic. They take a lot of pride in what they do and will keep after it. Like a lot of NLE's that are never fully finished, you'll see update after update, and some of the updates will bring back an old issue that was fixed. My strategy is to stay in touch and download each new "patch", but I keep most of the older ones so I can go back to one like I just had to.

Some day they have all the bugs stomped.

For right now I'm redoing the edit on the old Texas fort project in Pinnacle Studio 12 Plus. On my slightly underspec quad core this is slow going with stuttery playback on the timeline, but renders turn out fine. I tried Vasst's AVCHD Upshift but the m2t files it makes won't work in Studio so I have to work with native 1920x1080 .mts files. That's why I keep PowerDirector on the machine. It is quite a bit less demanding of the computer.

Hope this helps you a bit, your contributions here are a GREAT help to me!

Bruce
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Old January 9th, 2009, 05:30 AM   #25
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Thanks very much Bruce, and I would like to return the compliment and thank you very much for your Power Director comments, which really clarified the update status.

The menu editing explanations I have found on their support forum along with my own experimentation led me to a working solution, but the counter-intuititve mish-mosh really leaves me very unimpressed.

In most cases, I raise this type of concern not because I personally want to make menus with this software but instead since others ask me for advice and I want to offer a fair and balanced opinion when comparing to all the other choices out there. Particularly now that Sony has finally updated DVD Architect to fully support AVCHD disk menus, I am personally using it essentially to the exclusion of all the other 6 programs out there which also do AVCHD menus for the PC. But most people buy a piece of software and then want to use it as the entire end-to-end solution, and regrettably in the AVCHD world virtually no piece of software on the market is really completely finished (IMHO).

Cyberlink gets particular notice from me becuase it is fundementally a very nice program at a relatively low cost, and does many things very well. I continue to find it outrrageous though that it gets the "Editors Choice" as best PC NLE software from PC Magazine when it can neither burn disks nor do basic menus properly, to say nothing of the render bug which causes smart render to fail........... Thankfully I was able to get Dafydd Brevan and then a software developer at Cyberlink to send me replacement .dll's which eventually fixed my burner issue, but the menu and render matters are still ugly.

Sounds like the newest update still does not fix the menu approach. I understand the workaround, but most first-time users would be extremely confused. I just hope this menu topic is not a basis for releasing Power Director 8 Ultimate........

Last edited by Larry Horwitz; January 9th, 2009 at 06:47 AM.
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Old January 9th, 2009, 11:19 AM   #26
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Originally Posted by Mike Lewis View Post
Just playing with PD further. I note that if smart render is off, or if it is on and I include transitions, then I get some tearing on rapid horizontal movement which is not visible on the original clips. When smart render is working, with no transitions, then there is no tearing.
I agree the smart render bug is one that needs fixing!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Larry Horwitz View Post
Hopefully it will be in this next build of PD7. I sincerely hope that Cyberlink has the good sense not to do what they did on the prior version 6 deluxe....... fix most (but not all of) the bugs and release it as a new version for $69 to registered users. If they did, I would personally boycott them henceforth...
I have bad news, Smart Video Rendering Technology (SVRT) still does NOT work properly with the latest PowerDirector patch 2429a (available for download NOW).
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Old January 9th, 2009, 02:56 PM   #27
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I have bad news, Smart Video Rendering Technology (SVRT) still does NOT work properly with the latest PowerDirector patch 2429a (available for download NOW).
Juan,

Sad but true. I updated and found litte difference in any area I normally use. I see in the release info that they worked on fixing picture in picture PIP features.......... What are these people thinking....??

Larry
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Old January 9th, 2009, 10:24 PM   #28
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Juan,

Sad but true. I updated and found litte difference in any area I normally use. I see in the release info that they worked on fixing picture in picture PIP features.......... What are these people thinking....??

Larry
You may be able to blame me for that one. In addition to my finding 2416 wouldn't burn for me, I notified Dafydd that the PiP track I was using to place video scenes on as "cutaway" views without altering the main track audio resulted in overly soft images.

The main video track was crisp and sharp but the same kind of video placed on the PiP track and enlarged to fill the frame was noticeably too soft. In Studio 12 Plus when I place a video clip on the second video track it temporarily covers the video on the first track but looks just as crisp as the main track.

So from what I understand the programmers on the R&D team were feverishly trying to find and fix both problems as well as some others. I for one NEED that capability, it works so much easier than splitting the video with the audio locked so you can insert a "cutaway" on the main track.

But one of BEST features of PD7 Ultra is that it edits 1920x1080 AVCHD without the "huffing and puffing" Pinnacle Studio does.
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Old January 11th, 2009, 12:11 AM   #29
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I still like and use PD7 despite the bugs, and truly hope it gets fixed. The PIP fix was worthwhile but Cyberlink really needs to fix smart render and refine menu designer.

Larry
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Old January 11th, 2009, 12:13 AM   #30
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SVRT bug

I made som further tests with the latest patch (2429a). Smart rendering still works fine except that the output has some glitches. Around the edit points there are small jumps during playback. I use Dvico Tvix 4100 and Playstation 3 for playback, I have the same problem on both.

I only do trimming and joining clips straight from the camera (HF10). I tested the same clips with the same edit points in Corel Video Studio X2 and the output has no problem at all.

I use Corel Video Studio X2 (and its previous versions) since I have HD cameras. I tested couple of other editing software, as soon as there was a new version released.

My conclusion is that at the moment the only working, bug free AVCHD smart rendering capable editing software is Corel Video Studio X2. The only problem with Corel Video Studio x2 is that it is very slow to playback and edit AVCHD so I have to use the built in smart proxy which takes time to process.
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