Power director.

T

the doc

Well-known member
Does anyone round here use power director?

I know it isn't pro quality - but I specifically chose it over more expensive alternatives for its reputed stability. I have had massive issues using other editing progs with crashes / general instability.... but power director has been a joy to use.

Very intuitive, manipulates AVCHD without any need to process it before hand... good titles and keystone etc, very rarely crashes.

What I am now missing is the colour correction side of things. It has very limited toggles for brightness/contrast/hue and saturation... but no colour wheels or such like to make subtle / specific changes.

So - are there any ways round this? Any 3rd party software that will let me do my colour grading but still using power director as my editor? Everyione seems to talk about magic bullet - but it is not compatible (and crazily expensive!)
 
Using Version 8 with Windows 7 and for the 'stuff' I use for video editing, it beats all the others I've tried and used (both trial and purchased versions) for ease, reliability and most of all stability. I am running with a i7 860 at 3GHz so I can't say how an older system will react to Power Director but I see all cores being used when doinf a DivX render.

For my AVCHD GH1 captures, it's just a matter of drag and drop the files into PD8, no fiddling required.

I convert much to DivX (3Mbit lower resolution for TV captures and 6 mBit 720P for 720P movie 'timeshifting'). For most output fornats there are some adjustments and for DivX, full access to the DivX codec parameters.

I like it and the price is quite affordable, along with a 30 day downloadable trial.
 
Yeah Axthor I agree with most of your comments.

I take it you have the same problems with colour correction that i do though? Or have you found a workaround?
 
I haven't done any real edits requiring colour correction or other serious fiddling yet as so far the main function for PD8 since I bought it about one month ago is to clean up (i.e. remove commercials and trim) captured TV files.

If it's a problem Studio can't handle easily, I would possibly consider reinstalling my Studio 14 Ultimate to adjust single clips with filters. Use PD8 to export the problem section in a format with minimal or no loss that Studio can play nicely with, edit it there then export it back to PD8, again with a low or no loss format. I found Studio was ok with short sequences, just becoming unstable or useless with longer sequences.

Extra steps but they should allow for filtering not available to PD8 and i think the quality wouldn't suffer much. I'm just mentioning Studio because I have it. ;-)
 
Hmmm seems crazy to buy a whole other editing package JUST to do colour grading. Though I hear pinnacle now has magic bullet effects included as standard? That seems like a good deal.
 
I already had Studio 14, just found it too glitchy with locking up during edits or worse, dying during a rendering.

I already had an untried, limited version of PD7 that had arrived with a camera and tried it under similar edit conditions, an edit and rerender of a 720P component captured three hour 2010 Olympic opening ceremony. It handled the edit/render quite well. I read a PD8 review and on that info plus the PD7 result, I spent the upgrade cost to get PD8. So far, no regrets although more capabilities would be nice.

So far, I've been using two setups for my rendering; avi with the Divx Pro 6.9 codec set for 720P (1280x720), 3Mbit output or a lower quality 704x396, 1.5Mbit DivX setting.

Once I aquire a little more skill, I'll try some GH1 edits with higher quality rendered output.
 
Power Director doesn't seem to work well with GH1 720p footage - on the timeline, the video freezes at transitions while the audio carries on, particularly when you reopen a saved project. Anyone else see that?
 
Happens on two completely different systems here (one of which is a quad core, the other an i3, one is Windows 7, the other is XP Pro). It even happens with 720p created by Power Director itself (by rendering from another format). And others have confirmed the problem. Weird you don't get it. Try putting say four 720p clips on the timeline touching each other, save the project, reopen it, see if it plays properly now.
 
Tried a bit of Power Director tinkering for time lapse footage (or would the correct term be megabyteage?) today.

I saw somewhere here in one of the forums the settings for 2FPS MJPG. I tried them and it does work. Full audio and 2FPS capture so I did an experiment. I captured one hour of clouds video at 2FPS then gave the file to Power Director.

I decided for this test to try changing to a one minute time lapsed video. The "Power Tools" "Video Speed" set to a 10X multiplier got it down to six minutes length which I rendered out with a low loss codec then reimported and then used a X6 multiplier which gave me the wanted one minute clip.

Quality was reasonable but I wondered if I could work around the 10X multiplier limit. I figured if I could capture at 1FPS, a X8 multiplier might just give me a nice 30FPS conversion with a overall 60:1 speed compression in one step.

Well, it looks like setting the FPS to 1FPS is a good way to lock up the GH1 after pressing the record button. The screen still updates but no actual response to anything; pulling the battery required. 2FPS is ok.

Not a disaster but 1FPS would have been nice.

Now, a thought about another use for the GH13. Night time time lapse pointing up at the sky (hopefully clear). At 2FPS, there's a good possibility of decent star captures, expecially if we could lengthen the shutter speed to 1/4 or perhaps even 1/2 second. The minimum right now is fixed at 1/30 I think. A longer exposure might give some interesting results for night time time lapse and because we're in video mode, we are not introducing shutter wear and tear.
 
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