Pinnacle Studio 9

[Chonga]

Loaded up my Pinnacle Studio 9 last night and downloaded the latest upgrades and patches.
All was working well during the early part of editing but I found that the more video I added the worse Studio performed (especially on playback). The most notable thing that happened on playback was that the Transistions do not operate properly and sometimes do not appear at all causing the video to jerk and skip to the next scene.
I did all my system checks (DMA on HDD, close all background progs, defrag HDD etc..) but it didn't improve. So I saved my project and switched off for the night hoping that maybe the heat inside my PC was causing my system to under perform. Switched on this morning. Same probs.
I bet, from reading other reviews, there is someone out there who has experienced the same problem. If so, did you get round this problem and how?
I'm not totally convienced that what I'm experiencing is totally down to the software but then I'm not a PC expert and wouldn't know for sure.
My main worry is that when I eventually go to burn my DVD that i will get exactly what I see on the playback.

Any advice would be appreciated.

[pemberto]

Chonga,
What spec machine are you running. Processor, Ram, HD Type/Size/free space? What other apps are you running? What type of graphics card do you have?

In Studio 9 what video format are you working in? If you drop the resolution of your work does it perform better?

Pemberto.

[Chonga]

Originally Posted by pemberto

Chonga,
What spec machine are you running. Processor, Ram, HD Type/Size/free space? What other apps are you running? What type of graphics card do you have?

In Studio 9 what video format are you working in? If you drop the resolution of your work does it perform better?

Pemberto.

Pemberto..... I'll do my best here......

Processor - Anthlon XP2500

RAM - 1Mb 184Pin PC2700 333MHz DDR DRAM

HD - DiamondMax Plus9 UDMA133 7200RPM: 160 GB (Divided 40/120 - 120 is my capture drive and has about 85GB free)

Apps - didn't think I had anything else running at the time. I do have Anti Virus & Internet Security that I disabled. Also got NeroVision2 (don't know if that would conflict with Pinnacle?)

Graphics Card - Nvidia GeForce4 MX4000 Chipset, 350MHz Memory Clock, 128 DDR RAM, 8Mb/s Memory Bandwidth.

Video Format - I captured analogue through an Analogue/Digital Converter so I'm guessing that it it now raw DV format (AVI?). About 20GB worth. Didn't try at a lower Res (I am on the highest possible res at the moment).

I've had a quick breeze through the Troubleshooting section in the manual this morning and there are a few tips there I will look into tonight.

Hope this is sufficient info for you.

[vonhosen]

Applying video effects & viewing them in real time whilst editing requires a lot of power. If you have lots of effects edits and transitions your computer may grind to a halt. This can become very frustrating I know when you are trying to preview how your master piece is going to look.

What will tend to happen is that when you playback your video from the timeline it will playback your video as captured and all will be fine. When it gets to sections where you have effects & transitions the computer has to work harder & the frames per second of playback start to slow. the harder it works the slower it will get.

More professional setups will use hardware to do a lot of the number crunching & take the load.

Other options that may be open to you are:-

Programs like Sony's Vegas have Dynamic RAM preview (basically you can render complex sections in RAM for preview to see if the effects you have inserted have th desired effect. This is quicker than actually rendering the section as another file for playback)

Make sure that your preview out is to a lower resolution (lower resolution for preview equals less number crunching & smoother playback , but lower quality preview)

Or

You could render (encode) a small portion (or the transition) out as a seperate file for smooth playback to see if it's OK.

[Chonga]

Originally Posted by vonhosen

Applying video effects & viewing them in real time whilst editing requires a lot of power. If you have lots of effects edits and transitions your computer may grind to a halt. This can become very frustrating I know when you are trying to preview how your master piece is going to look.

What will tend to happen is that when you playback your video from the timeline it will playback your video as captured and all will be fine. When it gets to sections where you have effects & transitions the computer has to work harder & the frames per second of playback start to slow. the harder it works the slower it will get.

More professional setups will use hardware to do a lot of the number crunching & take the load.

Other options that may be open to you are:-

Programs like Sony's Vegas have Dynamic RAM preview (basically you can render complex sections in RAM for preview to see if the effects you have inserted have th desired effect. This is quicker than actually rendering the section as another file for playback)

Make sure that your preview out is to a lower resolution (lower resolution for preview equals less number crunching & smoother playback , but lower quality preview)

Or

You could render (encode) a small portion (or the transition) out as a seperate file for smooth playback to see if it's OK.

Thanks for that info vonhosen. I think I've got the jist of it.

[Chonga]

I had a play with Studio over the weekend and I've isolated the problem that I was having. It wasn't the amount of video I was using but it was down to the Noise Reduction facility in the 'Cleaning Tools'. If i had Noise reduction active in a scene that had a transition before or after it then it would not work properly. Also, I found that when I rendered a movie that had noise reduction it would give out a loud blip noise at the start of ever scene and transistion. Sometimes the sound would disappear completely after a blip noise.
With noise reduction turned off the movie operated smoothly and properly.

Anyone else encountered this problem?