Question regarding Pinnacle Studio 14 Ultimate.

[Gerlinde]

I have some clips, that I captured with PE7 and did some minor edits on. I would like to import those into Studio 14 to use some of the nice effects it offers.

I have exported the clips from PE as MPEG (HD 1440x1080i 30) and they have the file extension .m2t. Pinnacle imports the files without a problem, but than the fun stops.

Everything is slowing down to a crawl and preview is very choppy. Does anyone know what the deal is with Pinnacle and these files?

Do I have to convert them to some other file type and if yes, what would that be?

Thanks in advance for any help

[RJ Johnston]

For me, playback of HDV in Pinnacle Studio 14 Ultimate with "Enable hardware acceleration" turned on has about the same performace as HDV in Premiere Elements 8 WITHOUT GPU acceleration.

You might get better performance if you tick the "Enable full-resolution preview" checkbox in Pinnacle. There's a bug. Ticking that option actually gives you half-resolution and clearing the option gives you full resolution. So with half-resolution you should get some performance improvement.

I don't know what else would be better than HDV 1440x1080 if that's the resolution you want, certainly not AVCHD 1440x1080. After you add your effects in Pinnacle Studio 14, then what are you planning on doing? What kind of disc are you going to burn?

[Gerlinde]

Thanks RJ, I'm going to test your observation tonight. I kind of suspect it might be something related only to the new version.

I have tried one of the clips in version 12 and had the impression it worked better there. But than I used only one short clip and no pictures like I did originally in vers.14. I have to test that some more.

Regarding your question what I'm planing on doing with the footage, I'm not going to burn it to disc. I usually export as hd WMV and play the video via HDMI to my LCD TV from the hard drive.

[RJ Johnston]

Here's something else to try.

It seems that remuxing a .m2t file as a .mpg file with Videoredo Plus improves performance.

(Just changing the file extension of the orignal file from .m2t to .mpg won't work.)

Have you tried out the "Check 3D Server" that gets installed when you install Pinnacle Studio? It can tell you if your video card meets their standards. From the Windows XP Start menu it's under Program Files > Pinnacle Studio 14 > Tools. My computer and graphics card cannot play high-definition in real time. Everything else passes.

[Gerlinde]

Hi Robert,

I ran the "Check 3D Server" utility and everything passed except for real time HD playback capabilities. I can play HD footage without a problem in PE7. I only have to render when I have applied a lot of effects to get smooth playback.

I'm pretty much convinced now that there is some kind of problem with Studio 14. I ran a quick test and imported a hd wmv clip into Studio 12. It plays very smooth and I can put a check mark into "Enable full-resolution preview" for even better video playback.

If I do the same in Studio 14 the clip does almost not move at all, un-checking "Enable full-resolution preview" improves playback somewhat, but it does not even come close to the playback in Studio 12.

I still have to try you other suggestion, to convert the .m2t clips to mpg. I will report back how that went.

Thank you Robert.

[RJ Johnston]

I can play back HDV .m2t in Studio 14 with occasional pauses and have to render edited parts. I could easily live with this for HDV editing, though. I tried a HD WMV in Studio 14 but it didn't play back nearly as well, and it took a long time to encode in Premiere Elements.

I'm on a Dell Dimension 3000, Pentium 4, 3 GHz HT, 2 GB RAM, with a nVIDIA GeForce 9400GT PCI 1GB DDR2. I also put in a new power supply unit to handle the additional amps. I can hardly wait to see my energy bill go down with this new green power supply.

[Gerlinde]

Robert, I tried the .m2t clips in Studio12 and they run without any flaws. In Studio 14, they start up kind of choppy and than get stuck, start up again and so on. It's very frustrating. I guess I have to contact customer service and see if they can offer any help.

I use Movie Maker to encode to hd wmv. I find it works a lot faster, but you have to also add the time it takes to export from PE to .m2t which doesn't really take long at all. Have you ever tried this work flow?

My notebook is also very energy efficient, but I noticed after switching to Windows 7 (64-bit), my battery life increased quite a bit. What flavor of Windows are you using? I did a clean install of Windows 7 and got rid of all the pre-installed stuff ( not necessarily on purpose ) and I'm really happy with my notebook's performance.

[RJ Johnston]

I'm still on Window XP Pro SP3.

I haven't used WMM in a long time.

There's definitely something wrong in Studio 14. I have a test video where the interlaced upper fields are all green and the lower fields are all red. When I clear the checkmark next to "Enable Full-Resolution Playback" where I think I'm NOT getting full-resolution, I actually see full-resolution with the green and red lines lines interlaced during playback. Then when I check the box next to "Enable full-resolution playback," I see only green lines during playback. Yet playback is better when I see both the green and red lines. I should see better performance when I see only green lines, but I'm not.

[Gerlinde]

I used MEP16 to convert my .m2t files to .mpg files and now they play flawlessly in Studio 14. But the strange thing is, that the themes, like the video wall, also play choppy and staggering.

In Studio 12 the themes played smooth until all of a sudden the program started crashing when ever I click on the themes tab. I will try to reinstall both programs and see if that fixes anything. But I want get to it until next week, we will have company over the weekend.

[Gerlinde]

Just as a follow up: Everything works now all of a sudden I don't know why or what might have changed. Studio 14 plays now my .m2t files without a hick up, also the montage themes play smooth.

I have "Enable full-resolution preview" ticked and I read today somewhere for it to take effect, you have to restart the program. I also deleted all previous project files and auxiliary files.

I was able to fix the problem of Studio 12 crashing when ever I tried to open the montage themes. It was stuck on the "Extreme" theme. After I moved it temporarily out of the themes folder and restarted the program, a different theme was selected, and it did not crash. After that I can move it back into the folder and use it in Studio 14, but if I try to use it in Studio 12 it crashes the program again.

No big deal, I'm just happy I can use the program after all.

[RJ Johnston]

So there's hope for my system yet.
And you have both 12 and 14 installed at the same time?

[Gerlinde]

Yes I do, and I know from reading on the Pinnacle forum, that many people keep previous versions of the program on the same machine. I will probably uninstall it, once I'm sure Studio 14 works reliably.