Choppy Issue

[JPalmer]

I have always had a problem when running my Corel VS Pro x3 or x4 when it comes to watching my project or adding special effects. I can watch individual clips just fine but anytime I add a special effect or try to watch the whole project the video chops up and is completely useless for previewing my work. I have a newer computer running Vista with an AMD 3.0GHz X2 processor & 4GB of RAM. While watching task manager I hold around 70% processor useage and am only using around 1.9GB of my RAM when the problem is occurring. So my thought was it might be the on-board video card so I recently upgraded to a 128 bit card with 1GB DDR3, this did not help. I am out of ideas and it is very frustrating, any suggestions?

[Trevor Andrew]

Hi

Can you give details of your video files properties, right click a file and select properties, what are they

AVCHD video is very demanding and project playback may have problems.
Adding filters and filling the timelines can also cause the playback to stutter.

Smart Proxy will help in smoothing the layback issue.

If using HD video can you verify that you have activated Smart proxy and that proxy files have been created.

[JPalmer]

I'm using mp4 video files. My camera shoots in 1080P@60fps. I had not known about Smart Proxy. I will enable it and create some files and see what that does. Thanks.

[Ken Berry]

Unfortunately, VS cannot deal with any true progressive 50/60 fps video above 1280 x 720p. I encouraged Corel to include the new 1920 x 1080p at 50/60 fps during the beta testing process for X4 but was told at the time the international AVCHD standard had not been adjusted upwards to include this and there were not many users of such cameras. Both of these Corel arguments have now been negated, but as far as we are aware, Corel is not working to expand X4's capacity at this stage. It could conceivably happen as a patch, though I suspect it will more like only emerge in a new version of VS -- and we wouldn't be expecting that until about the first quarter of next year.

In the meantime you can output in 50/60 fps 1080p if you go to Share > Create Video File > Custom, and then select .avi as the format, and after clicking the Options button, you choose mpeg-2 transport stream as the codec. But as far as I am aware, you cannot then burn such files to Blu-Ray -- or if you try, VS will convert them to 25/29.97 fps Blu-Ray AVCHD.

I would encourage you -- as I do other users of such camcorders -- to contact Corel direct, to let your feelings be known. Only that way will they understand that they are not catering to an increasingly large client base...

In the meantime, I understand Cyberlink Director's current edition supports your format. Magix has also just released version 18 of their Movie Edit Pro software, but I have not yet found out whether it can also accept the format.

[JPalmer]

Thanks a lot for the help Trevor & Ken.