Version 6.10 is from another planet

eltonbuddha

Here's a very tiny project that demos how VP 6.10 doesn't handle speed change and zoom on the same clip. (This clip also has sharpen set to 1.00)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/pho3vdb2wnz6sc1/Jen ny.zip?dl=0

What actually happens when I open this project varies, but in every case, the result is a total muddle. Sometimes VP crashes trying to open it (it refuses to preview and exiting the user interface closes it but the process is still running like crazy and must be terminated in task manager).

For example, clip preview silences the audio. There's no thumbnail in the sequence line in storyboard mode. Trying to add zoom... never works and fiddling with it and changing speed back to 100% to see if that makes things better will eventually crash VP, so beware.

borate

The original clip had points of hesitation when viewed in several players, including when the gal raises her palm during the portion you isolated. So the clip itself may have problems.

Rebuilt the project as follows...

No effects were applied to the clip in the bin. Dropped the clip onto the time line. A thumbnail was displayed in storybook mode, though it did vanish from time to time.

Isolated the approximate twelve seconds that you had used.

Added 1.00 sharpening and your zoom numbers with 16:9 restraint.

Right-clicked the clip on the time line and reduced speed to 60.000. Preview audio was muted after applying speed effect. Advise doing this step last.

No crashes. The only anomaly was the brief pause mentioned above that was evident in the raw clip.

eltonbuddha

Thanks for checking this out. The video file does indeed have a lot of fits and starts. It's a Debut capture of a YouTube video playing in Opera. It took me awhile, years ago, to realize Opera is not the best browser for capturing bits and pieces of a streaming video on the fly.

But... my old VP had none of the problems that 6.10 has with this and similar video files. Certainly I never had to worry about what speed change did to other effects. You advise adding speed change at the end of the effect chain on a clip. That sounds like I have to punt on preview once I change speeds. Furthermore, many source source files have crazy speed changes at random places, and I have to do speed change in VP to get a sense of what other effects are worth applying to some clips. Not to mention that on many 6.10 projects, I have applied speed last, and other effects got lost, not just audio. Sometimes zoom disappears, sometimes sharpen goes away. It's a depressing crap shoot.

BTW, so far none of the anomalies I've seen in preview occur in exported files, so I'm not surprised you were able to make an intact output. It would be nice to experience the final result of edits within VP before exporting. I've had to resort to exporting some projects the past few days just to see what the edits look like. But then if I see something I want to change, it's back into VP to shoot in the dark with the effects editor, and then export again. Ugh!

I hope you don't feel like I'm taking my frustration out on you "Einstein" guys. I can see how helpful y'all are on this thread and many others I've read in this forum. I'm grateful you're here and responsive.

borate

The developers are likely monitoring this thread.

One way to isolate a speed change from other effects is to export sequence that contains only that speed-altered clip then add it back into the media bin. The speed change will now be embedded.

eltonbuddha

Thanks, I'll try that for embedding speed change..

I meant to note a couple posts back that DropBox did indeed work for including a link to my zipped project. It just doesn't seem to work for images.

[deleted]

" The original clip had points of hesitation when viewed in several players, including when the gal raises her palm during the portion you isolated. So the clip itself may have problems. " (Borate)

I think this is the case. Stepping through your original (unedited) .avi clip one frame at a time shows there are numerous points where several frames are duplicated presumably so as to keep the 30fps video in step with the audio during the original copying from utube.. e.g. at the start nearly 2 seconds do not show motion. (Your editing removed this,) but the small pauses in the rest of clip display remain. The problem now is that when you reduce the clip speed as you did to 60% , VP inserts extra copy frames. The short pauses already present (but hardly visible at 100% speed) now become more noticable leading to the stop/start of the movement. Although not sure, zooming (and other motion effects) in VP may do the same thing making things worse.

Nat

eltonbuddha

Here's another tiny project that demo's sequence preview wetting the bed.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/n0xxgrfi6z4k219/Little girl trying to jump over a physio-ball - very cute.zip?dl=0

The first clip is normal speed, the second is slowed to 60%. Notice the first clip freezes video several frames in before resuming near the end. The blue "building preview" message flashes briefly as this pause starts. Needless to say, no preview building is actually going on, based on watching for activity in the cache folder on my SSD.

Here's where it really gets interesting: I emptied the cache with no project open so the preview would have to get rebuilt next time I opened. I watched the green progress bars complete. NO CHANGE! Same thing happens sequence previewing. Somehow the bogus pause to await rebuild has been baked into the project itself. It's not a "creature from the cache lagoon".

Also notice clip 2 never gets a green bar, even though it previews better than clip 1!?

P.S. The little girl was not hurt. It's from a "try not to laugh challenge" submitted by her parents on social media.

[deleted]

Your downloaded project did show some glitches as you describe. The timeline also showed some odd features....a blank white area at the end as well as a blank "frame" in storyboard mode. As it is difficult to know how these occurred I decided to re create your project from scratch using the RAW downloaded file... Untitled 5110.avi which played perfectly both in VP as well as other players. The procedure was as follows.

Cleared the cache of all files. (Manually deleted them)
Opened VP and loaded Untitled 5110 ,avi to the Clip bin
From the clip bin, In Clip Preview the IN/OUT markers were used to select the the section required. Cutting the lady with glasses from the start and end of the clip.
Used the Place option to put the resulting clip on the timeline at the start. The timeline played perfectly showing just the section with the inset of the small child with the ball plus the background of the lady with the glasses.
Using your values added the Sharpen effect (=1) The clip and sequence preview both played correctly
Added the Crop effect. This was done by undocking and enlarging the Clip Preview window and setting the border around the insert image. The values were slightly different to yours because of this. The clip and sequence played correcty.
Added the Motion effect. (as you did). But why did you do this as no values had been inserted?? Nevertheless the clip and sequence played correctly.

The question now was what steps did you follow to add the second clip. Did you use Copy/paste or did you re-add the original clip from the clip bin and repeat the steps mentioned above? I tried both...
Shifted the red cursor line to end of the timeline.
Right click timeline and Copy, followed by Paste (insert). The effects copied and When played in VP there was a stop/pause and jump at the join.(Iinitially presumed this was due to VP having to re-load the clip from the cache but thought differently later (see below.)) An export at this point played perfectly.
Reduced the speed of the pasted clip to 65%. (Your figure). The pause/stop and jump at the join was still there but the clip slowed correctly. The full project exported and played perfectly.

I can conclude from this recreation that glitches are seen in VP when the program has a lot to process..e.g when it has to copy/reproduce new clips from the cache. I therefore ran this again but this time re-added the original clip to the end of the timeline and re-did the effects instead of simply copying it. (Note that the trimming of the clip was done from the Clip bin so the clip retained the trimming points.)

There was no difference in the result. The clip still paused/jumped at the join but the export was perfect.

Following a further test where the end of the first clip and the start of the second clip were NOT trimmed the join played in preview perfectly (The effects were kept)

The stop/jump faults were then IMHO due to the way VP deals with cuts. Even though you use IN/OUT to cut a clip or use split and delete etc. The clip remains complete within the cache which presumably just stores marker points. The result of this is that when VP reads through the WHOLE clip during preview it pauses in order to read over the section not required. It then catches up with the sound track. The result is a pause and a jump, possibly with a message if the jump is large. Although this is a nuisance when editing the resulting video exports OK. I may be wrong in this but it seems logical. VP is non destructive and is designed in this way.

Nat

eltonbuddha

Nat,

Thanks for researching this so thoroughly. To answer your questions:

The project is the result of being opened in 6.10. It was created 2 years ago in VP 2.x. In that version, I set only zoom and sharpen. VP 6.1 changed the zoom to crop AND motion. Whatever "motion" is, it didn't exist in the old VP, but 6.10 has done this to all my old projects. Zoom is gone and replaced with crop and "motion".

The blank at the end was inserted by me in the original. I usually do this since the old VP would wrap to the start of the sequence if I let it play to the end, so a blank of a second or two would give me time to hit the stop button. The second clip was created in the old VP with the "duplicate clip" command (ctrl-d). I suppose this is the same as copy/paste clip in 6.10. I then changed the speed to 60%.

I haven't touched this project in 2 years till I opened it last night in 6.10. I let VP finish building the preview and then, voila. What you see.

I guess I need some more education about terminology in 6.10. You say you put the raw file in the "Clip bin". I don't see such a bin. The file displays in the "video files" bin on my computer, as I would expect. What is the "clip bin" and how do I display it?

As you pointed out, the export is fine. I have found this to be always true so far with 6.10. Whatever bizarre shenanigans preview does, the exported file behaves correctly. I have even found occasionally that exporting can "heal" preview somewhat, in the sense that after exporting, exiting VP and playing the exported video to see if it looks OK, then reopening VP, it does preview much more smoothly, as if it "learned" how to preview by exporting first! Not every time, mind you, but often enough that it makes me wonder. Maybe this is a hint for the developers.

borate

Ran a test here, similar to Nat's approach...

Imported clips appear in the clip bin at the upper left. Tabs reveal each type of clip - video, audio, etc. - and a new bin can be created by clicking the + sign. There's also a sequence tab, which lists the sequences on the time line. The green preview line doesn't show as being complete due to the slo-mo. I believe that's normal.

Perhaps the conversion from an earlier version caused problems; there have been many changes since 2.x.

1. Dropped the Untitled 5110.avi from the bin to the time line.

2. SPLIT out the unwanted beginning and ending portions, leaving only the little girl.

3. Added 1.0 sharpening.

4. Added your CROP figures.

5. Copied/pasted the timeline as Nat did above, to create a dupe clip.

6. Reduced clip two speed to 65%.

5. Created a blank space between the two clips, just for convenience.

Both clips played seamlessly on the timeline and when exported.

[deleted]

Hi again

@elton...OK see why you have blanks. Motion is an effect that uses a combination of image manipulations including rotation, frame movement up/down/left/right and scale which in effect a zoom.

Zoom as a single effect is still there in 6.10 . and without keyframes acts as a simple full frame enlargement of the outlined area. (Crop doesn't enlarge) The normal ZOOM (in or out) is obtained by setting keyframes at different point in the clip having different zoom factors. The enlargement, or reduction (full frame) is then animated between the keyframes.

The clip bin is the area at the left of the screen where your clip/image thumbnails appear. There is one bin for each type of clip used as Borate describes.

@Borate

Hi Borate

AS your replaying of this scenario on the timeline didn't have a jump etc at the join, the stop/start I am getting with a flash 0f "Building Preview" might be a PC related problem. (Old Vista dual core machine Doh! ☹️) Interestingly everything previews without a stop when the cursor line is manually dragged across the join even when this is done much faster than "playing" the preview. However as doing this does not play the sound track, the stop/jump when the clip is previewed normally would seem to be connected with the sound track having to play as well. Plays without a jump though when scrubbing is turned on. At the end of the day it exports OK.

Nat

eltonbuddha

Thanks Borate. Point of information: it's not normal for the green preview line to be missing due to slo-mo. I have many examples to the contrary. And how could it be normal to leave the user clueless about the progress of preview building? Are there really so many problems in 6.10 that minor aberrations are dismissed as normal? How far we've fallen from 2.x.

Not to belabor this, but I do understand that I can get where I want to go by manually reconstructing all my 3,500 old projects, exporting the result, then importing that in order to get a stable preview. The travesty of the situation is that it appears to be the consensus here that, with so many changes since 2.x, of course 6.10 can't deal with even very simple video effects from such an ancient version. So I paid pretty good money to upgrade, with not only no advantages (except being able to run in Windows 10, which 2.x can't), but having to start over with the promise that the result will never be as good as what 2.x produced (since not playable within VP).

I led a team of developers for many years, and a key requirement for new versions was backwards compatibility. We couldn't dream of putting an upgrade on the street that made a hash of work done by prior versions. Old school, I guess.

eltonbuddha

Hi again Nat, we "crossed in the mail".

Yes! I've also found that the join line is the epicenter of preview nastiness. A big hint for me was when I noticed that jumping to the start of the next clip in the sequence with shift-right, the frame that appears in the sequence pane is the last frame of the previous clip. If I then advance one frame, the sequence preview has no problem with the clip. It's like VP considers the first frame of the current clip to be a bastard child of the previous clip. This seems to only happen if the previous clip has effects - which almost all mine do. I almost wish I were a developer on this product. I can almost see in my software engineer mind's eye what the code is doing wrong.

[deleted]

Hi elton

I think in some situations enhancing a program, for example to be able to use new technology/file types etc, inclusion of new effects, increasing the speed at which certain procedures take place means a program algorithm has to change making earlier productions unusable. (e.g. W98 programs no longer work on later machines etc.) VP is no exception. Earlier versions only had a single track to work with like WMM now it is much more versatile, but this comes at a cost.At some point the developers had to make changes. The cache format since 5.xx has changed a lot to make the process faster and in a lot of cases the .vpj from these early versions can't rebuild the cache correctly with the later version as the names are not used now. I think we have to flow with the river

Nat

[deleted]

Hi elton

if I cut (or trim) a clip I usually step through a frame at a time until the scene changes and then step back a frame (or two) and then use that point to cut. I feel that ensures that the next clip has been decidedly marked "no entry" As nothing is actually "cut" but simply marked and particularly if the clip has an effect the point may not not always be accurate. Some animations add extra frames. In the old days when I used film you new exactly where you were making a cut.

However if you find you do have an "intruder" at a join you can always drag the join along to eliminate it. (Drag it out of sight as it were) But only to the left. if you do this to the start of a clip with effects and drag to the right ALL the effects added are removed.

Nat

borate

eltonbuddha wrote:

Point of information: it's not normal for the green preview line to be missing due to slo-mo.

It may not be 'normal' but it appears to be the way the line displays on slo-mo.

Start a new project and load a single video clip onto the time line. The green line will span the entire clip, confirming that it is cached.

Now slo-mo the project. The preview line is short. Reset to 100% and the preview line again covers all video.

Perhaps a developer will weigh in to explain this behavior.

[deleted]

It seems that the green line represents the WHOLE original clip and this won't extend beyond the end of the clip. Slow motion is created by duplicating frames at regular intervals. The original clip remains cached and unaltered . No extra files are created in the cache and hence the green bar is shown unchanged in duration. On the timeline however the clip is shown extended to give the calculated duration.

In other words a 20 second clip has a 20 second green bar. If the speed is changed to 50% the green bar remains at 20 seconds as this is the original clip but the timeline is extended with the inserted frames to show a duration of 40 seconds.

If the speed is altered to 200% the whole of the clip is still present on the timeline but only half as long and so is the green bar as this still has to extend to the end of the original clip. As with Slo-Mo there are no changes to the cache. The whole clip is used and VP plays (in this case) every other frame to give 2x the speed.

Nat

vpolonski

I upgraded from VP Version 5.11 to 6.1. I'm about 10 min into a new video and every time I try to add a transition, it crashes. If I go back to V5.11, I have no problem. I am running an i5 CPU 2.67GHz w/8GB. Any ideas?

Thanks,

Vic

borate

Your system appears to have ample resources.

Check the chip or card maker's WEB site for an updated video driver.

In Videopad, Clear Unused Cache Files, under the OPTIONS menu|Disk tab and see if that makes a difference.

vpolonski

Will check for updated video driver. Thanks.

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