eltonbuddha

Works pretty well. Thanks.

The presets for sharpen are way too intense for me (the lowest is 3.0). I always manually change it to 1.0. Is there a way to tell VP to use this value as the default, or even just add it to the list of presets?

Seems like there should be a way to apply a video effect to all selected clips in a sequence, like a batch mode. How about to an entire sequence whether it contains selected clips or not?

I'm confused. I tried to follow what I take to be the gist of the above responses. The picture below is a screenshot of VP 6.28 with one video file loaded. First question: which of the 4 bins names in the upper left is the "clip bin"? All I see is "Sequences", "video files", "audio files", and "images". No tab is labeled "clips". So what is this "clip bin" you speak of? Second question: It looks like VP is in a complete muddle?? The clip preview window is blank even though the first clip in the sequence is clearly selected. AND, the thumbnail in the "video files" bin is checked, which I think means the "clip" represented by the whole file is selected?? But again, the clip preview doesn't contain anything. https://pictr.com/image/0LteDc

"There was no change in the clips on the timeline, in either TL or Storyboard mode." But that's precisely the bug. Showing up on the timeline is what all versions through 6.10 did. The current 6.2x versions don't, and as c_major says above, they're still trying to figure out why. Btw, I don't know what you mean by "in the bin" the image does change. I've never seen thumbnail's of clips derived from video files showing up in any of the 4 bins (video files, audio files, images, sequences). Is there I "clip bin" somewhere I've accidentally made invisible?

I guess I'm confused. c_major says they're working to fix this, and it for sure doesn't work in 6.28. In any case Borate, I've always used the clip preview window to choose a thumb frame, not the sequence preview. BTW, following Nat's exact procedure above, I got it to work when the clip was the only one in the sequence. When others are added, it stops working. Nat, try loading a video file into a sequence and split it into several clips. The default thumbnail for each clip it the first frame of each - not a bad choice. But now I want to manually select a different frame in clip 1 as the thumbnail. I do it in clip preview window. Nothing happens.

Thanks c_major. Good to know a human is aware of this bug and is working on it. Could you let me know in this thread when the fix is available? Also, for customer relations sake, you might want to change the wording of the auto-reply to not claim the bug just reported is fixed in the newest version. Just leave it as "several bugs have been fixed". The bot has no idea if the specific bug is fixed since it apparently doesn't read the bug report.

When I reported this just now, NCH said to download 6.28 which "fixes several bugs, including this one". I duly installed 6.28. No difference whatsoever. I submitted the same bug report against 6.28 not 5 minutes later, and they replied that 6.29 is "in beta pre-release" and "should fix this". Clearly they have a bot replying to all bug reports if there's a even a 10 minute more recent "pre-release" that they hope fixes everything. I'm going back to 6.10 for now. It's the devil I know and I can at least set thumbnails on clips. It's too bad because 6.24 seems to smoothly sequence-preview across clip boundaries, which seems miraculous compared to 6.10.

Just updated to 6.24 from 6.10. The good news is that sequence preview doesn't crash the program as often when playback speed is used in combination with video effects But the bad news is that clip thumbnails are completely broken. "Use this frame for thumb frame" menu item in either clip or sequence preview window fails to show the frame in either storyboard or timeline view. Whatever frame is the first in the clip remains fixed as the thumbnail. Has anyone figured a workaround for this bug? If not, any word on when NCH will fix it?

Hi again Borate, I'm the guy who started this thread last month: We went through all this back then, with no permanent solution, just a collection of suggestions to minimize the effects of the myriad bugs in sequence preview. I sent 2 or 3 small projects that you and a couple others worked with. There was nothing for it but suggestions on how to rebuild the project being careful to apply effects in specific order to avoid the land mines. None of those suggestions work in general. No developers picked up on that thread so there's no real resolution so far. But just to refresh, I'm running Windows 10, up to date video driver, VP cache in SSD, 16 GB RAM, 1TB hard drive, adjusting preview resolution constantly with varying results. The product is just wildly unpredictable and unstable with video effects at clip boundaries.

OOpps. Spoke too soon. I just discovered that some changes will cause the floating preview to get the flu. I duplicated a sequence that played fine in the undocked window, but applied sharpen to all the clips in the new sequence. Not only does preview start to falter at the clip boundaries (as regular preview always does) , but it actually plays differently each time. Maybe the boundary between the 2nd and 3rd clip causes a stutter, say, but if I restart the preview, the stuttering spreads to other clip boundaries, until after 6 or 7 replays, I'm almost back to my old friend: the impossible-to-watch preview. Have you noticed this?

(Just a placeholder post. I forgot to enable notification of replies on the above.)

Hi Maarten, I got excited when I read your post. I've been having the devil's own time with sequence preview since upgrading to VP 6.10. I've tried every suggestion on this forum related to preview issues, to no avail. But I hadn't tried undocking the preview window. It does indeed make things much better, but... What actually is happening is export within VP (probably to the cache), rather than to an external file. Notice that if you change any of the clips in the sequence, the floating preview window rebuilds, and it does so as slowly as if you were exporting. So what this procedure actually does is give you a preview of a sequence export. If your sequence has many clips and lots of effects, and you change anything, the floating preview starts all over and can take quite a while before it's ready to be played. Trying to play before it finishes this is really ugly. I have to say, this is more convenient than actually doing an export and then pulling that file back into the project (which is what I've been doing for weeks), so I'm grateful you've discovered this trick and told us about it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

OK, thanks. I see what you mean. Kind of confusing the way it displays all the time regardless of the actual state of the cache. I took it as evidence that the cache is being eternally churned, which I thought might explain the spastic behavior of sequence preview when at least some of the clips have video effects added. I have almost got reproducible scenarios for some of these problems, but will start another thread for those.

Here it is Notice there is no "progress bar" in sight. In any case, every project so far ALWAYS says this even if all clips have had green bars over them for hours. Also, someone might want to change the "tips for getting help on this forum" to delete DropBox as one of the ways to insert links to media in a post. Pictr works fine, thanks for the tip, but DropBox won't work on bet.

I put a jpeg of my screen grab in my public DropBox folder and copied the resulting URL to my clipboard. I inserted the URL in the post as you describe above, but nothing happened on 3 tries. Does DropBox not work for media in this forum? Do I have to use pictr.com?

When I hover the mouse under sequence preview, I always get a message about... well here it is ...well, I hope you can see the screen grab I've inserted into this post 3 times. I still can't

I used the corners all the time with the old version of VP - it had no problem maintaining the AR. Faster and easier to resize this way. So if this is by design, they're wasting these 4 points, making them replicate what is far easier to do by just grabbing any ol' spot in the rectangle. Oh well, just another way 6.10 adds to my workload. Far worse is the pile of erratic behaviors and outright crashes working with some of my older .vpjs. I have a tiny one that contain only a 12 second video file. VP plays the audio in clip preview but NOT in sequence preview. If I set a zoom and sharpening and select a frame for thumbnail, 6.10 goes bonkers. I had no problems whatsoever with the old version of the software. In general, sequence preview seems to be a radioactive no-mans land. I've reinstalled the software, moved cache to SSD & cleared it often, minimized frame rate and resolution, all the over-the-counter remedies I've read about on this forum and been told about by tech support. I've seen preview building get (temporarily) BETTER after INCREASING the frame rate. In some cases I've had to export and then re-import just to see the results of my edits.