topshot

I wonder why they removed the default transition that was in 2.41? It didn't always work as well as it should have (i.e., wouldn't insert the transition at times) but why take out that functionality? At least you can Ctrl-A.

Perhaps you missed the 2 bolded items from my last post; it seems to be working acceptably at this point. I don't buy that it was a hardware issue either. I've seen a lot of weird stuff in my 30+ years of working with PCs (and I'm also an electrical engineer), but this did not act or resolve itself like any hardware issue I've ever encountered. On an unrelated note, I don't understand why they removed the ability to remember the last Custom Export preset settings like 2.41 did and don't like the reduced number of quality levels on the AVI encoder settings. It used to be a slider from 1 to 51 and now it's just 7 bitrate options (or 4 "quality" levels). I'll have to see if they made anything else more difficult. I was looking into other free editors after my first bad experience with 8.97, but they all seem to make text overlays that fade in and out far more difficult than it should be so decided to give VP 8.97 one more chance.

The project isn't the issue. 8.97 clearly doesn't like something with this somewhat newer hardware or Win 10 1909 as I can install 8.97 on my old Win 7 laptop (running DirectX 11) and don't have much issue with the exact same file being read from the same SD card. 8.97 does still use more CPU than 2.41 did and seemed to take 2-3 times as long on that laptop (I judged this on the Resource Monitor graphs) using a fresh install of each. The new laptop is running DirectX 12 (as confirmed by dxdiag, which claims there are no issues), and I have finally been able to update graphics drivers for both discrete Nvidia K1000M and integrated Intel HD Graphics 4000 adapters. It doesn't matter which adapter I use and it performs just as it did with the Lenovo drivers. Upon adding the file to the project, CPU spikes to 98-100% and remains there for over 5 minutes. At about 6 minutes it starts to slowly comes down and will finally go back to nothing at 8-11 minutes (this is just for Videopad with nothing else running, of course). It won't display any video but will play the audio. After another half an hour or so: Well, just letting Videopad sit doing nothing may have solved whatever was causing the issue. After a lunch break I started trying other video formats (3gp, avi, flv and wmv) and they were working so I tried MP4 again and it worked. The file I had already added still wouldn't play but deleting it and re-adding did work. WTH?!?!? I'm going to reboot for like the 20th time today and hope it still works. Edited to add: it does seem to be working now. I have no idea what the issue was. Shouldn't have been Windows AV or anything like that as there was no disk (or really CPU either once VP settled down to < 1 %) activity. Something happened in that 30 minutes though.

I seem to have a similar issue as the OP though it may be all mp4 files files. I have been using 2.41 (free) on a Lenovo T520 running Win 7 the past 8 years with no issues. I just switched to a Lenovo W530 running fresh install of Win 10 1909 but discovered 2.41 won't install on Win 10 so I just tried 8.97 (free). First 2 times trying to get a small mp4 file (4 minutes of 1280x720) even loaded to timeline ended in me eventually killing the process as it pegged all 8 cores of the i7. Last attempt I added some pictures first (perhaps not necessary) and then a much smaller (30 sec) video which still pegged CPU but for shorter time. After waiting several minutes for it to settle down, it would play the audio but not show the video. I assumed it was a limitation of the current free version, but it appears it may be something else. Yes, it's an old machine but I didn't have any issues with the even older machine. I have no trouble playing the files with MPC-HC. Win 10 loaded Nvidia drivers for the K1000M from 2019 (what Windows installed) and DirectX 12. I tried getting the latest straight from Nvidia but only option I see provides DCH drivers and the installer says the system is configured to require standard drivers and I can't figure out how to get those from Nvidia. I could perhaps try uninstalling the drivers with internet off and then seeing if it will allow install of DCH ones but I'm looking for "cleaner" solutions first. I could also try not using the discrete graphics but that seems like taking a big step backward.

He means unistall K-lite like you would any Windows program and when you re-install it, you can select different options. His last step was within the Windows file explorer itself (on Vista, XP's option is different)

I just finished running some short tests with 1280x720 video and 16:9 pictures (in JPG format) and I've determined the following: 1. The first still of any grouping of stills looks highly pixelated while the others (if there's more than one pic in the group) normally look fine. 2. It doesn't make any difference if the still is the original resolution (or aspect ratio) or has been resized (or cropped) to be the same as the video resolution. 3. It doesn't make any difference if I'm using the native MPEG4 or H264 encoder. * See my best solution below 4. It doesn't matter if frame rate is 15 or 29.97. 5. It doesn't matter if there's no transition between a clip and the still. * See my best solution below 6. It's much worse in HD. Saving the movie in 640x480 normally doesn't have the issue as far as I could tell though once it was obvious for some reason. BTW, I'm using v2.41, not the newer ones everyone seems to have issues with. So far my best solution is to use H264 encoder but I must increase quality level to 28 from the default of 32 AND I must use fade instead of my preferred crossfade for all first stills after a video clip (or start of the movie). It takes much longer (over 4x) to encode, but MPEG4 just plain doesn't work. It was also 33% larger. So this is really no solution because that's not acceptable. Not sure what to do other than leave the stills out but that detracts from the trip report. Any other suggestions???

OK, any other suggestions why some stills look terrible? I took only 16:9 pics to match the video AR this time with no noticeable change. I used the recommended MPEG4 compressor with 2048 avg and 4096 max bitrates (the defaults).

I guess I was just surprised it affected it so much when it had so many pixels (2816x2112) to use. I would have expected blurry if anything rather than pixelated. It should have been a simple resize to 34%. It kept the same 4:3 aspect ratio, of course, adding bars on both sides. But I'm puzzled why some did come out looking fine??? Never had this issue when doing 640x480 videos and inserted stills that were normally 5X that size. Maybe I can just notice more since it's bigger? The clip is on - first thing is a still that shows this pixelation on the car front, canoe and shadows. The still at 0:57 is terrible. A simple re-size shouldn't cause this. Yet the stills at 4:50 and 6:19 (the one right before this one is terrible also) look good.

I recently tried my first HD video (finally have a camera that can go above 640x480) and the video portions are fine but most of the pics I inserted came out quite pixelated. Oddly, a couple of them did come out looking fine. They were all, of course, higher res and not the same aspect ratio. Any tips on how I can make them ALL look good? Is all that is needed is shooting the stills in 16:9? I don't want to waste my time cropping.