Magic+PD Overview and Workflow

Magic+PD is a new workflow for getting the highest possible performance from your computer while editing. Most computers can process HD fairly easily but using 2k/4k clips and/or doing complex editing tasks can push the hardware to the limit, which means that it can no longer preview the edited in real-time.

There are currently 7 different approaches to dealing with cumbersome clips or edits, and each one is shown with their respective benefits and drawbacks on the Magic+PD Pros and Cons document. You may find that any one or two options work well for a particular project while another one or two work better with different clips of types of edits.

Some, like using shadow files or lowering the preview resolution, are options from inside PowerDirector; while others, like manually swapping high-res clips for low-res copies, are external workflows.

Magic+PD is a one-step workflow where original clips are converted into a special intra- frame/intermediate before editing begins. The new clips are then edited and produced in PD just like regular source clips, except that they are much easier for PD to work with. Editing features that were previously not possible, such as real-time Full HD preview, will now be available.

Once the Magic+PD program is downloaded and it and the trial version codec are installed, processing the original clips takes just a couple of clicks. Here’s what it looks like, with the new steps in green:

Original clips Magic+PD PowerDirector TV/YouTube/Disc

A detailed tutorial of the installation process is available here.

The following pages contain a top-level discussion of how Magic+PD works; the free, open-source components it uses; the special intra-frame codec (and how to get the “pay what you want” full version); detailed steps of the work flow (including links to tutorial ); and a table of conversion times on various hardware.

For the record, I tested several intra-frame (including Grass Valley’s HQX, Avid’s DNxHR, and GoPro Studio’s Cineform) and none of the compared with the speed of MagicYUV, which is what this project is built around.

I sincerely hope this make many of your editing easier!  What is Magic+PD, and how does it make editing in PowerDirector smoother?

Magic+PD is the name of a small app that installs and configures several open-source and free components to let you simply and quickly convert ANY source clip into a special intra- frame/intermediate codec before starting an editing session.

While you might think of video clips as just being a string of still pictures coming one after another, the reality is that storing all the information in every frame would lead to gigantic files sizes, and that would severely limit both how much video could be stored in a camera and the resolution of the video that could be sent from YouTube or from a TV station.

The solution is that codecs do two kinds of video compression, which keeps the file and streaming size small, but that also means that PowerDirector has to spend quite a bit of time and effort extracting the details from many frames even if it only needs to produce or make changes to one. This page has an excellent description of what codecs do and how much work it takes to decode and recreate video that’s been encoded.

If you watch the main video on Vimeo, you can skip to the 19-minute mark and get the basics of temporal compression which is what Magic+PD actually does away with!

The secret is a new codec called MagicYUV which was written by Balázs Oroszi. He goes by Ignus on the PD forum, and you can read all about his excellent creation on his website.

MagicYUV is a lossless intra-frame codec that extracts every frame from the encoded source clip and stores them like a sequential series of full pictures. That makes pulling out each individual frame very fast, and because each frame is complete PD doesn’t have to search forward or backward (or both!) to find and recreate the missing pieces.

This also means that more (sometimes much more) of your CPU’s processing power is available for doing other things, and that generally means that you can set the preview quality to full HD quality in real-time so you can see everything clearly while editing 

On mid-range systems, it may not even be possible to preview 4k clips in real-time and you’d normally have to use shadow files. On high-end systems, previewing 4k clips is possible in real-time but the editor will skip or lag once you add any complex edits, again because the CPU simply cannot do all that processing in real-time.

The same thing happens with high frame-rate clips. A 4k/25p or 30p might preview OK, but a 4k/50p or 60p won’t, and even 1920x1080 clips at 120p require too much processing every second to show in real- time unless you do something to reduce the CPU’s workload. That’s what MagicYUV does!

The only downside to using MagicYUV is that the file size is about 10x the size of the original clip. That’s actually really efficient considering that it has as much as 30x the visual information as the original clip, but it does mean you may need to add an extra internal or flash drive to deal with the increased file sizes. Magic+PD components

The Magic+PD is the name of a simple installation program that installs and configures the following free and open-source video utilities: VirtualDub, and the VirtualDubFFMpegPlugins.

The main utility component is VirtualDub, which is a well-known, free converter app that allows technically-experienced users to transcode, edit and reconfigure videos. The downside is that it typically requires a very deep understanding of codecs to operate and is not well suited for most people who simply want to convert a video from one format to another.

Magic+PD installs a small script file that runs each time VirtualDub is run, which sets all the appropriate options for converting any source clips to MagicYUV in full quality and at maximum speed. ffdshow is a companion utility that lets clips created with DirectShow codecs (like H.264 and H.265) be accessible to a VideoForWindows (VFW) app like VirtualDub. Without ffdshow, VirtualDub can only open older style clips like DivX or MPG, and most new cameras can’t record in those formats.

Magic+PD runs this program at the end of its installation process, and all defaults can be accepted.

VirtualDubFFMpegPlugin is a plug-in for VirtualDub that allows “VDub” to access the files through ffdshow. Without the plugin, a two-step conversion process is required – first from MP4 to AVI and then AVI to MagicYUV AVI.

Magic+PD installs the plugin in the appropriate VDub folder so it is active once VDub is launched.

The MagicYUV codec is the final piece needed to convert the videos. Magic+PD will add an icon to install the Trial version of the codec, which will allow you to experiment with the system and see how much of an improvement is possible. The Trial version places a small white-on-black logo on each clip which makes it very easy to tell when you’re working with clips in that format.

Mr. Oroszi has decided to make the full (unrestricted) version of MagicYUV available as “pay what you want.” You can choose any price, including 0, and receive the full codec in return. Since his work is why the Magic+PD system is even possible, I would strongly encourage each PowerDirector editor to consider the potential savings in time and frustration of using his codec and make a suitable donation.

I personally donated $50 US because I believe so strongly in his work. While that might seem expensive compared to what PD itself costs, I will save that much in just a couple of hours of more productive editing time.

Once you have decided that Magic+PD is a good fit for your workstyle, you can visit the MagicYUV download page and purchase the full version for whatever price you want to pay!

I am not asking for any money for all the time and effort I’ve put in to bring Magic+PD to life, and I would ask that any support for my effort be considered when determining the value of MagicYUV itself. I’m happy to pass that on to the person who made all of this possible  Using Magic+PD to pre-convert clips to MagicYUV before editing in PowerDirector

You’ll see the best results and highest efficiencies when you set aside the clips you’re going to work with and convert them into MagicYUV before starting an editing session.

If you have a few clips, possibly in different folders, you can open each one individually in VirtualDub (which opens by double-clicking on the Magic+PD icon) or drag and drop them one at a time into the main window. To start the conversion process, choose Save as AVI… and select the destination folder and file name. The main tutorial shows that all clearly.

If you have multiple clips you want to convert, it’s easier to use the Job Control function (F4) and choose Process Directory (under the Edit menu). Next choose the destination drive and folder (be sure you have LOTS of free space there!) and then click on Start and VirtualDub will automatically transcode all the clips into MagicYUV format. This is also shown in the batch tutorial.

When the conversion is finished, load the clips into the PowerDirector media library and start editing. With most edits on mid-to-high end computers, you should be able to set the Real-time Preview Quality to Full HD and enjoy a smooth editing experience 

Once you’ve finished with the project and produced the video, you can delete all the .AVI clips to reclaim all that disk space.

If additional editing is needed in the future and you’ve deleted the MagicYUV versions of the clips, you’d either need to pre-convert the original clips again or browse to the original clips from within PowerDirector and choose each one individually when PD can’t find the AVI versions.

You’d still be able to produce the full video from the original clips, but you won’t have the benefits of smooth editing without recreating the MagicYUV versions.

Converting clips to MagicYUV using Magic+PD

When you convert a video clip to another format it’s called transcoding, and transcoding source clips from their original format to MagicYUV using Magic+PD is FAST.

With a powerful system, you may see transcoding speeds of 5x, which means it only takes 2 minutes to convert a 10-minute clip into the MagicYUV format.

Here are the transcoding/conversion times for 3 different types of clips on 3 different systems:

Hardware Test Clip Relative Transcoding Speed Primary Desktop i7-4770K + GTX 780Ti + HD 4600 1080/60p MTS H.264 4.15x (10min clip takes 2:40 to process) 2160/30P MP4 H.264 1.65x (10min clip takes 6:05 to process) 2160/30p MP4 H.265 1.05x (10min clip takes 9:30 to process) Surface Pro 3 i7-4650U + HD 5000 1080/60p MTS H.264 1.50x (10min clip takes 6:40 to process) 2160/30P MP4 H.264 0.67x (10min clip takes 15:00 to process) 2160/30p MP4 H.265 0.40x (10min clip takes 24:55 to process) Original Surface Pro (2013) i5-3317U + HD 4000 1080/60p MTS H.264 1.39x (10min clip takes 7:10 to process) 2160/30P MP4 H.264 0.58x (10min clip takes 17:15 to process) 2160/30p MP4 H.265 0.36x (10min clip takes 27:45 to process)

No matter what format your source clips are in, Magic+PD sets VirtualDub to convert them all to MagicYUV for maximum editing and producing performance.

The conversion only needs to be done once before you start editing.