Prodad hide not working

emmrecs wrote on 5/17/2021, 1:29 PM

I strongly suspect your question needs to be addressed to ProDAD Support since I am not sure how many readers of this forum actually have HIDE installed. I also rather doubt whether even Magix Support staff would be able to offer you any useful advice.

Jeff
Forum Moderator

johnebaker wrote on 5/17/2021, 2:35 PM

@terry-roberts

Hi

I had the same message on first run, however closing the message, the program continued and works fine - I too have DirectX 12 installed.

John EB
Forum Moderator

terry-roberts wrote on 5/17/2021, 4:21 PM

johnebaker

Thanks. i have got it working now. However, I can't seem to get rid of a mirror like object tracking the moving object. It's like a nearly invisible object moving with the object. Any thought's on this. Thanks in advance.

johnebaker wrote on 5/18/2021, 3:26 AM

@terry-roberts

Hi

Check you have not made two tracks tracking the same object.

I will tag @CubeAce in to this as he has been doing more work with Hide.

John EB
Forum Moderator

CubeAce wrote on 5/24/2021, 8:52 AM

@johnebaker @terry-roberts @emmrecs

Thanks John.

Not a part of the forum I find myself visiting that often. I would have missed this.

Hi Terry.

John is correct, I have been playing with Hide for about a week now.

First, All versions of Direct X from 9 get loaded with Direct X 12.1. Something I did not know myself until I looked it up on the Direct X website. Hide does seem to pause while it finds it and always comes up with the warning that it is not installed. Ignore the warning and wait. It will start.

First I will say it seems to be a very limited plugin for very obvious reasons and some not so obvious.

I am not a fan of programs that have no real feedback to their users and ProDad has no forums to speak of or anything other than a few old YouTube videos and the manual, so strike one as far as I'm concerned.

Strike two for me is the fished video, no matter how much I crank up the quality settings and wait more than a few hours for a final render have I been able to get a render that has not introduced more noise into the exported clip akin to recording the original at a higher ISO setting. While I can accept it is impossible for anything to create a background it can't see or deal with moving objects in the background to predict where to put the pixels, I can think of no reason why the exported file should suffer more digital noise. That needs improving if it is to be considered a serious tool. I should have been more wary when looking at their very low resolution examples. It does not appear to have improved from Erazr but seems more like a rebranding. Maybe it has been updated to work within Windows 10 but of that I have no idea.

Clips must have continuous movement in them to work and have relatively static backgrounds. Video clips using between 25 to 30fps seem to be in the sweet spot for conversion. Other frame rates work but the export times become excessive. As the program can only look about two and a half seconds ahead and behind the frame being rendered anything that becomes static will bleed through and become a problem.

Getting anything wrong with the controls when using key frames is a nightmare. Tracking can be a nightmare. Trying to correct mistakes is a nightmare.

Having said all of that, it is a very niche program and can once in a blue moon, with the right type of clip, give reasonable results that would be impossible by any other means.

Would I fork out for the full version if it had not been offered? Very doubtful.

Have I wasted a lot of time both trying to get it to work and then waited for hours for a render just to find it did not work as expected? Definitely.

Have I enjoyed the experience? 50/50.

Here is a short video of my efforts so far.

I may at some future point put up a full video of my problems with using the program and try to explain why certain clips just won't work but don't hold your breath as it could still be my lack of experience with the program and understanding of it. I am at least now more confident of what should work and what won't and it is (or at least at present seems to be) a very narrow window of acceptability.

Ray.

terry-roberts wrote on 5/24/2021, 9:48 AM

CubAce

thanks for your lengthy post.

The only reason I upgraded my Magix movie edit pro to 2021 was because they offered this software and 2 others as a free bonus. I think the demo videos that they use are actually edited, I think they took 2 shots, one without the target object and one with, they then edited the 2 together to make the software look amazing. I can't seem to get it to work without knowing that something was there. It leaves lets say an invisible cloak effect. Thanks anyway.

CubeAce wrote on 5/24/2021, 10:19 AM

@terry-roberts @johnebaker @emmrecs

Hi Terry.

The demos are definitely genuine and editable in the software to try for yourself but are really low resolution.

You really do need to read and understand the manual with this one and that isn't easy. On the knight clip and ghost runners I could have easily removed them completely as those clips meet all the criteria in most places. You need to use at least the stamp tool or the pixel replace option for best results. Crank up the look ahead slider and drop the one above that one right down. You may have to track the object you wish to remove frame by frame. Any disturbance or movement of the background will throw it off. HIDE does not use AI. When it was released as Erazr it was probably state of the art but no longer. Things move very fast in software (and hardware) and this one I think has been left behind a bit. It is a lot of fiddling and trying to work out what is wrong when it doesn't work. That is why I would have liked to see ProDAD have a dedicated forum. I'm sure half my current problems are down to me and I have already found a way to improve my last clip of the video and I'm rendering it now using three layers. One of which is an exclusion layer. I really have to pay attention to what the clip consists of and watch both the foreground and background carefully for potential problems that have to be manually intercepted. I have also noticed that it is not possible to overlap two masks without causing more problems. It makes the whole thing very labour intensive having to inspect each frame for problems.

Remember you can't see the result of the rendering of any frame until those pesky dotted yellow lines stop moving and with higher resolution clips that can take up to a minute for each frame. Possibly a lot longer on a less specified machine than mine.

Ray.