Moho Forum

Jkoseattle wrote: ↑Sat Jul 06, 2019 5:41 pm Wow! Disabling Frame Skipping really mucked it up. Lots of hangs and audio problems right away. That's not it!

That is expected on a large project, but you said it happened in any project.

Jkoseattle wrote: ↑Sat Jul 06, 2019 5:41 pm Wow! Disabling Frame Skipping really mucked it up. Lots of hangs and audio problems right away. That's not it!

And this is with a simple scene, no external assets added? If so, something is definitely wrong. To me, it sounds like something is interfering with Moho's processes. Try this: check Task Manager and see if you have another program or utility running while Moho is running and watch its activity while using Moho. I'm not sure you'll find anything but maybe it will offer some clues.

FWIW, I've used 12.5 for many complex multi-character scenes for TV production, and haven't seen this issue. However, for really complicated scenes, I don't typically click the Play button either; instead, I scrub manually or I use Preview Animation. Preview animation is more accurate than 'realtime' playback, especially when I'm reviewing my lipsync animation. But, even so, clicking Play in the transport controls shouldn't be a problem at all for simple scenes...the accuracy should be reasonably good in this case.

Also, for the sake of completeness, oftentimes the double speed playback does not happen when I first hit Play, but a second or two after. So it plays normal for about a second, then suddenly speeds up. And sometimes it just starts right up at double speed.

Hmm. Maybe a caching problem? Like the computer trying to figure out where it can save the entire cache? Just curious but do you have a regular hard disk or SSD as your system drive? If it's an HD, maybe the drive is getting full or fragmented? (I wish Moho offered more options for choosing a cache location and size like other animations programs do.)

Question #1: Which OS are you running? With older versions of Windows, it's recommended that the drive is occasionally optimized. But with Windows 10, it's not recommended and you really shouldn't have to do that.

Question #2: Sorry if I asked this already, but do you have a movie file in the project? You mentioned audio problems, so I wondered if this might be the case.

I don't normally import movie files into animation programs because playing a movie file tends to be processor intensive. Instead, I like using an image sequence and a separate audio track (uncompressed AIF or WAV.) For fast-streaming reference footage, I prefer a med-to-low quality JPEG image sequence, and for final render quality footage, I use a loss-less PNG image sequence. A JPEG sequence is ideal for animatics and other reference footage used as a backdrop or PIP insert. But for final renders, obviously you want to avoid re-compressing data.

Hmmm... a lot to think about here. Let me tell you something about the current project. While I'm not importing movies, most of the project is made up of imported images, mostly PNGs. No image sequences. Think comic book set to music, so the majority of the time I'm showing still images, often in switch layers, which occasionally move around or have other effects on top of them.

There is an audio track which I have as an mp3 but could just as easily use my WAV instead. I don't use the audio in the final version, as I assemble it in Camtasia and import the WAV then anyway - the audio is just reference while animating. The project is going to be about an hour long ultimately, split into scenes of 2-4 minutes each. I realize this is long, but the whole thing syncs up very tightly with music cues and I find I get better results if I have the freedom to jump around within a given scene than if I storyboard the whole thing out separately first, and really there isn't all that much animation going on.

I am using SSD drives for my OS (Windows 10) and for some synthesizer data storage, but I don't *think* any Moho anything uses SSD. None of my drives is nearing full.

Well, at least I'm sort of glad it's stumping everyone here and not just something stupid.

Most of what you describe sounds ok to me.

mp3 might be the cause because it's a compressed format but, to be honest, I don't think it should have this kind of impact on normal playback. More likely it would affect frame accuracy, making it less than ideal for lipsync animation, but that should be it. I guess accuracy will degrade the more it's compressed.

Just to be sure, have you tried testing performance without the mp3? Save a copy of the project, remove the file completely, and save again. Then quit Moho and launch it again to make sure the memory is reset. How does it work now?

If the plays better without the mp3, try converting the mp3 to an uncompressed AIF or WAV and import that.

FWIW, I only use uncompressed WAV or AIF when I need to time the animation to the audio track or when I need to animate lipsync. Using anything else might not be frame accurate and may impede real-time playback. In any case, checking final accuracy should be done using Preview Animation.

If there is still a problem, maybe there's is something faulty about the audio file in general?

Yeah ok. Since it's so intermittent, I'll just replace my mp3 with the original wav and then work a few days to see if that's it. In fact, what I'll do is tell Siri to remind me to report back in a week or so because if it hasn't happened I'm going to forget otherwise. so if I haven't posted in this thread in a few days that's a really good sign. Thanks!

The first 3 projects I worked on in Moho all displayed the fast playback "bug" and none of them had any audio whatsoever. Just some vector shapes and bones.

Windows 10, Harddrive is M.2