Moho Forum

Hi,

I'm having a ridiculously annoying issue when working on my current animation: every 10-15 changes I make, Anime Studio freezes for about 5-10 seconds (I'm working on a Mac, so I see the spinning coloured wheel). The changes can be anything from cycling 10-15 frames into the animation (excluding playback), to adding a keyframe.

This is making it quite frustrating to work, and is also adding a lot of time to the project.

The backgrounds have all been drawn in Photoshop and have been exported as .PNG files (due to transparency requirements). Each file is about 7mb. The size of the .anme file is 120mb (I can't see how this is possible unless it has imported each .PNG, instead of just referencing the file on the hard drive).

I still have the issue when none of the backgrounds are visible (I've disabled them by clicking the eyes in the Layers section), and no matter what the 'display quality' is set to.

I've just upgraded from v8 to 8.1, and the pauses still happen. I can't see it being a system related issue, I'm running an i7 w/ 8gig ram etc..

Has anyone else had this issue when working with large files, or have any suggestions as to how to make it stop?

[EDIT]
"every 10-15 changes" was being generous. it's every 4 or 5. /EDIT

Thanks

What's the pixel dimensions of these PNGs and how many of them do you have in a single .anme file?

What is the total number of frames in your scene?

You're not putting all the scenes and shots in the same file are you? Ideally you should split the scenes into one .anme file per background. Then put the film together in an editing package.

Try turning off the auto-save feature in the preferences menu, that might help as it saves every 30 sec. or so.

120 MB for an .anme file is quite big!

- How long (how many frames) is it?
- What are the dimensions? (HD 1920p, or bigger?)
- How many image layers?
- How many vector layers?

Just as example: my last AS project is 1 minute long (1500 frames) in HD, it contains

• 99 PNGs and MOVs (in HD as well)
  74 vector layers
  68 bone layers

and is a mere 1,4 MB big.

Aside from that I've noticed that AS behaviour on my Mac as well, but it's not an AS issue but a Mac issue. It happens regularly when I have too many applications open at the same time, and haven't restarted my Mac for some days. Culprits often are Safari or Firefox, they tend to eat up RAM like there's no tomorrow, and even after quitting them memory isn't released properly, so only a complete reboot helps.

Additionally you should clean up your AS files like this:
- delete everything you don't need in that scene.
- switch off visibility on all frames a layer isn't used. This not only speeds up editing but decreases render times as well.
- work with the lowest useful quality in the project window, see example:

Use "smooth images" only for pixel accurate positioning.

Autosave!! That was the culprit! I didn't know about that.. I've turned it off now & can work smoothly. Thanks so much for pointing that out, you've saved a lot of frustration and probably a few keyboards from being smashed too

Also, thanks for the other replies .. just for the record, I have about 10 .PNG files as backgrounds, each 3840x2160 (I'm only rendering to HD, but this high resolution allows me to zoom in a fair way without quality loss). There are a few small scene changes in this clip, but I prefer to work with one file instead of splitting it up so I can make changes & watch the work in progress in 1 viewing. The scene is just about 2 minutes, so almost 2880 frames. Have never had issues working like this in AS7 pro.

The file's still 120mb, but as long as I can work smoothly then I'm not fussed

Thanks again

Some personal advice. Get a timer, set it for 5 minutes and Save.

Dale

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Huh?

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Huh?

viewtopic.php?t=20467

Apparently, I can be annoying???

Dale