Preview at quarter resolution

[vivified]

Hi,

I'm working on a short piece in HD, and would really like the ability to preview animation at 1/4 of the final resolution. I'm doing 1080, so even
half res is rather large and slow. Is there a way to do this?
Maybe change the preview script (couldn't find it)?

Also, is there any way of lauching two copies of moho?
I'm working on a dual cpu mac, but the second cpu is just sitting there idle.

Cheers,
Bastiaan

[kingnutter]

You could try just dragging the corner of the preview frame in to minimise it.

This works if the audio is playing slow so might help in this instance too.

[Rasheed]

is there any way of lauching two copies of moho?
I'm working on a dual cpu mac, but the second cpu is just sitting there idle.

Open Moho as normal and then open the Terminal application and type this (assuming that Moho was installed in the standard location):

Code: Select all

/applications/Moho/Moho.app/Contents/MacOS/Moho;exit

Now a second Moho application window will open and if you close that window, the Terminal window will close as well.

I doubt, though, if the second cpu will be used. For an applications to use both cores, it has to be programmed as such. And because Moho is cross platform, this feature will probably not have been incorporated. OTOH Mac OS X could be smart enough on its own and assign the second Moho window to the second cpu.

[jeff]

Why not just resize the whole project while you are working on it? Just go to File, Project Settings and set your working res. to a quarter.
You won't lose any detail while you are working, so there's no advantage to working at HD res.
Remember you can do quick and dirty previews by pressing the F5 key. When you're all done animating, resize the project up to full size before rendering. Any help?

Jeff

[Rasheed]

Why not just resize the whole project while you are working on it? Just go to File, Project Settings and set your working res. to a quarter.
You won't lose any detail while you are working, so there's no advantage to working at HD res.

That is not entirely true. The relative line width is preserved if you enlarge the dimensions, but that is not always what you want. Sometimes you want that line width to remain 1 pixel and not become 4 pixels. And this could mean that a ball is lying in your character's hand in low-def and the ball just hovering above your character's hand in high-def.

It all depends on the style used in the animation, I guess.

[slowtiger]

vivi: I just did a HDTV piece (1920 + 1080) and rendered it at half dimensions. What exactly do you mean by "slow"? The Quicktime plays nicely and smooth on my dual 1.8 G5.

Or did you refer to the rendering time?

[vivified]

Yeah I mean rendering time.

I'm using only image layers (no vector stuff; scanned drawings),
and on my mac (dual 2ghz powermac) it is very slow.

Preview rendering at half resolution takes about half a second per frame.
While that may not sound like a lot, it gets annoying when tweaking animation. The in-app play function is also very slow.
Of course, the final quicktime plays fine.

I was just hoping I could modify a script somewhere to have F5 render
at 1/4 of the final resolution, but I guess it's not that simple.

Thanks though!

[slowtiger]

Ah, OK. Your rendering time is OK, mine is not faster nor slower.

As a comparison, AfterFX renders at the same speed, if not slower (on the same machine). But it has a nice option: you can work with low-resolution image files while preparing your animation, which get exchanged with the hi-res ones once you're satisfied with your animation and render the final scene. A function like this would be nice in Moho, IIRC it was mentioned somewhere before under which circumstances you can just exchange the directory Moho imports your images from.

[vivified]

Okay, but will the lores images just scale to the size of the final images?
This sounds like a good solution (low res proxy images), but as I see it
changing the image in the image layer also resizes the image...

[slowtiger]

Yes, this might be an issue right now (I haven't tested this myself). In the moment Moho imports images by their dimensions in pixels. So I can't offer a solution for your problem, sorry ...

[vivified]

I have found a solution to my problem; simply change the project resolution. When the scene's ready, I set the resolution back to full HD again.

Previewing at 720*405 is superfast, and for most shots, it gives me enough information.

[jeff]

Well, old bean, you should have followed my advice. That's exactly what I suggested two weeks ago!

All the best,

Jeff

[vivified]

Arg, I should read more carefully

Sorry.

[heyvern]

Jeff!

I have been using that F5 trick since you posted! That is cool. I must have sucked up all the knowledge from your post and that is why vivified missed it.



my only question is what is F5/preview doing that export animation doesn't have? It seems faster... but looks great.... and is less filling.

Could it be the screen display while rendering? The F5 preview doesn't display on screen while rendering.

-Vern

[jeff]

Thank Ramón López for the F5 tip, as I had completely forgotten about it until he mentioned it in a post recently.

Regarding the difference between F5 and an actual preview render, I think you'll find that rendering-intensive features like gradated fills are ignored in the F5 quick preview.

Cheers,

Jeff