RAM

[painterX]

hey,
i have a little problem. im working actually in tvpaint with photos, that i animate. after only a few photos the project has more than 1GB. I have to wait a long time, when I open the program or save it. is it possible to change the main memory(ram) for the programm- or some other ideas?

[slowtiger]

Opening and saving are operations which require harddisk access. Everything else is done in RAM, but these two operations can't be faster than your PC can shift data to or from your disk.

First: try to avoid getting such big files. Don't put more than one scene into one project file. Erase everything you don't need, you can keep old stuff in separate files.

Second: you may need a SSD to solce your problem. This is a "disk" which consists of flash memory, so it's much faster than a conventional disk.

[idragosani]

What is the speed of your hard drive? How much physical RAM does your machine have? And are you using 32-bit or 64-bit version? Ideally, you'd want a drive that is separate from your system drive and should be at least 7200 rpm. The SSD drive suggestion is a good one, although they are expensive and don't have as much storage capacity as an SATA drive (which are dirt cheap these days).

[painterX]

hello,
I have 12 gigabyte RaM, 64bit. I have a SATA hard drive. But actually the tvp project is located on the desktop (i think,i should change this, but my hard disk has not enough space-500GB). I think 7200 rpm.ich never heard about SSD. Is my hard drive ok or is the SSD drive better. The program is suitable for photographic work?

[ematecki]

TVPaint work in uncompressed mode.
So even if your photos are jpeg compressed, once loaded into TVPaint they are uncompressed.
(You just cannot do otherwise if you want to be able to change individual pixels, like when painting, which is the primary goal of TVPaint).

If your photos are, say 12 Megapixels, they take up 12x4 (R,G,B and Alpha) = 48Mb EACH.
Twenty such pictures take up close to 1 Gb.
These are facts that can't be changed (short of working with smaller photos, which may be possible depending on the final use of your work).

The best change you can make is getting faster drives.
If you have the money, go for a SSD.
A more (financially) reasonable way is to get TWO fast SATA drives, and put them into a RAID 0.
See your motherboard docs to see how to make this, nobody but this doc can help you here since this is very MB specific.
Look here for what RAID 0 means : http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2010/08/rai ... -tutorial/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Basically it will save half the data on one drive, the other half on the other, so dividing the time it takes to load or save by almost two.

[painterX]

ok ,
i think about it. another question: its just the beginning of my animation, my project has 2 GB. with the properties of my hard drive, how long can tvpaint work, say if my project has the size of 10 GB. The TVP can handle it?

[ematecki]

Yes.
We know several people having such big projects.
But it will obviously take longer and longer to save...
A fast HD comes close to 100MB/s, so 10GB will take at least 100 secs to save, or almost 2 minutes.
(much more if your temp dir is on the same drive than you save, which is discouraged, but unavoidable as long as you only have 1 drive).

Think about splitting your work in several projects if load/save times becomes too long.

[painterX]

i have an another animation. just a line - 5 minutes. i need 5 minutes to open the project, maybe longer. the other animation with photo animation - 17 seconds, 2GB. i need almost 8 minutes, i think. so this is very long,the saving too.

" so 10GB will take at least 100 secs to save, or almost 2 minutes." -->if this were so, I would be very happy.

in the preference my physical memory is: 12284 mb. if I buy more RAM (2GB), The program will be faster?

[ematecki]

i have an another animation. just a line - 5 minutes. i need 5 minutes to open the project, maybe longer. the other animation with photo animation - 17 seconds, 2GB. i need almost 8 minutes, i think. so this is very long,the saving too.

Indeed, this IS very long, even with the temp dir on the same drive as the file you load.
Have you tried to defragment your drive ?

" so 10GB will take at least 100 secs to save, or almost 2 minutes." -->if this were so, I would be very happy.

To obtain this, you need at least one new drive, but better yet two drives in RAID 0.
And if your current drive is only 500GB, it may be an older model which hasn't the performance of current ones.
How old is it ?

in the preference my physical memory is: 12284 mb. if I buy more RAM (2GB), The program will be faster?

Only marginally, the bottleneck is really the time it takes to move the data from/to the hard drives.

[painterX]

my hard drive is maybe 2 or 3 years old. so it wouldnt help if I buy more RAM? ?
my temp direction is on another hard drive, its on C. in the preferences i can change the direction. Should i do it? that means, i take the hard drive where my project is. should it be in the same folder?
Actually i try to defragment my drive.

[slowtiger]

What are the dimensions of your project in pixels? What's the framerate?

A typical animatin project has only 1 layer with a completely filled frame: the background; and this is only 1 frame for the whole scene. All other layers are only partially filled, with characters and props.

But if you do slow fades or pans of images filling the whole frame the file size gets very large very fast. That's why compositing programs usually work with linked files only, so the project file stays slim, and only the rendered result is large.

[painterX]

the format is 1920 x 1080 px. framrate 24. i work with many layers, differnt layers with jpegs, draw animation, effects and and and. but tvp doesnt works with linked files, unfortunately. so the project is very large. to split the project isnt possible for me. I dont know how, because all is animated,and i need the whole movement.

[idragosani]

What kind of hardware are you running on, in terms of processor, speed, etc? On my machine (specs in the signature), a project that is 2458 x 1296 @24 fps, about 2 minutes, a little over 1 GB so far, saving the file takes less than 30 seconds. No photos, though, just painted art, camera moves, etc. Rendering the entire thing to a video or frame sequence takes a while but that's expected.

[ematecki]

my hard drive is maybe 2 or 3 years old. so it wouldnt help if I buy more RAM? ?
my temp direction is on another hard drive, its on C. in the preferences i can change the direction. Should i do it? that means, i take the hard drive where my project is. should it be in the same folder?
Actually i try to defragment my drive.

The temp dir SHOULD be on another drive than your projects.
So the load is shared between the two drives.
(If the temp file is on the same drive than the saved file, the data will be read from that drive just to be written elsewhere on the same drive, thus dividing the performance by more than, because it will have to move it's RW head all over the disk all the time).

I hope your second drive is an internal drive, not an USB one ?
Because with an USB drive just forget the word "speed"...

More RAM will slightly improve the performance of TVPaint (of course, if you only had 4GB the improvement would be significant, but you already have 12GB)
while working on your project, but not while loading/saving your projects.

Use a drive performance test progam to check the speed of your drives. There are several free programs around.

[painterX]

My prozessor: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU 2.66GHz . I have change my temp direction, and make an little mistake. the program opens with notification. Cant create cache file. use default path. what should i do?