problems with lagging

[Animark]

Hello,
the last days I was working on a little film project and had trouble with sometimes 5 seconds lasting lags when I try to flip between different frames. I was very in a hurry and the problem was really annoying. I think I had it sometimes before, but never as obvious as the last days. It was happened on 2 different PCs, with two different TVPaint-Versions and I also tried different harddiscs (internal and external but did'nt got any idea how to isolate the problem. When I started to work, the lags were not present and became longer the longer I was working on a scene. So, I hope someone could give me a hint, where or how I could try to solve the problem.

Here are some facts:
project settings: 2496 x 1404 (24.000 fps)
clips lenght: between 50 and 300 frames
up to 6 layers, only black strokes (no colors or textures), one sound was loaded
TVPaints: 10.5.3 (32 bit) and 10.0.14 (32 bit)
Both PCs are Win 7, 64 bit with Wacom Cintq 21UX

I remarked:
- when the lag is happened, a blue circle (windows) was showing at the mouse-pointer
- the lag happens when I was drawing and try to flip between frames. It was a feeling like "every frame I want to flip to has to be pre-loaded". Like websites have to be loaded before you can see them.

That's it for now. Any ideas? Every help is very welcome

[Paul Fierlinger]

Well, there's always the idea to open TVP with a new configuration, but what you describe is very odd indeed. The size of your project, just 130% is nothing unusual. How about playing with an older version, something along the line of 9.5. Have you held on to one of those (I always do, BTW).

[Fabrice]

Any dependencies to a video footage ?

How big is the soundtrack ? (I already have seen people loading 3 hours long .mp3 and then slowing down TVPaint ...)

What about your proxy settings ?

What if you reset your configuration to default ?

Please can you upload the file somewhere for the dev team to test ?

[Animark]

Thanks for your thoughts, I will try one after another and keep you informed. It needs a little bit time to test, because the problem normally needs some time to appear.

There are no video dependencies. Also the problem don't relates to one special project file. I have about 25 projects (scenes) and in nearly every project the lagging came after some time. So, I think it don't makes any sense to upload one of them for now. But uploading is generally possible.

I will start with the sound. The sound is the only thing that is connected to every project of the film on every computer I use. But it is not a 3h lasting .mp3, it is:
- lenght = 1:42 (minutes / sec)
- size = 14 MB
- .wav (generated with cubase AI7)
- 32 bit float, 48000 khz (1152 kBit/sec)

I think it is not big enough to slow down my PCs, but I remember that it could not be loaded into the 64 Bit version of TVPaint. I added the sound when I started to make the storyboard/animatic (in 32 Bit TVP). After that I splitted the master soundtrack to the clips and made a new project of every single clip.

OK, I will do tests on the sound-thing today and hopefully in the evening I can tell more.

[slowtiger]

I remember having some lag when I unnecessarily had "sound while scrubbing" turned on in the preferences. Did you try different options there?

And just another wild guess: is the soundfile really 48 khz (check with audacity), is TVP set to the same rate, and is the master sample rate of Windows set to this? (as it has to on the Mac, I don't know about windows)

[Fabrice]

I think it is not big enough to slow down my PCs, but I remember that it could not be loaded into the 64 Bit version of TVPaint.

would you mind sending us the file ?

the duration is good btw.

[Animark]

So, strange things happened. I made a lot of tests yesterday on my own maschine and today on my schools maschine, but I wasn't able to reproduce the lagging problem. I didn't changed anything and kept an eye on the performance tab of my win taskmanager. I also made file-copies from the same hd and streamed some music while I was working - but no more lagging.

Sometimes my students ask me for help when they have technically problems and the problems went away in the moment they asked me. Maybe now it's the same with my problem, it disappeared after I wrote this topic. However, I will keep an eye on it and will report here, when something will happen.

Thanks for your help anyway. My soundfile is 48khz while tvpaint preferences kept a value of 44.1 khz. I also had the scrubbing option checked (I needed for sync) but it looks like it has no negative influence - at the moment.

[Mike]

I think it is not big enough to slow down my PCs, but I remember that it could not be loaded into the 64 Bit version of TVPaint.

Just some information about sound files which don't open on TVPaint Animation 10 64bits.

_ If the file opens in TVPaint Animation 9, it will open in TVPaint Animation 10 32bits
_ For 8/16bits sound files, there shouldn't be any problem with TVPaint Animation 10 64bits
_ The main problem can occur with sound files which are 24bits.
In this case, the bitrate must be <= 512Kbits/s. If not, the file won't open in TVPaint Animation 10 64bits
So, for 24bits sound files, you must export them with a bitrate under 512Kbits/s OR use TVPaint Animation 10 32bits

This difference between TVPaint Animation 32bits and 64bits versions is due to ... yes, QuickTime.
TVPaint Animation 10 32bits uses QT but not the 64bits version, because QT library is not available in 64bits (Apple doesn't want to do it) so TVPaint Animation 10 64bits can't use QT.
And for these specific sound files (24bits & high bitrate), it's QT which loads them in TVPaint Animation 10 32bits (and TVPaint Animation 9 which is always 32bits)

[Henk Beumers]

Hi all.
For what it's worth, I experienced these lags a number of times through the years. Very annoing at the moment and I never could relate it to one specific reason. Very different project sizes. With- and without sound.
If I look back to the job's I remember in which I experienced this behaviour it also occured in Mirage. 2009. So that's Mirage. TVP 9. TVP 9 pro all 32 bits and now 10X pro 64 bits.
It's must be something stupid like a bad monday because it's there and the next day it's gone for a long time.
Henk.