Crazy file sizes

[David_Fine]

I am perplexed as to why file sizes vary so much and wonder if there is something inherent in the way I am saving which is causing this. I have two scenes which are the identical set ups with the same layer structure and characters. The scenes are a very similar length. Both are line drawing with no BG files or anything much different about them, except the animation is slightly different, as they are different scenes. One file is 19 mb and the other is 48 mb. Why?

I have another line drawing scene which is actually lower resolution, shorter and less layers and it is 86 mb. How can this be? What can be causing such widely varying files sizes? The audio is different, but the audio files are about 1 or 2 mb, so they do not account for this huge variation.

[Elodie]

Did you crop the files ? or Did you import sequences ?

Lupus Film showed me once a weird bug that makes file being bigger when you crop them, maybe it's related.

[David_Fine]

It's possible, but certainly not in every case. What is it I can do to fix this problem now? The 86 mb file should probably be more like 10 mb. I am sharing these files with other people via Dropbox and so this makes updating rather slow. Is there any way to optimize a file? Maybe it is holding unused images or something.

[David_Fine]

Does anyone else have this issue?

[slowtiger]

Sometimes my file sizes seem to look funny, but it's no issue. I only care if a file suddenly gets much smaller, but so far even then there was no mistake and no loss of information.

[David_Fine]

Right, but when two similar files vary in size from 10 mb to 100 mb, there is something very wrong and as I say, it makes sharing over a network, or Dropbox, really cumbersome because updating is slow. I'm hoping the developers can explain how to address this, but I haven't heard yet. I suspect they are distracted by Annecy coming up.

[slowtiger]

OK, I understand this is a problem for you. My file sizes easily reach 1 GB or more, so a difference of 100 MB isn't relevant for me.

[David_Fine]

What kind of scene gets as big as 1gb? Is it 4K? Is it a long scene? Lots of full colour? In my case, just very short line drawing only. No large files involved. The issue for me is really the fact that there is a mysterious ten fold increase in files size for the same thing. So would that mean that I could have a 1 GB scene turn into a 10 GB scene? My point is, something is very wrong if pretty much the same files can be ten times the size, so I am hoping there might be some explanation.

[slowtiger]

In my case, part of the size was due to my inexperience. I had several films of about 2 min length done in a single scene - one of them before we had those nifty exposure system in TVP. The file went up to 12 GB, IIRC, because of some veeeeery slow background dissolves and a continuous frame-filling rain on 1's.

If I find time again I maybe do some tests about this.

[David_Fine]

So I have a four second scene. The line drawing version is 77 mb. The cleaned up version, with a dark ink line and more layers, should be bigger, but for some reason, it's only 9 mb. So that's totally bizarre and suggests that there is something really odd going on. If I knew, I could just fix it by optimizing whatever needs deleting.

[D.T. Nethery]

So I have a four second scene. The line drawing version is 77 mb. The cleaned up version, with a dark ink line and more layers, should be bigger, but for some reason, it's only 9 mb. So that's totally bizarre and suggests that there is something really odd going on. If I knew, I could just fix it by optimizing whatever needs deleting.

That is very odd . I've never noticed that large of a jump (in file size ) . I have often noticed that adding FX to a scene or adding layers will make the file size get larger , but never a difference as extreme as between 77 MB compared to 9MB . (and in your case it starts off larger at 77 MB and gets smaller at 9MB , even though the cleaned-up version with more layers would be expected to be larger ...) I've been following this discussion and have run some tests , but I'm unable to duplicate this phenomenon you are describing.

Question : is the rough line drawing version (the 77 MB file size) generated from scanned and imported drawings , or are the rough line drawings all drawn digitally directly into TVPaint ? The reason I ask is because that is the only case where I have usually noticed such a dramatic reduction in file size ... for example, I have a scene which is sized at 2048 x 1536 , 116 frames , 3 layers , made up from scanned drawings . Without any changes to the raw imported drawings the file size is initially 800 MB . However, when I run the Scan Cleaner FX on the drawings the file size goes down to 25 MB . That's the typical behavior I would expect . But if the rough scene had been 3 layers, 116 frames , drawn digitally , I expect it would have been about the same size to start with (25 MB) and would not change dramatically when I added the clean-up layers ... it might get slightly larger with the clean-up layers , but I would not expect to see it shrink . Adding fill color layers to each of my 3 layers in the test scene made the file size go up to 34 MB .

.

[David_Fine]

All the artwork is drawn in TVPaint. No scanning. Also no FX or BG. Just line drawing. I just opened the 77 mb file, made a very tiny change and re saved it and the file size dropped to 26 mb, so that's intriguing. As if it was holding some info, like multiple undos or something, which it discarded. I could privately send you two files which show this behaviour if you think you might be able to see why it's happening.

[Thierry]

David,

Elodie forwarded me your files, and I also noticed the issue (noticed it with other files too).
We'll see what is causing such an increase of file size.

>> to-do listed !

[David_Fine]

Great. Thank you! I look forward to hearing from you when you have had a chance to review. Cheers!

[David_Fine]

Any news on this issue? Thanks.