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I'm working remotely with a friend who is new to TVPaint. He is making a short film that is 3.5 minutes long . His storyboards are all in a single .tvpp file , but I showed him how to break it up into Clips (scenes) . There are 41 Clips . There is a music track (song) that runs the duration of the 3.5 minutes. Most of the scenes have 3 - 7 layers , with several still images (storyboards) on each layer , but not an excessive number of images . At this point there is no animation , only the black and white storyboard panels. The pixel resolution of the project is 3840 x 2160 . The latest version of the file is around 3.8 GB , which seems rather large for 3.5 minute animatic with no fully animated scenes, no color , just black and white sketches (some grey fills) .

Anyone have any thoughts on why it would have ballooned up so large ? Could it be the music track ? What if he reloads the soundtrack but does not save it as a dependency embedded in the project ? (so the soundtrack is a referenced dependency ), would that make the overall file size smaller ?

I'm at a disadvantage in that I don't have the file myself to look at , but trying to figure out from a distance what the issue may be and tell him how to fix it. If anyone has any suggestions , I'd appreciate it.

One of the other things I'm considering is to suggest that he downscale the project (modify project) to 1920 x 1080 for the animatic , but then when he's ready to animate , work at the 2x scale of 3840 x 2160 (to allow for resizing, camera moves, without any pixel blurriness) with each scene split up to it's own separate .tvpp project file , rather than all scenes in the same project file. I had told him that I would usually work at 2x the intended final output (which in this case will be 1920 x 1080 ), so that is why he scaled his project to 3840 x 2160 , but now I wonder if that scale is overkill for an animatic ? Maybe better to just work at 1920 x 1080 for the animatic ...

I do my animatics even smaller, like 1280 x 720 - good enough to draw, good enough to show. I can always blow up a scene when I start animating if necessary.

Yes, he definitely needs to break up his film into 41 separate project files!

Agreed on the need to down-res the animatic. Under 1080 should be fine. A short while ago I purchased the Bloop Animation tutorial series for TVPaint and one of the particularly useful sections of it was a guide to splitting your animatic.

D.T. Nethery wrote: ↑02 Sep 2018, 16:39He is making a short film that is 3.5 minutes long . His storyboards are all in a single .tvpp file , but I showed him how to break it up into Clips (scenes) . There are 41 Clips . There is a music track (song) that runs the duration of the 3.5 minutes. Most of the scenes have 3 - 7 layers , with several still images (storyboards) on each layer , but not an excessive number of images . At this point there is no animation , only the black and white storyboard panels. The pixel resolution of the project is 3840 x 2160 . The latest version of the file is around 3.8 GB , which seems rather large for 3.5 minute animatic with no fully animated scenes, no color , just black and white sketches (some grey fills) .

Anyone have any thoughts on why it would have ballooned up so large ?

Look no further than that.
Such a filesize with these conditions is expected, if it was less than that I would be extremely surprised.