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Hey everyone

I'm new here and I'm also pretty new to TVP in general, so if I ask some very stupid questions, I'm sorry. Trouble is: I'm working on my bachelor project for university right now, which is a ±3 min animation film. I wanted to do the animatic in one big project, then (as I saw the project kept getting bigger and bigger, needing more and more time for saving and having problems with the preview) split the file into smaller scenes for animating. So far so good. But I kept asking myself if it is normal for TVPaint to be SO SLOW? I'm working with TVP 10.5 on a MacBook Pro. Until today, I had 4GB RAM and an HDD, but as it was going slower in general, I upgraded today to 8GB RAM and an SSD. But still, while yesterday I would wait 3 minutes for the program to save, it now still takes 1 minute (in the big file with the animatic (which is 5,42GB by now, with 3 scenes/20 clips, no sound).

Is there anything in the settings I can change or whatever so it doesn't take so long? Or am I just spoiled by Adobe programs which save in a heartbeat? Right now I'm always between "do I take the extra minute to save?" or "do I dare take the risk and wait a little longer just so I don't get out of the flow to wait the extra minute?" - and then if I don't save, TVP crashes all of a sudden (another annoying thing that happens every other day) and I lose what I haven't saved... but saving after every step, like I would in AfterEffects, just takes too much time for me right now! (Also, I have to export every scene right now because the preview is going too slow.) Is there anything wrong with me or is this normal?

Any help would be highly appreciated, I just can't imagine that this is TVP standard behaviour.
Thank you!
Susann

I was in that situation myself and swore never again to allow a project become that long and that big. I had a nearly 10 GB file which took more than 10 minutes to open or to save. The good part: TVP was still able to flawlessly work with it, although I only had 2 GB of RAM at that time.

The technical reason for that: writing or reading several GB to or from the drive takes time. Although I'm wondering why an SSD would be that slow, maybe someone with more experience with these can comment. I do hope you always back up that thing on a real hard drive every evening?

Unless it's absolutely necessary (like having one consistent scene of several minutes) I'd divide my films into short bits, scene by scene.

Thanks for that quick reply! Yes, I had hoped the SSD would make a bigger difference... (I hope it does with the preview in smaller files at least. Already when I started the project and it was only about 25MB, it already had problems with a smooth preview if I remember correctly. Ever since I had a project with a camera (but the canvas isn't that much bigger than 1920x1080.)

Yeah, the problem is that up to now, I don't have a real "cut" in the film, it's just one long scene really. But I guess I could make a cut somewhere. But that's the reason I wanted one big file to see if the whole thing works.

And yep, I'm backing up all data every evening on 2 external harddrives (I've experienced a harddrive crash in a bigger important project a few years ago and am paranoid with that stuff ever since ).

I just remembered that there's a function I don't use myself but which may cause serious delay: Auto Backup. It's in the preferences. Is it a really high value? Then this could be the culprit. Set it to 2 or even 0, this should help.

Hm, thanks but no, it's already set to 0 (I think by default, at least I didn't change it).

I don't know which version of TVP you are working on, but there's a new item in Preferences, called TVPP Compression. Do you have that checked by chance? That would slow down saving time.

Do I need to check or uncheck it? Either way, it was unchecked, I checked it, didn't help (made it worse, so I guess unchecked is better).
(I'm using TVP 10.5 by the way.)

Yeah, it was a shot in the dark, and yes, unchecked.
Your project is too big for safety sake in my opinion and I say this for more reasons than just whether your computer is powerful enough to handle it. It's just too big to lose without getting a heart attack. I never go beyond 12 clips within a single project. To work on a school project of this unwieldy size is just too risky, but you can split it into several, say thre parts. There's a utility for this in the animator's panel, which works quite well. If you want to take this route, I can guide you through it (if you can't figure this out for yourself, but it is simple): One third of the way make a cut. You will get yor projects name with the addition xxx right and xxx left. The right one will be twice the legth of the left one, so cut that in half. Now you have three projects and rename them as you wish and see how the save time goes. I'm pretty sure it'll pretty close to normal. Later, there's a way for you to put them back together as a single file, which again, won't be difficult to do. Just save all the elements as you go.

Do you mean the "split clip" button in the Animator Panel? I've used that for splitting clips that got too long (frame-wise, but they're still not very long, I'm making rather short clips), but not to divide the whole project. If so, then I don't see the right option in the Animator Panel... When I view the project and say "split clip", it still just splits the clip and makes a new clip *inside* the project, but doesn't create a new project. (To split the whole project, until now I'd have done it by duplicating the "big project" and deleting all the clips except for the ones belonging to, say, scene 1, saving it as its own .tvpp, duplicating the "big one" again, deleting all except for scene 2, saving this, and so forth... I bet there's a smarter way with your suggestion and I'm just not seeing it right now. Maybe I go get some sleep. )

No, you're doing it the right way. I thought you had said the entire film is one clip. If this is the case, and you have divided the clips into more than one project, are you seeing better results in save times? You should.

I wonder if something went completely wrong, cause over 5GB for an animatic seems really large for me. I don't know if this could be something similar: A friend noticed that his edit (an adobe premiere file) nearly doubled its size every time he saved it. After a day working on it it grew from 24mb to some GBs.
He still doesn't know what could be the reason for it, maybe a corrupted file, but in his case it helped to create a new Project and import the old in it.
I don't know if there is the possibility to import a whole project in TVPaint or if it will help, but maybe.

Susan, have you installed the 64 bit version of TVPaint ?
Have you checked the "TVPP compression" in the preferences ?
Have you only drawn in TVPaint or have you imported videos or image sequences ?

schwarzgrau: Strangely, this worked for now. I copied everything and pasted it into a new project of the same dimensions, et voilà - 1,75GB. Now I'm curious to see how fast it will gain weight again

Elodie: Ehm, I guess 32bit - in "About TVP" it says 10.5.4. 32 bit. "TVPP compression" is unchecked. I drew mostly in TVP, I just imported a background layer... (well in some clips I tried (just to get to know the program) the Motion Keyframer to move the background layer, I guess that's making the project bigger?)

Did you try to save with the 64-bits version ? It should be faster (and you should also update to TVPaint 10.5.5).

Ah, whoops, I didn't know there was already a 10.5.5. I'm downloading it right now
But, ehm...how do I get/change it to/... the 64 bit version? x)

Also, what's happened now: I've got the smaller file (1,77GB by now) but now it takes again 2 full minutes to save, so 1 minute more than the 5,42GB version. How does this make any sense?