I’m working on an animated music video and I’ve realized something important as I was building one scene after another. With each new complex scene full of objects and animations, even after the scene was done and nothing was left to animate in that scene, Synfig would animate slower and slower.
I realized turning off each scene (each scene is in it’s own group) when I was done with it, by unchecking the check box in the layers list, would speed things up. That helped while I was working but I can’t animate that parameter so it doesn’t help when I want to play back the entire video.
Now here’s the tip. Assuming your animation is grouped into scenes, ensure that once a scene, or group of animations is finished, set a waypoint with it’s “amount” value (why isn’t that called “opacity”?) to 0 and ensure the waypoint’s “in” and “out” values (right click on the waypoint) are set to constant. Do the same at time point 0 and only make the scene visible just before it begins to animate the first object. Once something is invisible and constantly invisible, it no longer consumes animation resources and the remaining objects/scenes animate faster.