Changing preview defaults [Issue #3584]

Hey guys,

We’re about to change some defaults in Preview dialog. Check out this issue for details: Correcting default parameters in Preview dialog · Issue #3584 · synfig/synfig · GitHub
Basically, I proposed to change Quality to 1 and FPS to the project’s value. The reasons:

  • Quality = 1.0 - a good balance between rendering time and quality of the image
  • FPS = [project’s rate] - there shouldn’t be any frame skipping, it alters intended feel of animation

Old defaults are:

  • Quality = 0.5 (very poor quality)
  • FPS = Project’s rate / 2. So it skips frames which I am not a fan of, especially when making frame-by-frame animation

I use Preview window A LOT because you can manually and easily control speed of the animation using scrollbar. So how do you guys feel about this? @KonstantinDmitriev @rodolforg @BobSynfig @Kai @robertojguerra @Khemardi (man, I wish there was a group with all active artists, so we can ping them all using @artists)

Let’s vote:

  • Yeah, let’s change preview defaults
  • I think old defaults make more sense
  • Eh, I don’t really care about Preview window
0 voters
2 Likes

For the context, Issue #3584 / PR #3690

Here is what I wrote in Pull Request

The question is what is the point to do this ?
A preview at (Quality 1 / FPS 24) is a full size and full quality render in cache (Quality 1 means size 100%).
The preview default settings are on purpose low quality to speed up the process in order to have a rough idea (you can see that it is a render with the progression bar).
In the other hand, you can obtain the same type of preview in the workarea activating “Render future and past frames in background when enabled” when you want to preview and if you set bounds it pre-renders everything in this interval only.
And at least in the workarea, you can set “Low Res” and select a rendering mode to make it lighter!

If you set the zoom at 100%, this is full canvas size.
Don’t use “Fit” that makes it look ugly.

I’d rather say we should rather have editable defaults in the Preferences>Render settings.

3 Likes

And to have a default zoom to “100%” instead of “Fit” which makes the render ugly …
At least to understand that “Quality” is a ratio of the canvas resolution, not a real Quality setting

Yeah, I like that idea. Didn’t think of that myself…

Yeah, I checked it now and “quality” in Preview Window is related to pixel-size/canvas resolution and internally (code-wise) is called… “zoom”, oh my.

It is unrelated to the (deprecated) “quality” parameter for rendering. By the way, AFAICS it is used only in (Noise) Distort and Radial Blur layers.

It is a good way to avoid hate lol

Maybe add in the Preview Settings dialog a “save as default values” button too.

Hmm, I see people actually divided on this… Yeah, the option to change preview settings technically won, but I am not comfortable to push forward with this. Alright, what I think I am going to do is close my issue, close the related PR and then make a new issue about implementing defaults in the way @Kai suggested.

Maybe in meantime we could change Quality to Scale in Preview window, it does make more sense this way.

1 Like

Or maybe Pixel Size.