Hi from a newbie filmmaker

General Introductions
1

Hi all, I stumbled upon Synfig ages ago, but only recently i started getting more interested in it and decided to join the forum. Today I managed to make a bouncing ball in Synfig :slight_smile: I am an independent filmmaker and I am working on a film made only with free software and released online under a creative commons license. The film will include some simple 2d animation and the tool I want to use is Synfig. I just wanted to introduce myself and thank the developers for the great work they are doing with Synfig!

ps: I have 2 suggestions:

  1. I create my canvas 1920×1080 and every time I open Synfig I have to manually re enter that size as by default is smalle. Would it be possible remembering the previous size when Synfig is opened?

  2. For us who are into filmmaking a cool option would be being able to select the canvas size according to video resolution like 1920×1080, 1280×720 and so on would it be feasible?

  3. This is not a suggestion but I would like to point out that changing theme into dark does not work in my Synfig (version 1.0.2 OS Lubuntu 16.04.01)

I don’t have an account on github but if someone would like opening feature request tickets would be great :slight_smile:

Filmmaker

2

Hi and welcome Filmmaker,

  1. Edit/Preferences/Document
  2. Maybe
  3. Look at my signature how to change GTK theme

And of course search function of the forum and the wiki…
All these topics are widely answered already…

P.S.: Some incompatibilities between 1.0.2 and more recent version for file format, you should switch to dev versions to be able to open your stuff in the future :wink:

3

Thank you for the suggestion and for the welcome BobSynfig!

I Didn’t know about the incompatibilities thank you!

I will check the wiki more (I found the tutorials there)

I tried installed the snapshot version and it looks very good! I also managed to set the canvas size and the dark theme.

I have a question on the render engine though. I know that Cobra is the new engine but which version should I use for the optimum quality? Cobra (software), Cobra (hardware) or Cobra (safe)? I decided to go for Cobra (software) as my laptop it is not crap but it is not a power station so I thought better to stick to software rendering but I may be wrong.

Also this is trivial but would like to point out that the icon of Synfig in Lubuntu 16.04.1 looks blurred (bad resolution I suppose) it seems a bit strange given that the software is used for 2d art ( my 2cents), anyway again thank you!

Filmmaker

4

Hi,
about rendering engine you can try them all.
It affects only the speed of the rendering, depending on your hardware configuration (guys please correct me if I’m wrong).
Hardware uses NVIDIA GPU for acceleration (if your computer has one onboard).
Software is the almost the same, without GPU use.
As Cobra is still under development, some features may be missing compared to the old/legacy Cairo engine, some of these stuff are available with Safe (and some optimizations are not applied too).

For the icon, you have the source SIF to render it in better resolution if you want :wink:

Cheers