Hey folks - Been a while!
I was getting a bit wild with animation for a project and something i did is causing my file to not open again. I;ve been trying for hours with chatGPT to try to figure out how to fix the code myself but no luck.
Wondering if anyone can look and help make it so the file opens again? Even if some portion of the animation or some layer is lost, preserving the bulk of it and then fixing from there would still be worth it to me! Thank you for considering… @BobSynfig and anyone! (file got big so using drive if permissible)
I sent you restored file in private message. I had to remove duplicated waypoints, so parts of animation maybe missing since waypoints are duplicated in time, not necessarily in value.
For developers:
The problem was in duplicated waypoints, here’s an example from the corrupted file:
You can see that there are duplicated GUIDs in waypoints (highlighted). Why do we need GUIDs for them? Seems like they serve no purpose
The first waypoint has negative time (-0.3s), this should not be possible
And the main problem, there are duplicated waypoints at 3.5s
In summary, file contained 17738 duplicated waypoints. Luckily, I had a perl script to remove them, otherwise it would have taken me a lot of time to process manually… After removal of waypoints, the file shrunk from 23.5Mb to 19.4Mb, so 4 Mb of duplicated waypoints.
Anyway, the question is, what causes Synfig to save so many duplicates? You can see on the second picture the problematic waypoints at 3.5s have the same GUID, so this is something to take note of.
I’ve just checked and you’re right! You can go to “Canvas->Properties->Time” and just set something like -10s in “Start time”. I didn’t know Synfig allows you to do that. Damn, one more mistake like that and BobSynfig will take away my “Expert Synfig User” badge
Wow - thank you so so much to Svarov. it opens and everything I care about was preserved! Such a life saver.
Regarding other points, questions, etc:
Yes this was my bad re: not backing up. I usually am responsible about lots of version save-as’s as I work, but this time I didnt. Lesson (re-)learned!
This was version 1.5.3. Of note just had to re-download on a new device after old computer died, still working out kinks.
I think I know what particularly caused this error, and relates to the negative time question - you know the “Scale Waypoints” feature that allows me to spread out waypoints on the timeline? I was playing with that just before saving and closing this file, and I think I spread some waypoints backward into negatives, and probably caused some waypoints to overly others, causing the glitch. Of note as I was working I noticed a weird glitch I hadnt seen before where if I was in a subfolder/sub-group, usually I can manipulate all the waypoints associated within that canvas, but instead it seemed that I was still acting on waypoints even of the parent groups. I’ll see if that continues or if it was a one off.
As an aside, I am excited that i do NOT think the problem was a new python script I have been creating with chatGPT’s help that allows me to automatically merge certain tangents but not others when I export my vector work from inkscape - I hope to share that soon in a separate post. I also have created a recent python script that takes any non-animated vertex widths and animates them to randomly vary in thickness and jitter a little, to create a bit more of a drawn animation look. More to come!
Thank you again to the community for being awesome! My learners continue to benefit from these animations.
