Hi
A difficult one this. I created a movie in Synfig a few months ago and was very impressed. I just reloaded it yesterday after upgrading to .64 (64bit) and I get about one frame per 1.5 seconds - intervening frames are dropped. I regressed to .63 and it’s the same. Uhoh…
Since creating the movie originally I have installed inkscape successfully from .dmg, and kdenlive from MacPorts which I have subsequently removed - it wasn’t quite for me yet!
Is it possible that some library file has been overwritten that Synfig needs? This is probably too wide open to solve but I’ll be very sad as I have some paid cartoon work coming up and I would like to keep using Synfig.
Thanks
Jeremy
2011 MacBook Pro + 8GB RAM
Mountain Lion
Maybe it is something you added to the file that is getting it going slow. Do you have old versions of the file? Maybe you can share the file to test what’s causing its noticeable slowness?
-G
Hi
No, no changes at all. But I followed your advice and tried an older incomplete version and that was slow as well.
I have attached the sifz file and would be very grateful for any comments or pointers toward a solution.
There were over 200 video frames that I rotoscoped which I hope are not required to make the file run as I have not attached them!
Many thanks
Jeremy
AxtRoto6a.sifz (779 KB)
Very interesting issue. 
The way to come back to speed up playback is to remove the useless (I think) Advanced Outlines that are in the big and small lightnings. Looks like you create them with a tool with the two layers creation enabled.
So what’s the issue behind the Advanced Outlines? The calculations to arrange the widths is very time consuming. It is a waste of time from the computer point of view to calculate the widths if the Outline is not visible at that time! Many Advanced Outlines with many points each one becomes slow render.
I have to think on something else to avoid update of the widths if the layer is not visible.
Thanks for sharing the file. It helped me a lot to understand a potential improvement I can do in Advanced Outlines.
Cheers!
Wow! Thank you!
Yes, that certainly speeds things up, except when the two lightnings are visible. Also setting Low Res helps a little more. This makes Synfig usable again for which thank you. I’ll reinstate .64 and see how that goes.
However… It doesn’t quite explain why Synfig was running at normal speed a few months ago. Or… Am I remembering t wrong? I know I used to run the preview renderer quite a lot, perhaps because of this exact problem? Hmm. I’ll read up a bit about advanced outlines and only use them when I actually need to in future. I haven’t deleted them from this project, just unticked them in the object tree.
Anyway, thank you so much for your excellent and speedy help, it is greatly appreciated. I can now work on turning this prototype into what my client actually wants!
Jeremy
Thanks to you, others will benefit when I speed up the Advanced Outlines render time.
-G
