Timeline Freeze

First, I want to say that I absolutely love Synfig. All I wanted was an animation package where I could place images and features, set up keyframes, and animate them. This is it! It works. And it’s free.

Well, it works for awhile. That’s my issue. I’m using Synfig 0.61.08 on WinXP. When I’m doing some serious editing, it usually lasts for 5-10 minutes. Then I’ll drag the timeline to preview the animation, and Synfig crashes. Sometimes it’ll crash in less than a minute of starting to use it, which starts to make it unusable even with constant saving.

I do have a dual-core processor. I set the affinity each time. That helps, but it will still crash in a few minutes if I’m doing heavy modifying and timeline dragging.

Once again, I think Synfig is excellent. It’s simple to use and it works well. I’m sure it works great on Linux (which I am not using now), but for me on Windows it’s frustratingly unusable except for very small projects. Any ideas? Thanks.

Do you have any more information about the crash? A backtrace perhaps?

And can you share your sif or sifz file?

My feeling is that there are some loose ends in the rendering code, and occasionally this results in a crash. The more layers you have, or the longer it takes to redraw, the more likely you’ll crash… I think there is still an open bug on dragging the timeline around as fast as you can… But this is just qualitative analysis based on my gut feel. I’d love to get some quantitative data on which are the troublesome layers (I suspect the warp layer myself)

Thanks
Chris

Sorry, I just noticed there’s a support forum! Feel free to move this there if you want.

I’m not sure if it’s possible to provide a backtrace. When this issue happens, all Synfig windows close without warning and I’m back to the desktop.

The files I’ve been working on are very simple… just one text layer and one image layer. I think I have to be a member to attach anything. I will do that tomorrow.

When I do not set CPU affinity, Synfig will crash right away when I do a timeline drag. After I do set the affinity, it will last longer. But then it will always crash after 5-10 minutes, and it always happens on a timeline drag. Maybe dragging slower would help? I haven’t been doing it “as fast as I can”, but you never know.

  1. The program makes back-ups which you could send. If you restart the program it asks you if you want to load that backed-up data (though I guess you’ve noticed :wink: ).

  2. For me Synfig crashed only once during a timeline drag and that was when I wanted to go from one of the last frames to the very first one in one drag. I guess that could be seen as an example that Synfig can’t handle fast timeline drags.