Performance

[ryberg]

Does TVpaint have any settings for performance with multiple cores, open GL, Ram etc.?

I'm working on a i7 iMac with 16 GB ram. How can I get the most out of this system?

I've noticed that After Effects does rapidly faster renders than TVpaint.

[Eric Scholl]

Hello ryberg,

You can configure your TVPaint to improve performance, but it depends on your computer power and on the size of your pictures.

The higher the resolution is, the bigger the images are. And the more it will take time to load these images.

Here are some tips to improve performance when using TVPaint:

When you import a file from a scanner, some light/white pixels make the file bigger. The first thing to do is to use the scan cleaner function of TVPaint. It will clean your picture and delete all light/white pixels.
You remove about 95% of the existing pixels, so you will see the difference when saving a project, and it improves loading speed of pictures.
You can find it in the FX window under "Add FX >> Color >> Scan Cleaner"

Scan.jpg (51.17 KiB) Viewed 15272 times

Try to use it with a spline in its settings, like this, with a flat curve at the beginning.

Untitled.jpg (30.29 KiB) Viewed 15272 times

Another thing to know is how to configure your proxy. Click on "Windows >> Preview Settings".

Proxy_settings.jpg (27.58 KiB) Viewed 15272 times

Here you can manage your preview settings, this don't have any consequence on your final video. Lets see how it works :

Background proxy renderer : the program will calculate the preview while you are working on it.
Force Proxy renderer : the program won't let you start the preview until it finished to calculate.

Quality : 100% means an excellent quality when watching the preview, but it will take more time to calculate it.
1% means very bad quality when watching the preview, but it will take less time to calculate it.

Show TC : shows the number of the frame your watching in preview

Play All : Force the preview to play all frames, but it could slow down the preview. Without this option, some frames could be skipped but the preview will always be played with the good speed.


What you can do too, is to use the fliplook functionality by hitting the "W" key when you are on one of your frames. It permit you to see some pictures before and after the selected picture, like in a preview.

I hope this will help you.

[malcooning]

I've noticed that After Effects does rapidly faster renders than TVpaint.

which After Effects version is that?
In CS5 AE became all x64, which makes for faster overall work.

The best rendering improvements come from tweaking the preview settings, as Eric pointed.
I usually set it for background proxy render, and set the Quality value down to 10-20 %.
This yields a fast render, and the quality is enough for getting the picture.

Another thing you might want to consider is utilizing your RAM, as you have quite a lot of it.
You can use something in the likes of RamDisk (google it). Basically this takes a defined portion of your RAM and creates a temporary drive from it, available for your system like a normal drive. This means you can then set this drive as your temp folder for TVP, and all the renders will be written there. And since it's a drive based on RAM, it'll write and read at least 10 times faster than a regular drive. It's much faster than a SSD drive too.

[ryberg]

which After Effects version is that?
In CS5 AE became all x64, which makes for faster overall work.

It's actually CS4 but even though it's not x64 you can set it to use multiple processors thus benefit from 16GB ram. I think that's why though I don't care to go too deep into tech stuff.

Just like both of you, I find the preview settings at "background proxy" to be most efficient. This has no effect on the final output render time of course.

RamDisk sounds interesting. Never heard of it before. I'll google it. Would this affect final output render time?

[ryberg]

Oh, and thanks for the tips Eric

[malcooning]

RamDisk sounds interesting. Never heard of it before. I'll google it. Would this affect final output render time?

Anything that is processor-dependent will not directly benefit from RamDisk, but the fact that you are offloading disk tasks from the CPU (because you'll be reading straight from the RAM) will make rendering the final output faster. Also, since you'll be reading from RAM and writing to the disk, it's a much faster process than reading from the disk and then writing to disk (alot of disk activity). Lastly, If you're working in large resolution and have many layers, any process that will normally be slowed by disk-read will benefit from RamDisk.
I was surprised how fast it worked when I used it the first time. It was faster than any RAID setup I had before. But as I have only 4GB of RAM installed currently I didn't keep on using RamDisk. When I build another system I'll make sure I have 16GB or more on it. Just be careful with anything that goes on the RAM drive. the nature of RAM (random access) is volatile. never store anything on it beyond the current session, and save often (your files should be located on a solid drive, but the temp drive should be the RAM).

[ryberg]

all-right, I'll look into it.