I’m hitting a lot of crashes running Animate Pro on Windows 7.
The most frequent and obnoxious are the crashes while rendering. The program will crash at the first keyframe of a camera move. If I make it past there, I’m usually good (unless I start doing other things on the computer during the render).
Initially I only experienced render-related crashes when I wanted to render a movie using H.264 compression. As I said above, the problem starts at the first frame of a camera move. If the render didnt crash at this point, it would stop rendering my BG layer after the first keyframe of the camera move. The movie file would have a black BG, rather than my imported JPEG.
I continue to experience the crashes, but the dropped BG only happens with H.264.
The solution I came up with was to just render with no compression and compress it later with Quicktime Pro. That worked fine until recently, when I once again experienced crashes on the first frame of my camera move.
The NEXT solution I came up with was to just render the frames as images, then put them together in After Effects. Obviously, that solution was also short-lived, because now I’m getting the same crashes on the first frame of camera moves, and I’m all out of solutions.
This is not a file-specific issue. It has happened with at least the last 10 files I’ve created. I do not know what to do, because I love ToonBoom, but If I can’t render my work I just can’t use it.
I can’t imagine that my computer’s not powerful enough. I’ve got:
- Intel Xeon CPU with 2.93GHz
- 4 GB RAM
- NVIDIA Quadro FX 1800 Graphics Card with 2558 mb of available graphics memory
- over 700 GB of hard drive space
AND I’ve got the “Visual Effects” settings set to "Adjust for Best Performance"
Any tips, suggestions, solutions? Are there any patches I should download? Any help is much appreciated. Thanks!
-JJ
Well I just did it a test here with a quick scene that I created with a camera move in it. I was unable to reproduce your crash.
You said that this happened with 10 files that you created - can you describe the steps that you use to reproduce this crash? Is it something like the following:
1) create a new scene
2) add a drawing element
3) add a background
4) add an animated camera
5) try to render - crash
Or is it something where you have to create a file, then add a whole lot of elements, a lot of animation, and then it only starts to crash after a while?
With crashes it’s usually best to email Tech Support - you can send them a sample scene that crashes for you and they can investigate on their end to see what the problem is. Send them an email at techsupport@toonboom.com
Thanks for the quick reply! It’s something that happens after I’ve been working a scene for a few hours. So I’ve got Toon Boom created elements, Photoshop imported elements, peg animation, symbol animation, etc.
I’ll definitely email Tech Support. When I send them a scene, I need to send all of the elements, correct? Is there an easy way to bundle all the files/folders up?
Thanks again!
Yes, when you send your scene to tech support, you’ll need to send the whole project folder. What you’ll need to do is select the project folder in an explorer window, usually for Animate Pro it stores the projects by default in My Documents, but you may have decided to store it somewhere else. Select the folder and then zip it, using a zip client like Winrar for example or 7zip. Once your folder is zipped, you can attach it to an email, or if it’s too big to email, then the support department will set up an ftp where you can put it.
It may be that your scene is too heavy and is in need of some optimization. If you can’t reproduce the problem with an empty scene, then it usually doesn’t mean that there’s an actual bug, but perhaps you’re creating scenes in a way that’s not very efficient and is eating up lots of memory. Although you have an excellent setup, everything is finite - but they’ll have to take a look and see.
Thanks! It actually looks like that’s the problem. I’m creating scenes that require huge background images, which seem to be the source of the troubles. Trimming the BGs in Photoshop to the bare minimum seems to have solved the problem on the scenes I’ve tested it on (although I’m still having the H.264 issue…)
-JJ