I just purchased a shiny-new computer with nice specs and tried to run Animate Pro on it. At first it was working well, but when I changed the resolution to around where I will need it (7650x9900) it crashed (without any error message). Not right off the bat, but always around the first minute or two - it seemed to be expedited when ever the “render” button was clicked. So I booted up my hardware monitoring equipment to assess the situation:
CPU load : Core 1 of 4 (of 8 ) stayed around 20% - max spike of 66%. Others nominal or 0%.
GPU : nominal - spiked once at 22% and 50%
Memory usage : didn’t seem to increase much beyond what is normally used - plenty of gigs left.
Then I tried adding some extra threads as it said in the manual - that only made it crash faster… So I’ve been poking around the forums, trying to figure out what’s going on. The closest thing I’ve been able to find is that Animate Pro is limited by it’s 32bit architecture (can’t use all of the RAM available and such…?) - is that what is causing this? When 64bit is out, will all my troubles with this be over? I’d really like to be able to try a 15300x19000 resolution, too! Will the 64bit also be available in a PLE to try - or perhaps there is a beta for the 64bit Animate Pro/Harmony coming out soon?
Thank you for taking the time to read this!
Computer Specs:
Windows7 64bit
CPU: i7 3.8ghz (4 cores - hyperthreaded “8”)
GPU: 360TI 2gig
RAM: 16gig
It is most probably a memory maxed out for a 32 bit. What kind of film are you rendering at that resolution? Is it for a poster?
In 64bit it will push the limit much higher so you shouldn’t have these issues.
Do you have big bitmap images in the scene also? If so you could help the situation by activating Preferences> Render Tab> Enable External Read if image is bigger than. By using this it will process the bitmap images in a different thread with the maximum memory allowed by the Operating System so that Stage doesn’t have to used up it’s memory allocation as much. This only helps when you have bitmap images though.
Yep, you’ve got it - got to have that nice, crystal clean look! (TV resolutions are soooo low… 
)
Not a single one - but it sounds like a good idea, so I’ll try and keep that tip in mind - you never know, I might need it later!
I seems to be just the size that is killing the program. A basic summery of how I tested it is this:
The same thing happens if I don’t scribble like a maniac. Telling it to render is the fastest way to get it to crash/stall - even if the screen is empty/has two strokes.
That’s normal. When you are not Rendering, in OpenGL view, it doesn’t care about the output resolution except to keep the right aspect ratio of the camera frame. What could make it crash at the point is the number of vector lines that you have. The graphic card’s memory would be the limit.
However when you change to the render view then it has to create that huge bitmap and then the memory allocation might be maxed out. There is probably a mathematical way to find that limit, something like the number of pixels x 3 channels x 16 bit/per channel. I think even if you are outputing in 8 bit/per channel it would still create a 16 bit image internally since all the calculation under the hood is 16 bit to maximize the quality.
You might have to try to lower a bit your resolution until a 64 bit version is out.
Thanks for the info!
That’s a bit of an understatement 
Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to wait for the 64bit PLE to come out before I can really abuse it. Unfortunately, I can’t just tell the program to render a “screenshot” of the image to the very high res I’m looking for - it seems to max out a little bit higher then HiDef. Unless your screen is set higher then that and you check the button to use the current project res (but that creates a corrupted file at 7650x9900 - 1/2 res works, though!).
I’ll just have to poke around and get to know the program better while I wait for the release/beta. Oh poor, poor me, I can’t do any work with it, so I’ll have to go play with the cool animation software, instead! ;D
Thanks for taking the time to help me with this, Stevemasson!
The other thing that I know some people have done when outputting posters is they’ll output it in pieces then stitch the pieces together. Not an elegant solution, but effective.
In Harmony we also have the ability to export a PDF.
~Lilly