Hi,
Recently a small project I have been working on has been taking a very, very long time to shut down. I’m wondering why this might be. When I “quit Toon Boom Studio”, it takes about ten minutes to shut down (literally twelve minutes when I timed it this morning). I thought maybe there was too much line work (rough sketches were numbering over 100) so I deleted most of the roughs but the problem has not gone away. It seems to take longer each time I shut it down. Not even sure if it really is a problem, but as it was not happening with any previous projects, including much larger ones, I am starting to worry a bit.
Is this a common thing, and is it even something to be concerned about? Any advice would be appreciated.
Thanks very much.
DanB.
Hi,
Have you tried to transform all of your artwork from line to brush and have you also flattened everything?
The behavior you are encountering is not usual but there might be things that makes the software open and close such has the specs of your machine and the complexity of your project. Is this only happening with that current project? Also how big is the project in question?
Regards,
Ugo
Hi, thanks for the quick reply.
I do all my artwork in brush, both rough work and inking. I almost never use the line tools and when I do I always convert to brush. When I do my inking, I have “draw top layer” on so the drawings flatten automatically. When I’m doing my roughs, I have this off so I can gradually darken my lines and work out the shapes I like. I don’t bother flattening rough work as this seems an unnecessary step and takes time when the rough drawing has a lot of brush strokes (which is usually the case because I am not a great freehand illustrator and it takes me quite a bit of “pencilling” or sketching before I’ve worked out the correct shape). I do like to keep some roughs though, because I find I can often re-use bits of them, and I never know when one might come in handy, however…
It seemed to me that simply deleting the roughs after finishing their corresponding inked drawings would be a better solution than flattening them. Since this lag came into effect when shutting down, I have been deleting more roughs per session than I have been adding, so gradually their number is diminishing. There are fewer now than there were a couple of weeks ago, and at that time the program was shutting down nicely. Plus, in previous projects with more overall scenes, drawings and roughs, I never had this problem.
The current project is three scenes long, each with about 300 frames of
finished, inked drawings for each of three elements (body, mouth, eyes and nose), with about 70 roughs in the first scene and three separate voice/sound elements in total over the second and third scenes. The sound elements run from about 50 to 300 frames. They are MP3 files.
In previous projects I had more characters, scenes, voice files, plus a video background of myself interacting with the characters (I’m using version 4.5). I never erased any of the roughs in these previous projects.
My computer is a black macbook purchased around a year ago. Sorry, I’m not a techie and don’t know the specs. I never run anything else when using Toon Boom.
Does this have anything to do with the quartz/anti-aliasing (sorry, I don’t remember the exact terms - I am away from my home computer) options in the preferences display tab? I used to switch back and forth between changing that option and checking “open GL anti-aliasing” (or whatever it’s called) when I wanted to go from rough work to inking. One option is better for roughing because it prevents pen lag, but the other option was better for inking because the drawings are smoother (no jagged edges). After realizing it didn’t make a difference to the exported video if I do my inking with the former option active or not, I just left that on (because you have to restart Toom Boom every time you change those preferences). I was doing this for a while though, before the slow shut down problem started, so not sure if it’s related.
Sorry for the long reply; just trying to explain the situation as best I can so I can hopefully get a solution.
Thanks very much for any help in advance.
DanB.
Hi,
Your workflow seems to be correct. If this is completely isolated to this specific project would it be possible to provide us the project in question so we can do some testing to define what the exact cause of the slowness is.
You can send us an e-mail at techsupport@toonboom.com and we will arrange the sending of the project if the file is too big to send by e-mail.
Best regards,
Ugo