Lag when playing animation

What is the recommended amount of frames that I should have in each harmony project?

I’m trying to do an animation that is around a minute long with easily over a hundred or two hundred layers.

As I’m adding more layers I’m noticing a very obvious lag when playing back my animation - I need the playback to be fairly accurate to match the sound.

Is there a way to either lower the quality of the playback so it plays quicker?

Is there a recommended maximum amount of layers or frames per scene?

I want to have around at least 100-200 hundred layers going at once at 4k at 24fps. Is this too much?

I’m new to animation and don’t really know any of the basics. I have a fairly good computer.

Any advice is very much appreciated.

It really depends on the resources of the computer.
Working in 4K resolution is a challenge for even the
best hardware.

You can try disabling some non-essential layers if you’re scrubbing
or doing something related to audio synching. Alternately, instead of
selecting the entire project select a subsection of it. Let it run through
once loading the images into memory and subsequent playthroughs
will be faster.

You can also render to a movie file if not scrubbing.

Thank you! This helps a lot.
It might just be me - but I think that selecting only a small amount of frames for the “Start” and “Stop” selection helps too.

If you’re doing a full ‘film’ in one scene I would suggest doing one ‘shot’ per Harmony scene and then edit all the exported shots in another software.

Besides selecting to play just a selection of the timeline you can add several displays (one for each character, etc.) and then play only the elements connected to that display.

In some cases, as rkiz pointed out, exporting a movie might be the only way to see an heavy scene in real time.