http://C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Desktop\Exports\player.gif
I recently created a post about the effect on TBS operation when the shadow is added. In my prior post what I was working on at the time was just a character playing drums. All the drum props I incorporated into TBS as a separate media elements. This way when the drummer bangs a symbol for example…I can peg this media element and have some movement on it.
And of course for the character I used drawing elements. When I made the original post I added a shadow element to just the character and I wrote about the difference in rendering performance. Exported as a SWF file here was the results:
For the piece that I did, 1,000 frames one character with 6 elements
all background was media element exposed for the 1,000 frames
With no shadows:
Render time was -15 seconds
Exported SWF file size was 1.3KB
With Shadow:
Render time was 1.5 hours
Exported swf file size was 10.76KB
I’m running a Pentium M (1.7khz) with 1.5G and dedicated ATI Radeon video card
But here is what surprised me this time. I wanted to add some depth to my piece …so I decided to add shadow to the drum props. In a separate TBS file where I created the props I added shadows to each piece, and place it in my library. I then brought these item into my work …again as individual media elements.
And this time I did not add a shadow element to the character (like I did the last time). So really there is no shadow element in this project. The shadow effect seen is from the static media elements created outside of the project.
So I really wasn’t expecting what occurred when I exported the project as SWF file. When I tried to do this it took hours. And I went to my time line and unchecked the media elements just to check that this indeed was the cause.
With no media element checked export took seconds. With one media element checked …it took about 20 minutes …and the time increases as I add more element.
Is this normal?
P.S I wanted to add just a frame of my work to this post but haven’t quite figured out how to add gif files in the post.
Hi Tiger,
The behavior you are pointing out seems quite unusual and if possible it would be very helpful for us if you could provide us a sample project to do some test.
After doing some test here we did get some slowdown with media elements when we have the thumbnails shown in the Exposure sheet. Disabling those thumbnails fixed the speed to come back to real time. As for the render time we did not note any slow downs.
If you want to send us a project simply send us a mail and we will setup an ftp folder for you to drop the thing.
Best regards,
Ugo