Hello, first off thanks for reading this and helping me out. I’m thankful for these forums.
I have been having a problem with exporting some very simple animations on Toon Boom Studio 6. I am trying to export the files as uncompressed AVI files. The TBS project file sizes range from 3 to 10 MB. Each TBS project is about 300 to 600 frames long. It’s super simple animation, not much movement, hardly no cell swapping, and no lip sync or audio added in. I animate roughly 10 second shots and then edit them together and add sound afterward in Adobe Premiere.
Here‘s an example of what types of animation I‘m doing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElyQuuKYzow (I did that a few years ago on Creatoon- sorry! Toon Boom is a billion times better).
The computer specs are as follows:
Windows XP Professional Service Pack 3
Dell Inspiron 546
AMD Athlon Dual-Core Processor
2.51 Ghz, 3.12 GB RAM
While exporting, TBS.exe can take up 50 CPU and 1,064,596K on a scene with a background, and three layers. It will freeze up around the 70% mark. I can only get things to complete if I go to Medium AVI quality, and even then it will drop certain layers to make the export work.
I don’t get it. This doesn’t make sense to me because I have Toon Boom Studio 5 at home. I have been able to make 20 second long animations with 15 to 20 characters all moving in the same scene with basically no problems. The sizes for those files are up to 30MB. Here’s an example of that stuff, which is way more complex: http://vimeo.com/17790468
That computer is older than the one at work, and it‘s specs are:
Windows XP Service Pack 3
AMD Sempron Processor
2.31 Ghz, 2.93 GB RAM
Any ideas as to what is going on in version 6? Do I need to upgrade the computer? We want to do more animations here at work, but can’t even get this one to happen.
Thanks so much for reading all of this! Any help will be much appreciated.
Hi AdrianK,
It’s not only the size of the project that determines the memory and processing requirements. Blurs and transparency effects are very heavy to calculate. Also now with the HD format being used more often, this could account for the difference.
Additionally, note that for 32-bit XP you only get to use roughly 1.6 GB of RAM per program at most. The trick is to try and optimize the project as much as possible… Use bitmap backgrounds that are no larger than the resolution of the project where there is no panning/zooming. Try to combine your audio clips unless you need one separate for the purpose of lip-synching and even then, after you have your assigned lip positions , you could remove the reference clip. Using many textures and textured lines can also increase the render times.
Since your movies are somewhat long, I hope you are using the scene-manager to create the project’s scenes before you begin as keeping the scenes separated uses your memory more efficiently and allows you to create/render larger projects than trying to fit them all into one scene.
Thanks for your response.
When I do these animations I create a new TBS project for each individual shot, so essentially each project is only 300 to 600 frames long. The files that I use for characters/backgrounds are PNG files. I export each shot individually from their individual projects and then edit them all together and add in the sound in Adobe Premiere Pro. So for those cartoons it’s several small TBS projects edited together, it’s not one big one. Sorry, I should have made that clear on my first post.
Here’s one of the files that I’m using that I cannot get to export: wildsidekids.com/KillerWhaleShot.zip (the site it’s being hosted on is the kids program where I work)
That one is only a few layers and it’s like 400 frames long, and it’s nothing complex at all. Yet, export fails every time. I would like to export everything as uncompressed AVI files.
Thanks again for your help.
Anyone else able to offer any help with this exporting problem? It still won’t work.
Thank you for sending the project for testing…
Is it possible to send some png’s to support@toonboom.com for us to test with as your project did not allow me to select the images?
I emailed the files. Thanks for helping.