using .png files

cadman · Post by **cadman** » Mon Jan 31, 2011 10:29 pm

I'm using Serif's Drawplus X4 to create graphics and exporting as .png files but the Anime Pro 7 doesn't seem to like too many layers like this....is there a setting I'm missing to make it work better?

shift · Post by **shift** » Tue Feb 01, 2011 4:44 pm

What kind of problems are you having? I use .png's and i have no problems. How many layers are you using?

cadman · Post by **cadman** » Tue Feb 01, 2011 7:03 pm

I have many many layers and everything is .png files....my main problem is that it takes forever to export 10 seconds of footage plus there was a time it was kinda jerky, like it skipped a few frames

cadman · Post by **cadman** » Tue Feb 01, 2011 7:08 pm

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Vicious-P ... 0548995360

what I have so far....if you can get there from here

Vagabond · Post by **Vagabond** » Tue Feb 01, 2011 7:59 pm

cadman wrote:I have many many layers and everything is .png files....my main problem is that it takes forever to export 10 seconds of footage plus there was a time it was kinda jerky, like it skipped a few frames

If you duplicated the trees and if each building is a separate png file then that would be too much. Just render each level of the animation then import it. Even when the space ship is landing you should have 7 layers at the most:

The sky layer
the farm layer
then the moving bus
the town layer
then the moving trolly
then the garden layer
then the moving space ship

Whatever isn't moving can be combined and rendered as it's own png. The farm, town, and garden layers don't move but should be rendered separately to preserve the parallax effect. That should speed things up.

moorsel · Post by **moorsel** » Tue Feb 01, 2011 8:06 pm

Well most of my animations use a lot of .png files, see examples on

http://prinsesmieke.blogspot.com/

or

http://prinsesmieke.blogspot.com/p/vori ... films.html

Yes, rendering can take a lot of time, sometimes up to 1 hour for a few seconds of animation and I accept this, I am patient man

What exactly is your problem, is it only related to rendering times?

Sometimes I run into stability issues during rendering from within as and I suspect they are related to memory issues as my .png file can be rather big and some of my as projects contain many many many many .pngs. Using the command line render option of as solves these issues most of the time.

cadman · Post by **cadman** » Tue Feb 01, 2011 8:45 pm

the farm is one file and the tractor moving is another, the city scene is one file with the moving trolley another, but the garden is alot of files...

I got rid of the farm and the city for the next scene because the martian has to come out of the ship and jump around along with many oher martians (like the clown car in the circus routine) and the garden is alot of files because they move in and out of it doing schtick

I'm thinking what I need to do is just simplify and rather than build an entire generic set to do everything on I need to do individual ones for each scene....oh bother

slowtiger · Post by **slowtiger** » Tue Feb 01, 2011 10:50 pm

vagabond already wrote correct advice: if you have a background level, like the garden, which consists of numerous separate PNGs, but there's no movement in it, it is a good idea to render this to one PNG which contains everything.

You don't have to throw away anything. First: make a copy from your original file.

All garden elements already are within a group layer, right? Just render the garden and put the resulting PNG into this group, adjust its size, then erase all the other elements.

Repeat this for each of your background levels. This alone should make AS much faster.

If you worry about resolution, do this: change your project dimensions to some multiple of the actual values. Now the PNG rendered from this is much larger.