Any rumblings of a date for Moho 13 yet?

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slowtiger
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Re: Any rumblings of a date for Moho 13 yet?

Post by slowtiger »

A nice small one in my neighbourhood in Berlin.
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Re: Any rumblings of a date for Moho 13 yet?

Post by synthsin75 »

slowtiger wrote:Last week I presented Moho to an animation studio who thinks of adding it to their outfit of TVPaint, AfterEffect, and Adobe Animate. Nobody asked about when the next version will come out. They were interested in what the current version can do. And they were pretty impressed.
Yeah, professionals are much more concerned with "what can you do for me now". Promises of future versions/features don't pay the bills.
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Re: Any rumblings of a date for Moho 13 yet?

Post by Greenlaw »

At the studios where I've worked, even when we have access to beta software, it's almost never used for actual production work. Occasionally, exceptions are made for a few shots to take advantage of brand new features or when the beta fixes a 'show-stopper' bug found in the release version, but it's generally considered risky to use beta software in production.

When you're on a schedule, it's safer to stick with tried and tested...which Moho 12.5 is. :)
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Re: Any rumblings of a date for Moho 13 yet?

Post by hayasidist »

Greenlaw wrote:it's safer to stick with tried and tested
Indeed! And not just in the media industry -- many businesses don't want to be at the bleeding / leading edge when it comes to using new software - be that operating systems; office automation; business support; CAD/CAM; … and it's more than just the cost of acquisition - they also consider the potential costs of updating their procedures, re-training staff, rolling out across the corporate estate, interfacing with legacy systems used by their customers and suppliers; and they balance those costs against the costs of NOT updating (e.g. increased support costs, market image and technical risks from falling too far behind ...)

Businesses make decisions to upgrade or not based on a balanced cost/benefit analysis and not on a desire to spend money just to be "the first kid on the block to flash the latest fashion accessory around." (unlike some people who stand in line for days just to spend megabucks to get bragging rights about owning the latest consumer gadgets from the likes of the Apples of this world.)

and I'm confident that as soon as Moho 13 does arrive, there'll be a howling and yowling here about what's in it or not in it, and the price ...
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Re: Any rumblings of a date for Moho 13 yet?

Post by slowtiger »

Ah, the price. They also considered to buy Toonboom. When they heard the 400.- € price tag for Moho they claimed "that's a bargain!"
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Re: Any rumblings of a date for Moho 13 yet?

Post by byron »

Greenlaw wrote:...
When you're on a schedule, it's safer to stick with tried and tested...which Moho 12.5 is. :)
I'm guessing you haven't been affected by the bugs/crashes I regularly encounter with 12.5 :|
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Re: Any rumblings of a date for Moho 13 yet?

Post by Greenlaw »

No, Moho 12.5 has been very stable for us at my workplace, and for me personally at home.

For a while, I was using Moho 12.5 nearly every day at work and seeing only occasional crashes with unusually complex projects. With more typical projects, Moho 12.5 has been very solid and never crashes for me.

Could it be an OS thing? At work we're running Moho 12.5 mostly on Win 7 and a few Win 10 boxes, and at home I'm running Moho with Win 10. I don't have a Mac right now so can't personally speak for Moho's stability there.

Crashes and bugs need to be reported to the developers. I routinely submit detailed bug reports and they've been pretty good about addressing critical problems quickly.
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Re: Any rumblings of a date for Moho 13 yet?

Post by byron »

Greenlaw wrote:No, Moho 12.5 has been very stable for us at my workplace, and for me personally at home...(truncated)
I'm using Windows 10, and I've had the following problems:
- Unable to select multiple points while holding shift.
- Unable to undo steps
- Sometimes really slow undo
- Bones and/or bone labels disappear, and will only reappear after restarting
- Random crashes (admittedly, not very often)
- Blurry layers when GPU acceleration is on

I work with a lot of mixed media: images, movies (as backgrounds), multiple audio files, as well as rigged vector characters created in Moho. I probably don't report bugs as much as I should.
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Re: Any rumblings of a date for Moho 13 yet?

Post by Greenlaw »

Just curious but does this happen with any Moho project you work on or just a specific project?

I've experienced similar behavior when Moho places a bad keyframe thousands of frames before 0. I'm guessing this error forces Moho to evaluate data across that distance, which deeply impacts performance. Fortunately, it's a very rare occurrence. (I haven't seen it since the earliest releases of 12.x.)

If this is what's happened in your project, Wes wrote a script that fixes this error. It's in this forum but don't have the link handy.

If the performance issues happen all the time for you with any Moho project, I'm not sure what's causing it. Since you work with a lot of very different media elements, could it be that a particular element you're using is making the projects unstable?

Check Task Manager while you use Moho and try removing elements to see how that effects performance. For example, you're using a movie file with compression, that may be taxing your CPU...especially if Moho is also trying to animate a complex rig.

If that's the case, you might try converting the movie to an image sequence, or rendering the character animation in a separate pass and compositing it over the movie in a second project. For the character animation pass, you might even consider using a JPEG sequence of the movie as a 'reference-only' background...compressed JPEGs stream very quickly, even over a slow network, and don't require much CPU power. (I do this for 3D animations and VFX work all the time.) When the character animation is ready, use Moho's Layer Comps to output the character anim as an image sequence and composite it over the high-quality background in another Moho project or in a compositing program like After Effects or Fusion.

Hope this helps.
Last edited by Greenlaw on Fri Apr 05, 2019 4:09 am, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: Any rumblings of a date for Moho 13 yet?

Post by Greenlaw »

I don't know if this helps but, in general, I leave GPU acceleration disabled because it usually messes up masking previews in the Workspace. I imagine it might also affect performance if your project requires all of RAM in your graphics card to be used.

In most situations, it's not necessary to have GPU acceleration enabled since the GPU is not used at all for final rendering.
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Re: Any rumblings of a date for Moho 13 yet?

Post by synthsin75 »

byron wrote: - Blurry layers when GPU acceleration is on
That's by design. GPU acceleration improves performance by rendering unselected layers as static images.


And here's that script Denis mentioned: viewtopic.php?f=12&t=32714
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Re: Any rumblings of a date for Moho 13 yet?

Post by Greenlaw »

Also, when I do use GPU acceleration, I like to disable features I don't need to see in the Workspace, like Anti-aliasing for example. Some options can make the preview look prettier but they might not be necessary and they can impact playback performance and interactivity.
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Re: Any rumblings of a date for Moho 13 yet?

Post by byron »

Greenlaw wrote:Just curious but does this happen with any Moho project you work on or just a specific project?
Good question. Honestly, I haven't really methodically tried to pin it down. I just tend to work work work, and then a bug happens. I get annoyed, save, *sigh*, restart Moho, and then move on.
Greenlaw wrote:I've experienced similar behavior when Moho places a bad keyframe thousands of frames before 0. I'm guessing this error forces Moho to evaluate data across that distance, which deeply impacts performance. Fortunately, it's a very rare occurrence. (I haven't seen it since the earliest releases of 12.x.)

If this is what's happened in your project, Wes wrote a script that fixes this error. It's in this forum but don't have the link handy.
Interesting theory. I'll look for that script and try it on one of my more troublesome projects.
Greenlaw wrote:If the performance issues happen all the time for you with any Moho project, I'm not sure what's causing it. Since you work with a lot of very different media elements, could it be that a particular element you're using is making the projects unstable?
I'm sure it's the fact I'm using an mp4 h264 video+audio (from a gopro) as a background. When I turn that layer off, performance greatly improves.
Greenlaw wrote:Check Task Manager while you use Moho and try removing elements to see how that effects performance. For example, you're using a movie file with compression, that may be taxing your CPU...especially if Moho is also trying to animate a complex rig.
Also a great suggestion! I recently learned the batch exporter will utilize all cores as well, so I've just started using it for faster renders, although I haven't actually timed it yet to see how much faster it might be.
Greenlaw wrote:If that's the case, you might try converting the movie to an image sequence, or rendering the character animation in a separate pass and compositing it over the movie in a second project. For the character animation pass, you might even consider using a JPEG sequence of the movie as a 'reference-only' background...compressed JPEGs stream very quickly, even over a slow network, and don't require much CPU power. (I do this for 3D animations and VFX work all the time.) When the character animation is ready, use Moho's Layer Comps to output the character anim as an image sequence and composite it over the high-quality background in another Moho project or in a compositing program like After Effects or Fusion.
I'll definitely try your suggestion of converting the video to an image sequence, since I don't really need the audio in the clip for this particular project. If I did need the audio, I could always drop it back in during the compositing stage. Curious about syncing issues popping up if I did that though? Hmm. I did try to render my vector and pixel/bitmap layers with an alpha channel, planning to composite the video in the background using Davinci Resolve, but was unable to export with an alpha channel. I don't have the option to render to Quicktime, only AVI, MP4 & M4V, even though I have quicktime installed on Windows 10. I don't see an alpha channel option checkbox anywhere for the other formats. Tried both the 64-bit and 32-bit versions of Moho, as well as reinstalling Moho again to see if it would work. No dice.
Greenlaw wrote:Hope this helps.
Yes, it does. Thank you! :D
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Re: Any rumblings of a date for Moho 13 yet?

Post by Greenlaw »

A few tips:

I don't have a lot of time this morning so I'll write until I run out. Anyway...

A typical workflow for a complex project is to work in passes and then composite the work in a compositing program or video editor. It's not necessary to do this, but it is more efficient. I use Moho's Layer Comps and Moho Exporter to break out all my scenes as separate PNG image sequences (which have embedded alphas,) and then composite them in After Effects or Fusion. Then I output movie file for each scene from the compositing program and assemble the edit in a video editor. (I like to use Vegas Pro but there are a lot of editors that work fine. There are even a few good free ones out there.)

If you're on a budget, for compositing, I highly recommend Black Magic Design's Fusion...they have a free version that has most of the features found in the Studio version, and the Studio version is very inexpensive for it's capabilities. (Now under $300...at one time, it cost $5000 and even recently it cost about $1000.) I used Fusion almost every day for compositing and visual FX in 'The Box' at Rhythm & Hues for about 12 years, and Fusion is still my favorite compositing program. It's very powerful, fast and easy to use. BTW, it's what I used to composite Scareplane with.

In Moho, I like to use JPEG sequences for backgrounds. These are meant only for reference to animate to, and not actually rendered as part of the final image. If I need the background or other bitmap elements to be final quality out of Moho, I'll use PNG instead, which is a lossless format so I get much higher quality. In general, an image sequence is going to be more efficient to work with than a compressed movie file, and probably more frame accurate too (some compressed movie files don't necessarily show every frame when you're stepping through them.) You can always import the audio for the sequence separately.

To save memory and improve performance, I only import the data I need for the scene, so audio and images or movies are pre-trimmed to exactly each scene's duration. I do this by exporting the individual scene data from my animatic edit before I start animating in Moho (or whichever animation program I'm working in.) If I place markers for each scene in the animatic, all the exported elements (pic and sound) for each scene will be in-sync when I import them to Moho. Then when I export the footage from Moho (or wherever,) and bring it back into my edit, I simply overcut the finished footage in the track above the animatic. When I've filled all the holes in that track, I'm done.

This is more or less a typical workflow in animation production, regardless of length.

Whoop...gotta go. Will pick up on this subject later.
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Re: Any rumblings of a date for Moho 13 yet?

Post by sbtamu »

Greenlaw, that is exactly how I do it. But for quick and easy jobs I will use AVI uncompressed in Vegas and for animations that have a few scenes I will use PNG because AVI on larger jobs makes my PC lag and it is hard to scrub though the time line.
Sorry for bad animation

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