Real time playback or not!

[simon]

Hi
Does anyone get realtime playback with Moho. Im on a mac 1.2ghz plus
1.2 of ram,OSX 10.3 and I never get anything approaching playback at real time. I'm now using moho 5.1 and although it has addressed a number of issues regarding general sluggishness playback speed is the same.
Even with a simple bouncing ball at 12fps 320x240 moho never gets past about 10fps. This is very frustrating and Im sure that I didn't have this problem in OS9. Whats going on?. I have tried the tips from this forum ie
closing timeline window making camera window smaller but this doesnt make a great deal of difference. The problem is still there on a duel 2.5ghz
Mac with a better graphics card. Can anyone help as realtime(or as near as) playback is very important to me. I understand that as projects get bigger things tend to slow down but not one ball bouncing a couple of times
through frame .

Thanks for any help you can give.

Regards

Simon

[Lost Marble]

Moho is not designed for real-time playback. It tries to play things back quickly, but real-time isn't always possible. Here are some tips on how you can speed it up:

http://www.lostmarble.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=4437

By the way, playback on Mac OS X is particularly slow in comparison to Windows and Linux. The display effects OS X uses throughout the user interface means that Moho has to go through more layers to get a picture to the screen. We no longer produce an OS 9 version of Moho, but when we did, the same exact program file on the same exact computer would play an animation at twice the speed on OS 9 as it could on OS X.

[7feet]

Another thing thats not addressed in that topic, that I find speeds things up a lot, is to turn off the antialiasing in the display properties (botton bottom right on the main window). Don't know how it works, but that antialiasing is a hog. In a pinch, if I want to see motion and still know whats going on, I might even turn off the outlines. Running things through with just the fills can give you a decent idea of whats going on, but still run at a reasonable rate. Hell, in general it's faster to turn off any display options you don't need.

For that matter, don't discount that "current layer" button to the left of the other one. Despite the name, it seems you can choose the display options for for each layer if you want. It also gives you easier access to the simple "hide in editing view" option that you would otherwise have to go to the layer's properties to get to.

In a pinch, just set the display to Wireframe. Which I guess would lead me to a little bit of a request. LM, if there was any way to do some kind of "hidden wire removal" in the just workpath view, it would make it a lot more comprehensible, and it sure is pretty fast. Please?

--Brian

[simon]

Hi

Thanks for the replies.

So are you saying that isn't really optimized for use on a mac?

Sorry to harp on about this but surely a small wireframe ball bouncing
across screen should play without any problem even at 24fps. I understand
that moho is not designed to give realtime playback but having seen the performance be worse on a G5 than on my old OS9 machine seems a bit daft to me. Dont get me wrong I like Moho, I like Moho a lot. I would even buy a better graphics card if told I would get faster frame rates.

As I said before 5.1 does feel a great deal better but for me judging the timing of animation at such slow speeds (OSX) is a real problem. I would hope that something could be done about this in future versions?

Many thanks

Simon

ps. I did read your thread about how to improve frame rates and it did make a bit of difference but on the downside I lose frames.

[7feet]

All of my experience with Moho is on PC's. I should have been more specific. It bogs down over here too. Seemingly not as much as OSX, but it happens.

--Brian

[anigreator]

Yup same here. And just to test my levels of patience, my dual proc machine still sits there mostly scratching itself.

From what I know and have experienced I can offer this:

Moho does not use harware acceleration (does it even use SSE/MMX stuff built into the compiler?). A better graphics card probably won't help that much. LM did experiment with OpenGL, but there are major differences in the way Moho draws things to the way OpenGL wants them drawn. So a non-starter there (although this news isn't gonna stop me - read on ).

Reducing the resolution of your project only affects the final rendering, not the speed of the preview. Reducing the size of the playback window works.

Reducing the size of/closing the timeline has a much bigger effect on playback speed than you'd think.
(~20%!)

But to go back to an old point, and possibly go over the same ground again (sorry)... LM, is there absolutely nothing in Moho that can be done with OpenGL? The timeline is a prime example of something undercomplicated that would benefit from hardware accel. Whilst I see that OpenGL might not like the way Moho derives the 'Preview' mode of looking at things, 7feet and myself are already using the primitive fills-only mode to get a decent frame rate (at postage stamp size), which surely lends itself more to GL rendering.

Derived from above, I really like the idea of being able to record certain actions during playback - mostly layer movements in my case. The results of this process seem beset by lag and crazyness at the moment, meaning that the feature is generally useless. Would hardware accel provide a means to actually make this work?

As it stands, we already have features of the software that do not work properly due to a processor-centric computing barrier. Certain styles of animation (my music vids f.ex.) absolutely require impeccable timing of actions, or groove. Having to 'work' to even get to see things properly is a drag. I think I can speak for a large number of users in saying I'd be prepared to sacrifice visual quality for imporved temporal quality and snappyness.

So a few questions/suggestions - have you tried:

• Rendering only the primitive shapes/colours in GL?
  
  Rendering the scene as images, then sending them to GL as textures?
  
  Anything involving the timeline (remember a 20% improvement available here)?
  
  Optimisation for specific processor architectures? I particularly like the SSE/MMX ability to add eight floats together in one fell swoop, and the like. Very handy for compositing-like activities (and neural-networks, should anyone ever stray into that field).
  
  Multithreading? It's a bore, I know, but once you get it to work properly it can even makes you feel good (how sad am I?).
  
  Paying some other cleverdick to optimise your code? We all hate 'letting go of the baby'.
  
  Reverting to using standard UI elements? When I first started using Moho, the mac-esque feel was quite a surprise. Probably not as important/useful as the above points... and probably anti-Lua somehow.

So why listen to this upstart I hear you ask? Well, as it stands Moho provides an excellent tool for the 2D vector animation market, at an excellent price. It does however lack that certain production-grade robustness required to get the software used by (or poeple who think they are ) high-end animators. I can only speak for my little part of the production industry (check http://www.fe23.co.uk/1/clients.aspx), but it does seem that Moho is looked down upon somewhat in these circles. This isn't because what the software does is bad, more how it goes about doing it is slightly flaky (from a production point of view), which puts these people off no end.

Should it come to it, I for one would be more than happy to pay x times as much money for a 'pro' version of the software to see some of these features implemented. I'm sure I'm not alone in that, and it would be nice to see Moho used by more of the forementioned groups.

Anyways LM, sorry for the longwinded rantesque post, but please consider!

Cheers!

Chris

[simon]

Again thanks for letting me see that this is not only a mac problem although it seems that it may be worse on a Mac(OSX). Your points seem quite common sense and I would like to think that LM may consider dealing with this problem as they have alway been very good at sorting out user problems. With some of the other animation packages that I use and having a top of the range G5 I don't expect to reduce window sizes to get faster playback. On occasion I have had to reduce a 320X240 screen to a quarter of its size to see anything that I can judge. I suppose in a way it takes the fun out of animating.

Regards

Simon

[Lost Marble]

Simon, when you say a 320x240 screen, do you mean your Moho project is 320x240 or the actual window on your desktop is 320x240? When you're in Moho, the size of your project really has zero effect on playback. It's the size of the window that matters.

We're always working to improve Moho, and playback speed is one of the things we're working on. We have something in the works that should help, but it wasn't quite ready for version 5.1.

[7feet]

The other tip I forgot to put in earlier was to try checking the "Allow Frame Skipping" option under the Animation Menu. Unless tour piece has gone really over the top, it works pretty well. If your project is 24 fps, and your running down to even 12 fps, it's only going to look like your animating on twos and will allow you to judge your timing pretty well. Hell, even if your down to 6 it'll look like 4's and I see enough of that by intent, unfortunately. Not so wonderful for the subtleties but should get you through most of the grunt work.

Also, one of the other things that seems to hog processor time are the 3D operation, layer transforms and stuff. Unfortunately, I'm using an awful lot of that. If you are using them on the backgrounds, it can be a great idea to render out the backgrounds first, camera moves and all. Bring that video footage of the background into a fresh project and animate you characters. Cuts down on a lot of the overhead. Rendering out separate elements and characters and then compositing them later seems to be some's preference.

--Brian

[simon]

Hi

Yes just a 320x240 project although it seems that larger projects dont seem to slow down to any greater degree just beacause they are larger.

Closing the timeline window does help as does reducing the camera window but I would prefer not to have to do this. Oh and thanks for saying that you are already looking into improving playback speed.

Regards

simon

[anigreator]

I suppose in a way it takes the fun out of animating.

You touch upon exactly whats fun in Moho! Once you've done the whole setting-up-the-character thing, you can even sit there amusing your friends with off the cuff, two minutes to animate skits.

The depressing bit is when they start asking why they're sluggish- Ironic lucky googlet - have a look!

'Render' I hear you say. 'Why' they say etc etc.

Anyhow LM, it's good to hear that this is being considered. Keep up the good work!

EDIT: btw: The 'skip frames' feature dosen't skip enough frames to realtime the aimation as it stands fullscreen. It helps, but the forementioned points help more on the whole.

Maybe for now we should all put together a sticky post about how to get the best framerate for any given situation, rather than having people read through all of this.

Also: 28fps on a PAL project is slightly worrying!?

[Jamie K]

I think the sluggish playback problem is behind the audio stuttering problem (which is still there on both of my OSX systems). It's as if something is limiting playback speed to be below the selected frames/sec in prefs.

I just downloaded the 5.1 (demo), shrunk the main window and closed the timeline. Moho still plays back one or more frames/sec slower than whatever frame rate I select in prefs. This is on an 800mhz G4 Powerbook.

For example, at 24 frames/sec selected in prefs it reports playing back at 19-21 frames/sec.

At 12 frames/sec selected it reports playing back at 10-11 frames/sec.

Frame Skipping on or off doesn't seem to make much difference, it actually gets slightly slower with Frame Skipping on.

This is with no objects loaded, nothing started, a blank canvas. Something must be radically UNoptimized if it can't play a blank project in real time. :^)

So I suspect there's room for optimization to improve the playback situation. Good luck with the fix in progress! I hope the next release is responsive enough with playback and synced audio to make Moho a dream to use on OSX.

Best Regards,
-Jamie
http://www.JamieKrutz.com

[stephen]

Frame Skipping on or off doesn't seem to make much difference, it actually gets slightly slower with Frame Skipping on.

This is with no objects loaded, nothing started, a blank canvas. Something must be radically UNoptimized if it can't play a blank project in real time. :^)

Here is a strange thing. On my Mac, it plays back a blank project at 14fps, I selected 24fps. when I turn on frame skipping it jumps up to 18 fps.

If I load a simple animation it plays at about 12fps. If I turn on frame skipping it jumps to 23fps.

Let it sit idle for a few minutes and the rate drops to 6fps, and still is 23 with frame skipping.

[Lost Marble]

When you have frame skipping turned on, the fps display shows not the actual number of frames displayed per second, but the "equivalent" fps. In other words, it includes the skipped frames in the calculation. So, with frame skipping turned on, if the fps display matches the project's fps, then you know you're seeing it in real time, even with some frames skipped.

[Jamie K]

I wish it would show in real time but even with frame skipping checked it's reporting slower than real time, for example falling to 22-23fps on a new 24fps project, with NO objects in the project. Resizing the playback window didn't seem to matter, maybe because of the lack of actual objects.

I just tested this using demo Moho 5.11 on a dual 2.5ghz G5 and OSX 10.3.9 - a speedy system.

I wouldn't mind skipped frames to get real time playback, if it could actually do that consistently.

I think Moho would be much improved if it could somehow do a real time preview. It would be the icing on the cake! Good luck addressing this performance issue.

Will OSX 10.4 help in any way?

Best Regards,
-Jamie