Moho Animation Forum

Hello again,

After about a year I'm coming back to Moho. Good to be back, but I've forgotten everything.

Trying a simple project to start, I've imported an image and an mp3. Changed the movie length to 3000 frames to accommodate the audio file. I want to simply zoom and move around the image in sync with the audio. Imported audio, plays back fine. Then added a few transform and zoom actions to my imported image. Dragging through, all looks good, but hitting play nothing happens. Same if I preview animation. It SAYS it's playing, but it doesn't move beyond frame one. Something simple I know, what is it?

I don't think I've seen that before but the first thing I'd try is to disable GPU acceleration in the Display Quality settings.

Also, try rendering a full render. If it disappears there, maybe an unwanted setting is present, like Do Not Render This Layer enabled in the top group?

If it renders but still doesn't preview, check that you have the latest graphics driver for your computer/card installed.

3000 frames is a lot of frames for Moho to keep in memory, especially if you have hi-res bitmaps. Will it preview if you shorten the preview range?

If the motion doesn't need to be absolutely continuous, can the animation be broken out to smaller segments? I've worked on some really long continuous scenes before and they're usually broken out to several projects, and later comped or edited in post. (Heck, I've broken out short scenes this way when they're complicated enough.)

That's just a couple of guesses. It could be a number of things but we'll need more info.

Check Project Settings if start and end frame are the same ... happens more often than you'd think.

slowtiger wrote:Check Project Settings if start and end frame are the same ... happens more often than you'd think.

Nope, they're correct.

Is the problem only with this particular project, or do you see it with every project?

Another thought:

How about 'Allow Frame Skipping'? I normally have it enabled unless I'm seeing performance problems.

It doesn't sound like your project is very heavy but if it is, I can see how this feature might cause a playback problem. If it's enabled, try disabling it. If your project is indeed heavy, playback may slow down, but you'll see every frame in the timeline.

BTW, what's your system specs? Knowing if you have a low- or high-powered system can help narrow the problem.

K, a few more tests:

EDIT: Spec-wise, it's the same system I've done all my Moho work on, all of it much more complex than this is going to be.

What I've discovered is that the insertion of the audio file causes the problem. The project needs to be 3000 frames because of the length of the existing audio, but the only animation that's happening is display and very simple manipulation of jpg images. They appear, disappear, and will occasionally move very simply. It's documenting these images with an existing soundtrack.

So, all is well until I import the audio file. Then nothing runs. The audio is a simple mp3.

Maybe the bitrate of the mp3?

You might want to try a different audio format. mp3 may playback okay, but if the data is highly compressed (which it probably is since that's the reason to use mp3,) it could cause problems in animation programs like Moho. In general, decompressing the data requires more CPU power, and it's probably going to be less accurate to work with. (Especially if it's a long audio clip.)

IMO, if you're synchronizing animation to sound, it's better to use an uncompressed format. For example, when I have a lip-sync assignment, I usually import an AIF or WAV with appropriate settings. Uncompressed audio may take up more disk space but it requires a lot less CPU processing for accurate playback.

I don't know if this will have an affect on the display problem though. Just an idea.

Another thought: I don't know if this is a processor problem or something else. Check Task Manager and see if playing back is is grinding your CPU or hogging RAM. If not, at least then you know the problem is related to something else.

OK, I can try uncompressed, not a problem at all. I'll try that a bit later and see.

The more I think about it, I really don't think the mp3 would cause Moho to not show the preview animation. I don't think compressed audio is going to hit the CPU the way compressed video does, and it probably wouldn't affect Moho's ability to display the preview animation. I think it's more likely to just play or drift out of sync while scrubbing than interfere with the display preview.

Something else is probably affecting the workspace preview display.

And you would be correct in that. Using uncompressed audio doesn't make any difference.

Also, I tried with just a 5-second snippet of the uncompressed audio, and there is just a single square on screen, so I'm not even importing my images now.

Have you checked your video driver? Just wondering since you said you haven't used Moho for a year or so. It's possible that there's been an OS update or two that may require a driver update.

Oh, and what version of Moho are you running? The current release is 12.4. There's been a lot of bug fixes since 12.0.