Dealing with massive animations

[Christian_Wheel]

Hi all,

I'm building an app to use in a presentation.

This app MUST be 1080p, and I've designed 32 animations in After Effects that are all 1080p PNG sequences with alpha transparency.

Each folder of PNG files is around 200 MB, meaning all the frames together are about 6.4 GB. Clearly too large.

My original intent before realizing the insane filesize was to import these PNG sequences into MMF as active objects, but importing even ONE slows the program down to a crawl.

If I recompress them as movie files, I'll reduce the size SIGNIFICANTLY. Probably could get the whole thing in a hundred megs or so. But I will lose both the alpha transparency (which I need for my backgrounds to show through), and precise frame-by-frame control of the animation. Some parts need to loop a certain number of times and I was counting on Fusion's logic for this.

Any ideas on how to best approach this?

[JumpUp_Games]

I ran into this issue and had to use active picture to load sequences externally. Once loaded into the frame it stays in memory until you change frames in case you want to loop something.

[Christian_Wheel]

Thanks for your reply!

The issue at this point is more "I can't load 6+ gigs of graphics into memory at once on a 32-bit application." Nor should I.

I need a way to load compressed images, or compressed video with alpha transparency like VP8 or VP9.

Sadly this may be one of the cases where Fusion is not the right tool for the job.

[JumpUp_Games]

I definitely understand. Hope you find the right tool.

[defisym]

Just to clarify, when loading an image, fusion needs to decode it to bitmap then load it to memory, then create texture in video memory. So the real memory usage will be much larger than the amount you assumed, about 8MB for one 1080P texture. Even a 64bit application will also cannot load so much as it will exceed the video memory limit (usually 4~6GB nowadays, not including shared)
Another issue is, it will cause significant frame drop if you load frame by frame in objects like active picture during runtime, as the disk I/O and decode will cost much longer than one frame (16ms if running in 60FPS). The only solution as far as I know is compress the assets and crop the transparent border, to reduce the size…

[Volnaiskra]

Make sure you have "optimise image size in RAM" selected, so at least Fusion doesn't need to decompress the PNGs into RAM (which would effectively turn them into BMPs, but 33% bigger because of the extra alpha channel). You probably have done this already.

The only things I can think of are to shrink (and scale to 1080p at runtime) the animations and/or reduce their frame rate and/or break them up into lots of little chunks. Perhaps you can put the first, say, 100 frames of an animation into object A, and the next 100 frames into object B (with "create at start" set to off and "load on call" set to on), and so on. You start off with only object A and B in the frame, with B set to invisible. When object A reaches frame 100, you destroy object A and reveal object B, which will start playing frames 101-200, and create object C (invisibly)*. When object B reaches frame 200, you destroy B and reveal C for frames 201-300... And so on. I'm not sure if this can be done without experiencing slowdowns or stutters while creating those objects though.


*Perhaps you want to wait a frame before you create C, to give time for B to purge from memory, since we know that destroyed objects only really get destroyed at the end of a frame cycle. So maybe only create C when B reaches halfway, or something like that.