Moho Forum

I have a project which involves a dozen or so full screen images (.PNG files), a dozen or so text layers in a switch group, and an mp3 audio file. When I load all my resources up into layers, before I've even done any animation, suddenly Moho gets really slow, and I sometimes have to wait 5-10 seconds for it to respond to something I click on.

What is in my project that is causing this lag, and
what can I do to fix this?

I've already split my 4-minute project up into 4-5 shorter movies because of this lag, but even at under a minute, it seems too much to handle.

Try using a wav, or other uncompressed audio format, as a stand-in audio for the mp3. Compressed audio, like mp3, affects performance.

Done. That wasn't the problem.

Hmm... on second thought maybe that was it. I closed and re-opened Moho completely and while it's still laggy it's usable at least. Thanks! So far...

Nah, while it's helped a little, the more PNG files I add, the slower it gets. There's no way to get around the need for all these image files. That's really the project. It's going to be a slide show with occasional dissolves and pans, but mostly just full screen images. Is there a different image file format I can use, or any other way to make this more usable? Or should I revert to PowerPoint?

The file format won't make a difference. A 24-bit JPEG, for example, takes about as much memory as a 24-bit PNG once it's been uncompressed in RAM. The file size only makes a difference in load time for streaming, like across a network, which is why a JPEG image sequence might step/scrub more quickly. (Fine for reference footage.)

What's the pixel size of your files? Can they be scaled and cropped? You'll have to do that outside of Moho because Moho's cropping and scaling is non-destuctive,

Can you pre-render parts of your project? Like the Text? I've always found Text tool to be slow to work with in Moho so I don't typically bother with it. I can only imagine what working with a whole bunch of Text layers in Moho is like.

I'm also wondering if this is that 'orphaned keyframe' error discussed the other day. This is when Moho creates a random keyframe thousands of frames away and then slows down because it's apparently trying to evaluate all the frames in-between. If that's what happened, Wes wrote a script to find and kill that errant keyframe.

Here's the link to the recent discussion:

https://www.lostmarble.com/forum/viewto ... 80#p187405

And here's the link to the script's thread:

viewtopic.php?f=12&t=32714

You might also use Layer Comps to hide things you don't need to see while animating (like bg elements? Characters you're not currently animating?) and then use Layer Comps to unhide them before rendering.

You might even use the Mute channel that way. Just be remember to un-Mute before you render.

There are other optimizations you can try like Allow Frame Skipping or disable Enable Bone Dynamics (if you're using BD.) Or disable GPU acceleration, or at least display options you don't need for animation.

A lot of these things don't affect final rendering so you don't need to reset them for rendering. (Not sure about Bone Dynamics...it's been a while since I've had to disable this to work in Moho. If you're using BD, test this on a short range before committing to a full render.)

OK thanks for all the help. I duplicated my project and removed all text layers from the duplicate, leaving all the images where they were. The file size changed from 1,006 Kb to 25 Kb!! And we're talking maybe a dozen text layers. (Albeit with a custom font I created.) So it appears Moho is rendering text content as an image and storing that in the project's active RAM, whereas the image layers are merely references to files. What a difference. Of course, now I have to go to all the effort of turning my subtitles into transparent PNG files, less convenient to be sure, but probably worth it since this project, if it gets the green light, will be over an hour in length, dozens of projects, hundreds of images.

Glad some of the info is helping.

Good luck!

Are those text layers or vector layers with text. Vector layers might perform better.

And you can just convert text layers to vector, although you lose the ability to easily edit the text.

For more than just one incidential text I would not recommend Moho's text engine, instead use Indesign or even Photoshop or the like to get a really professional result.