Hello, I apologize if this question has been answered before and if this question is in the wrong area. (Also, I would like to be thorough, so I appologize for the long message, but hope the format compensates)

As the title of this thread has said, I cannot seem to render an animation I made in Krita, however, the issue I have seems to be linked to an odd occurrence I haven't seen in other posts. For posterity, I am using a Wacom Mobile Studio 16, running Windows 10 64 bit and have successfully rendered a video before with thanks to the advice provided in the Krita Online Manual site.

Currently, I am working on animating a fox's walk cycle, but chose to make it slightly more complicated. Knowing I can do pretty great 2D animations in Krita, I decided to complicate my life and create a sort of false-speedpaint by creating frames for every step I take. My goal is to show how much effort goes into creating a simple walk cycle and how building on basic lines and shapes can result in pretty awesome animations. I've gotten a third of the way done, however, the file is becoming pretty large on the computer resulting in Krita running very slowly (I have about 640 frames to date). With that, I am attempting to render this part of the animation so that I can unload all the frames to date and lighten the workload. (I'll reassemble the animated parts in Blender later for a youtube upload.)

THE PROBLEM

When I ask Krita to render the animation, it seems to have issues rendering the actual file.
- On the first time, it nearly shut down my computer as. for some reason, it decided to render every frame as a .png file, which I stupidly told it to upload to my desktop. A black screen and a day later, I got the files erased, and the issue didn't recur
-After that, and sending it to an empty file I aptly named "Fox", a "fox.mp4" file started to render, but was soon abandonned with an error message suggesting to read the log_encode.txt file for more details.

Each time I retried, the second scenario happened, and, although I am not the best at reading the log files, I found this (the last bit of the file) interesting:

Parsing a group of options: input url C:/Users/Victor Bureau/Desktop/Fox/Gg shuffle%04d.png.
Applying option r (set frame rate (Hz value, fraction or abbreviation)) with argument 24.
Successfully parsed a group of options.
Opening an input file: C:/Users/Victor Bureau/Desktop/Fox/Gg shuffle%04d.png.
[image2 @ 000001c1aceab080] Could find no file with path 'C:/Users/Victor Bureau/Desktop/Fox/Gg shuffle%04d.png' and index in the range 570-574
C:/Users/Victor Bureau/Desktop/Fox/Gg shuffle%04d.png: No such file or directory

The odd thing is that Gg Shuffle.mp4 was the video file I rendered last time, and I am unsure where it's getting that command. I am unsure why it's trying to link it to a .png image from that video... The following is a snapshot of the Render Animation window I am using currently.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/x3wugvinmzbs1mb/render%20format.jpg?dl=0


My Trial and Error

So far, I've tried to render this video about 5 times, trying different solutions to attempt to solve the issue.

- I went in the ffmpeg.exe file path and made sure it connected to the right file. (done from attempt 2-latest)
- I went back to the Krita Online Manual website and downloaded the newest version of the ffmpeg download (version 4.1) but did not find the ffmpeg.exe file in it.
- I used the suggested direct link that the KOM website offered and redownloaded the files to give it a fresh start.
- From attempt 3-latest, I have been also making sure the .mp4 file path has been correct.



If anyone sees where I made a mistake, please let me know. I'd like to get the animation fixed as soon as possible so that I can move onto my next section of animation (and hopefully not have this problem again.
Thank you for your time and patience.

No problem with a long post since it helps to get the information across.

As a matter of interest, someone else had a problem with a long and large animation and that may be of interest to you: viewtopic.php?f=139&t=156671

I assume you're using Windows since you mentioned looking for ffmpeg.exe and I assume you're using the latest version of krita which is 4.1.7.

Is your .kra file approaching 4GB in size? If so there could be problems which the developers are trying to fix at the moment. This would be obvious if it happens to you so I assume it hasn't happened yet.

How much RAM does krita use when you're working on the animation?
Have you adjusted the RAM etc available to krita in the Settings -> Configure Krita -> Performance area?

If this is a file size and/or RAM size problem then splitting the animation into sections and combining the rendered outputs in Blender (or something else) would be a good way to bypass the problem.

When did this problem start? Can if be definitely linked to the file size, number of frames, RAM size getting to a certain level?

Do things work ok with smaller animation .kra files that you may have made before or can try making now?

When you render an animation, krita always makes intermediate .png files to be used by ffmpeg. These are usually deleted after rendering unless you selected the option to produce Both image sequence and video. You need enough space on your hard drive to accomodate these of course. It may be that the desktop folder has some kind of limitation with a large number of files (I'm clutching at straws here) so you could try a different destination folder and see if that helps.

For ffmpeg, the manual recommends https://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/ (as linked to from ffmpeg.org) and the 4.1 Static build. I just downloaded that and ffmpeg.exe is in the bin folder of the ffmpeg-4.1.... folder. I assume you selected 'baseline' from the .mp4 further options (small icon with three dots to the right of 'Render as:).

I don't know about the KOM website but can you try the recommended link again and rename the top end folder as ffmpeg-4.1-new-try and point to /bin/ffmpeg.exe inside there?

I can't see anything wrong with the Render Animation settings that you show in your screenshot.
The ffmpeg log file message is strange and confusing. Does that always happen with repeated attempts at rendering?

I can't think of anything else and I do hope that this problem can be solved.

Thank you for such a thorough reply. I shall do my best to answer all of your questions

ahabgreybeard wrote: As a matter of interest, someone else had a problem with a long and large animation and that may be of interest to you: viewtopic.php?f=139&t=156671

Thank you for the link. I shall go read up on this post after my reply.

ahabgreybeard wrote: I assume you're using Windows since you mentioned looking for ffmpeg.exe and I assume you're using the latest version of krita which is 4.1.7.

Is your .kra file approaching 4GB in size? If so there could be problems which the developers are trying to fix at the moment. This would be obvious if it happens to you so I assume it hasn't happened yet.

Yes, as stated, my Wacom tablet is running Windows 10, and Krita is up to date.
I do recall seeing that Krita claimed the file was over 4GB, which is one of the reasons I chose to cut the animation short and render it. However, the properties panel of Windows claims the file is 58.1MB or 60,953,495 bytes, so I am not sure how to verify this (I thought 1MB was 1000 bytes and 1GB was 1000MB)
Given that the error message related to an earlier (and admittedly smaller file) rendered video file, I did not take the file size into account as a reason that the process fails. I will definitely cut the animation even shorter to see if that fixes the problem

ahabgreybeard wrote: How much RAM does krita use when you're working on the animation?
Have you adjusted the RAM etc available to krita in the Settings -> Configure Krita -> Performance area?
[...]
When did this problem start? Can if be definitely linked to the file size, number of frames, RAM size getting to a certain level?

I don't know how much RAM Krita uses in this file. The problem started when I was about legs deep (lol, I'm animating the legs first). I'd say about 300-400 frames in, though I realize the problem was centered around Krita refreshing all the frames whenever I duplicate or move frames. At that time, the refreshing it did took about 5 seconds (so minor annoyance when you're asking it to select an object) but when it got to 550-600 frames, it could take around 30 seconds just to refresh. Using Ctrl+drag on a frame would take equally 30 seconds for Krita to register that my mouse moved over 2 frames.

That was the first red flag that told me that I wouldn't be able to render the full video in one shot.

ahabgreybeard wrote: Do things work ok with smaller animation .kra files that you may have made before or can try making now?

I can definitely say that with my last project, the two files I made (a preview and the full thing) were smaller files, and the only issue I had was understanding that I needed a ffmpeg.exe file to do it (and to choose video rather than image file lol) however, this is the first animation I have tried since.

ahabgreybeard wrote: When you render an animation, krita always makes intermediate .png files to be used by ffmpeg. These are usually deleted after rendering unless you selected the option to produce Both image sequence and video. You need enough space on your hard drive to accomodate these of course. It may be that the desktop folder has some kind of limitation with a large number of files (I'm clutching at straws here) so you could try a different destination folder and see if that helps.

Well now I get why it was trying to make .png files. There is way more than enough space for the rendering process, and I think you nailed it on the head with the file size (I say before I test it out) but it's also nice to know why this step was registered. Dunno why it chose to glitch to my previous render for a .png rather than having an issue finding fox4.png though... but it might be another artifact of the large file size.

ahabgreybeard wrote: For ffmpeg, the manual recommends https://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/ (as linked to from ffmpeg.org) and the 4.1 Static build. I just downloaded that and ffmpeg.exe is in the bin folder of the ffmpeg-4.1.... folder. I assume you selected 'baseline' from the .mp4 further options (small icon with three dots to the right of 'Render as:).

I don't know about the KOM website but can you try the recommended link again and rename the top end folder as ffmpeg-4.1-new-try and point to /bin/ffmpeg.exe inside there?

I have selected baseline. As for the ffmpeg 4.1, I have looked though each folder to find the bin folder, and even did a file search for ffmpeg.exe thoughout my whole computer (having heard that Windows 10 comes preequiped with ffmpeg.exe) and the only file with that name given is in the older version of ffmpeg.exe
Could you provide the path you took from the compressed file of 4.1 to find the ffmpeg.exe please?

ahabgreybeard wrote: I can't see anything wrong with the Render Animation settings that you show in your screenshot.
The ffmpeg log file message is strange and confusing. Does that always happen with repeated attempts at rendering?

Yes, the same message is repeated, which is why I focused all of my attention on the attempt to find a .png file of an old render rather than the file size of the video.

More as a note to self here, I would like to conclude this post with a review of my next steps in fixing the issue:

Thank you again for your thorough reply. I will get back to you with the results of my new attempts.

I reduced the file to 317 frames making it from 40.8G to 17.1G and retried it.

The first attempt saved all the files as .png files, and the second and third attempts failed all together with no issues recorded... the video just didn't play.

On the fourth attempt, the video was supposedly 15 seconds long (which 317/24=13.21 seconds so no oddity there) but then, every time I hit play, no video came up.....

A quick point that I wish I'd made earlier: Windows Media Player is not very good at playing a variety of video formats (something to do with video codec library versions). The general recommendation is to download and use the VLC media player which will play just about anything you give it.

It's available at https://www.videolan.org/ and it's free and you can make it be the default player for any video file extension. Highly recommended.

Later, I'll give a longer reply to the points you made in your reponse. I hope that using VLC will help the situation.

As a side issue, don't worry about the difference between 58.1MB and 60,953,495 bytes, it's to do with historical conventions and is explained here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mebibyte Try to ignore the difference.

On the status bar at the bottom of the krita window, it shows the amount of RAM that is being used to store the image while it's open and being displayed and worked on. That is probably the 'over 4 GB' figure that you saw. The image/animation is stored in a lossless compressed form in the .kra file and is expanded/decompressed when it's opened by krita. If your animation can be compressed from about 4GB to 58MB then it must have lots of white space and probably lots of 'hold'/repeated frames possibly on many layers.

Previously, I've seen and loaded an animation file that was 3.6 GB for the .kra file and 10 GB for the image in krita and that loaded (eventually) and played well inside krita (but it didn't render out to video). You're not approaching that size yet.

Generally, krita uses about 1GB of extra RAM above the image RAM storage size required so this shouldn't start to cause problems if you have 8GB or more of RAM in your computer. You can find out by using your Windows Task Manager but that doesn't seem to be needed at this stage.

In Settings -> Configure Krita -> Performance, there are three tabs: General, Advanced and Animation Cache. You can adjust the settings in here in an attempt to 'tune' the performance of krita.

NOTE:This really needs the advice of a krita developer (waves to Boud and Thera) or someone with experience of large images/animations but you can try to make some useful changes to the existing settings.

Memory Limit: Give it 6 GB if you can or more if you have 12 GB or more of RAM in your computer. I'm using the priciple of allowing 2 GB for the operating system and assuming there are no other applications running.

Internal Pool: 10% ??

Swap File Size Limit: 2 GB should be more than enough and you have lots of disk space I'm sure.

Frame Rendering Clones Limit: I'd set it to 1 but if you have 12GB of RAM then try setting it to 2. Read the tooltip note when you hover your cursor over it and consider the arithmetic involved.

Cache Storage Backend: If you have 12 GB or more of RAM, try setting this to In-memory. Read the tooltip and do the arithmetic.

If you do all that, it may help but then again it might not.

Regarding ffmpeg: If you download from https://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/ the 4.1 64-bit Static Build, you'll get a zip file called ffmpeg-4.1-win64-static.zip If you unzip/extract that, you'll get a folder called ffmpeg-4.1-win64-static that you can rename if you want to. I rename it to ffmpeg-4.1 and copy/move it to the C: folder so I have less typing to do.

Then, the path I use is C:\ffmpeg-4.1\bin\ffmpeg.exe

I wish you luck and hope to hear that you've solved your problems in some way.