Blackmagic Forum

Hello.

Making a storyboard film with stills only - PNG’s - and audio

On my old Mac Pro 2013 it’s super slow and sluggish. A timeline worth of 30 minutes with some 400 png’s take app 2 minutes to load. Each image is app 2000x858 resolution app 25 mb.

What’s a good timeline setting ? Or does it matter at all with only pngs? Why so sluggish. I’d say it shouldn’t be.

Bought a new Mac Studio Ultra 48 core 64 mb (wanted to upgrade computer anyway )

Exported the project and it runs even worse on that machine
Same slow load of timelines. Also zooming timeline using short cut makes the beach spin for like 30 seconds. Eventually it’ll crash DaVinci

So basically it’s unusable.

I reinstalled Monteray on Mac Studio and installed davinci again tried different footage. Video footage and it’s fine it seems. Just a quick test.

What’s with the pngs I wonder

Best Ulrich

Have you tried using JPEGs instead of PNGs? I used to use only PNGs with Vegas Pro as there was no choice in my scenarios where I needed to be able to have transparent backgrounds. I was pleasantly surprised when switching mainly to Resolve Studio a few months ago that the JPEGs are perfectly fine. My main work is photography rather than video and I use photo slideshows a lot; no delays at all loading. I use Capture One for creating JPEGs from Canon RAWs and I have my own settings but I think if using Photoshop or Lightroom saving JPEGs at around 85% should be more than enough.

JPEGs are a fraction the size of PNGs obviously. You can reduce the file sizes even further at no cost to quality by using JPEGmini on the finished files.

no I have not tried JPEGS . I have like 10.000 PNG already linked up. but I can try nevertheless. I would just think it should not be a problem with 25MB PNG when you can work with 8K files.

So ideas about timeline settings?

PNGs are rough because of the lack of embedded timecode and (often) lack of unique file names.

What if you broke the project down into 5 timelines of 2000 stills each, rather than 10,000 stills in a single project?

We had a complex documentary project some months ago that had a lot of stills, and we finally opted to convert the still sequences to 10-second ProRes 422HQ files instead, because it seemed to be easier on the system.

I have 3 timelines. Still same project. I mean, this software advertises 8K functionality. stills shouldn't be such a big deal I'd say.