Slow Lip Sync - Preparing Scene

[DimitriM437]

Recently manual lip syncing in CA has been extremely slow ever since a recent update. Everytime I split a viseme or change the mouth layer for it (ex. Ah -> W-Oo) the scene will change to a grey box with the words "Preparing Scene..." in the middle and the application is frozen for a couple seconds. It's makes manual lip syncing very very slow and tedious and I was wondering if there's any settings I should change or anyway to make CA faster. This hasn't happened with any of my past projects, it has only occurred recently. The only thing that I can think of that's different is that I've made 1 scene that's close to 5 minutes in length and in the past I usually did multiple scenes (5-6) that were each about a minute in length each, and then edit them all together in Premiere. So I'd like to know if having one big scene instead of multiple smaller ones is the problem. Thanks.

[JasonRugg]

I'm having the exact same issue, would love to hear if anyone has any suggestions. It's really slowing down our workflow.

[DanTull]

We have run into that situation with scenes that contain puppets with many behaviors/parameters. The problem was that the refresh that is done to publish the edited visemes so they can be seen on the stage was refreshing lots of parameters that had not actually been changed. We've since dialed that back so it is much faster in the next (unreleased, though you could join the beta program to give it a spin) version, but the fix for that came too late for inclusion in the 1.5 release and we didn't want to risk taking the optimization.

One thing you could try is to add the audio track and a simpler puppet (like the Blank Face template) to a new scene. Do the edits there to get the mouths how you want them and then copy and paste the viseme track back onto the puppet in the more complex scene.

Not a great solution, but it might make a viable workaround for this performance pain point.

Dan Tull

P.S. Sorry for the delay in responding. I didn't see this thread earlier and just ran across it when perusing unanswered questions.

[etiennerichard]

Four years later, is it normal that this bug as not been corrected? I've just opened a puppet that worked fine two months ago and now it takes seconds to change a mouth for another one, this is so time consuming.

[CoSA_DaveS]

The original bug was fixed back in 2018. It’s possible there’s a new similar bug, or even the reappearance of the same bug. What version of Character are you using? If you’re willing to DM the exported puppet file to me, or share a screen-recording of the problem, we’ll try to fix it. Right now I don’t know of any open bugs in this area.

[etiennerichard]

I am currently working on version 22.4.

My computer is running on an GeForce1080, a threadripper 3960x, 64Go or RAM and all my drives are M.2. I normally have no problem doing anything and the file was working 7 weeks ago, as stated in my first inquiry.

Thank you in advance!

[CoSA_DaveS]

I've tried to reproduce the problem in the same app version on a similar machine, but it's quite snappy (I'm doing 5 minutes of audio). How many minutes of audio do you have? Could you zip up your project (after quitting Ch) and DM a link to me to help diagnose? Or just a screen-recording showing the problem might be enough.