Formerly Good PNG files now render slowly

[Guest]

I've been using a number of PNG files for some time with no issues and everything has been smooth. Now going back to these files, pages the previously opened very fast now take a very long time (a number of minutes, not seconds) to render the graphic. This also has slowed PDF creation of those pages to a crawl as well. I'm using Framemaker 10 on Windows 7. Has anyone else had this issue or discovered a fix to this problem?

[Arnis_Gubins]

Did you import these by Reference or by Copy?

Are the files on a local drive or a network drive?

Are you all patched up on your FM10 release?

How are you creating the PDF - using SaveAsPDF or printing&disitlling?

Are you using the CMYK or RGB option?

[Guest]

Hello Arnis,

These are imported by reference from a folder common to the FM files on a network drive

Using FM 10.0.2.419

Printing the PDF (Adobe PDF is installed as a Printer option)

Using RGB graphics

[Arnis_Gubins]

I suspect that the network location may be the culprit. Is it possioble for you to test some of the graphics from a local drive? [And what Mike suggested about aggressive anti-virus checking the traffic - together these can be a real performance killer.]

Also, the RGB option I was referring to was in the SaveAsPDF route within FM. The SaveAsPDF  is now recomended instead of printing to the deviice (Adobe PDF printer instance). One of the options in the SaveAs dialogues will be to use the RGB option instead of the CMYK one. For FM10, the CMYK option was still a bit flakey.

[Guest]

Arnis,

I copied the entire folder, containing the FM files and all graphic files, onto my local drive and tried that (to give you an idea of network speed, the copying operation took 2 1/2 hours, roughly). That did speed up the process considerably, but the PNG graphics are still slow. When scrolling, a full-page PNG graphic would take 20-30 seconds to render, versus the minutes it took over the network. Still, the same graphic as a WMF file would render almost instantaneously. PDF creation from the network location took close to 2 1/2 hours and approximately 1 hour from the local drive. I tried the "save as" option next using the RGB option to create a PDF and, while the quality was good, it took nearly 3 hours to produce (628 pages). If there is a progress window, I can see that pages that have the PNG images are taking longer for the PDF conversion. I have also noticed the smaller PNG images aren't nearly as bad as the full page ones. One page that contained 4 smaller images instead of one large one loaded pretty quickly. All of the suspect images are vector images exported from CorelDraw into PNG files.

[Arnis_Gubins]

What are the specifics of the PNG format that you specified from Corel Draw? Also, if these were vector drawings in the first place, why use a raster format such as PNG? You would get much better results with EPS (and EPS can contain image data as well).

What are the image dimensions that you are using in FM and what dpi setting was specified? Keep in mind that PNG is a compressed format (though not as extensive as JPG) and a full page graphic can easily be 80-100Mb in size when uncompressed. FM's raster handling uncompresses the files and internally stores these as fairly dumb bitmaps. FM also doesn't compress rasters when creating the postscript used in distilling to PDF, so there could be a huge amount of traffic being generated.

[Arnis_Gubins]

Addendum: try printing to a postscript file to see how big the file is (and also for a timing reference). Then manually run distiller to create the PDF. Sometimes this two-step is faster than FM's behind the scenes handling of things.

[Guest]

Sorry for the late reply, Arnis, I'm catching up from a mini-vacation. These are primarily full page graphics, although I've also seen delay in smaller graphics as well. The reasoning behind using the PNG files instead of a vector format was the speed at which the page would display when accessed online. The PNG pages would scroll considerably faster than the vector-based graphics, because some of these drawings can contain well over 100,000 objects. I suspect my problem is a combination of everything you've mentioned with slow network speeds and anti-viral software thrown in. I will try your two-step method and see how that works out. Thank you for your support!

[jasonr37304254]

OK, Im think I have found a breakthrough for this. Some what...

I imported a watermark .PNG file into Premier Pro and when I went to export it would take 8+ hours to render 1080p with 16bit encoding. I've never had this happen before so I "short-tested" an idea. I went to After Effects, imported the PNG watermark in, scaled it down and made a lossless movie clip of a still water mark. And exported out at lossless w/alpha on at 1080p 23.976 FPS. Then I imported the file into premier pro. Swapped out the PNG image with the move of the PNG and exported it. 2 min 08 seconds. Then I replaced the lossless movie of the watermark PNG with the real watermark .PNG image and exported the exact same settings out 5 min 37 second.

There is for sure something going on with premiere exporting out. It cut the time IN HALF once I replaced the PNG watermark image with the Lossless movie of the PNG watermark that I had previously created in After Effects.

Just a heads up

[Mike-Hardy]

This behaviour can also be caused by virus checking software. If you can temporarily disable any such software, see if that makes a difference.

[Guest]

Mike, unfortunately my IT department has me locked out of all administrative functions such as switching the scanning software off/on. It's a distinct possibility, but hopefully a culprit within my control can be found.