[Investigate] Large file won't export as a movie

I have quite a long project (around 7000 frames or so–I know, it’s a lot) that I planned to have ready for a school thing in a couple of days, but it won’t export as a movie. I suspect that it’s because it’s so large, but I really don’t want to go through splitting up the parts and having to make multiple parts of my video. Is there any way where I can get the video without having to do that? Thanks! :smiley:

Okay, so just figured out that it’s pretty much impossible to copy and paste stuff from one project into another using pencil, making splitting up this project impossible. Honestly I’m starting to freak out just a little bit since exporting to a movie through pencil is pretty much the only option I have by the looks of it. Please, can anyone tell me how to compress a pencil project so it can be turned into a .mov format even if the file is large? I need an answer asap.

I never saw a 7000 frame project before…Good on you mate @liltoadie
Please share the file with me if you can, I really want to know the feeling of working on a 7000 frame project.

About to your question:

A possible way to do that is exporting your project into an image sequence (from the menu -> File -> Export -> Image sequence). And then convert the image sequence to a video.

There are a couple of tools available e.g., Photoshop, Blender. But sorry I didn’t use any of them so I can’t recommend a best one. Maybe @morr knows more about that.

@liltoadie Hi Charlotte. You have such a large project that it’s unheard of to attempt to export that many frames as video. Sorry to hear you’re having issues.

Unfortunately you cannot convert a pencil2d file into a movie. You could extract all the image files, but if you’ve used many layers and stuff, it won’t be properly placed.

I can only suggest that you export batches of image sequences until you reach the end (e.g 1 to 500, 501 to 1000, 1001 to 1500… and so on)

But before doing that try to create a backup copy of the file just in case there’s any issue or crash during the export sequences.

Then, once you have all the image files exported, you can use a video editor to reel all the images into a single video. I can reccommend either KDENLIVE (it’s free) or you can use Blender (also free) which is a 3D app with video editing capabilities.

Both are relatively stable, although for KDENLIVE if you’re using it for windows you have to download the FFMPEG library, but they have a small guide for that in the same page.

https://kdenlive.org/download/

If nothing works send me the file and ill try to help out and send you the video later on.

Thank you all so much for your replies! I tried doing the image sequence thing before and my computer almost crashed, but I’ve found that using Screencast-o-matic to capture the entire animation and then adding sound later is seeming to work, my only problem being my animation being out of sync with the sound (but I’m fixing that in the actual program as of now). Also, my project really is more of a slide show more than anything, so I guess that’s why it’s 7000 frames (aka it’s not really that impressive :D) Again, thanks for the feedback, it helped me a lot and hopefully I’m heading in the right direction now.

@liltoadie Hey, well it’s good to know that you’ve found a workaround to your issue, however this is not ideal from our perspective. If you manage to finish your work without issues and deliver the presentation, would you mind to share the source file with Matt (he’s the main developer) so we can investigate this problem?

The next step for Pencil2D will be to improve optimization and performance, so it could become a great test file to achieve this since it’s really hard to get more than 2k frames at any given time.

Of course this would be for our eyes only and once we’ve finished testing we would report back to see if you can work with it again on a new version.

Let us know what you think, and thank you for your patience, we will surely continue to improve the software to meet such demands!

@morr @chchwy Yup, I’d be glad to share the source file, since I actually just presented the project with the Screencast-o-matic thing today. I’m kind of new with sharing stuff on this forum, so should I just email it or dropbox it or…? Sorry, I’m a bit wet under the ears when it comes to the actual computer-ish part of making stuff on electronic devices. Possibly one of the reasons why this file won’t export :stuck_out_tongue:

@liltoadie It’s ok, if you want to email the file to us you can send it to pencil2danimation (at) gmail.com -> replace (at) w/ @

If the file is too big, and you have google drive you can upload it on you linked drive account, there and you can control your sharing permissions for the file, similar to dropbox :slight_smile:

@morr @chchwy The file turned out to be too big to fit in an email, so I shared it with the email you mentioned above on Google Drive under the folder HON. My project is kind of janky and long, especially with the sound, but I hope it helps in some way :smiley:

I’m having the same trouble with a project of 480 frames and with 3 bitmap layers, one vector layer, the camera, and a sound layer. :{

@thurndiek Hey. sorry to hear you’re having issues. Please upload your project to google drive and share it to pencil2danimation@gmail.com so we cna take a look.

In the meantime please make sure you’re using Pencil2D’s latest version, and that you are using the .PCLX file format.