Re: Rendering filmstrip-style animation

[Christian W. <cwa...@gm...>]

James C. Wilson wrote:
> if I attempt to give it a hi-res filmstrip(21720x580)
> it panics and gives me an out of memory error--understandable given  
> the hugeness of the image(I have 768 MB RAM).

Hmm, that's around 50 MB - I'd have expected that to work, but I don't  
know offhand where the bottleneck is. Anyway, time is probably better  
spent implementing real video support than optimizing for such  
workarounds.

> However, this does open the door to some other, less memory- 
> intensive preloading technique. Maybe preloading around 8 frames  
> before the animation begins, then preloading ahead as the already  
> loaded segment plays? Does that have any merit, do you think?

I doubt it - image loading is currently done synchronously, i.e. it  
must be done in its entirety between displaying two frames. That will  
probably cause stuttering. But to be certain, go ahead and try it.

One thing I would suggest that might accelerate the copying a tiny bit  
is to arrange the frames in the filmstrip vertically, not  
horizontally. Since pixel data is stored line by line, that keeps the  
bits needing to be copied close together in memory.

  -Christian