Jehan, you say what?

Hmmm… the 2GB size limit really looks like one of these filesystem limits, especially with older Windows OS. But as you say it's Windows 10, 64-bit on NTFS, that would be a weird limit (I don't think they have such silly limits anymore).
Anyway if you can upload one of your XCF somewhere, a good idea could be to open a bug report and give a link: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=GIMP
This way, we can try and check the file. Maybe there is an actual file corruption during saving time. If so, that would be worth checking. Even better, if you have any reproduction steps which always result in a corrupted file on your system, we could check if they also work on ours.

As for GIMP not being suited for big animations, it's mostly true (for now) because there is no efficient way to store an animation in a XCF file, and no efficient GUI to handle the logics behind. This will change soon. That's the kind of things we do: viewtopic.php?f=25&t=15138

The idea behind 1 layer == 1 frame is just terrible as soon as you want to do serious animation (more than a few seconds). Well on the other hand, you say you do mostly abstract animations. So maybe in your case, you don't have any choice (well… not sure what an "abstract" animation entails exactly, but I could imagine that it means there is not much levels in the animation, so you can't really use the power of layers; just guessing).

Also as other noted, you should definitely break your artwork into smaller pieces (usually you would cut it in "sequences", that's what we do). Note that that's what all film-makers will do. You don't edit a single movie into 1 single file (you could imagine it would be terrabytes in the end of a feature-length movie!). So you need to break it into smaller chunks that you can actually process. Then later you edit and "link" your sequences together. An animation artwork is often incremental this way.

For info on any of our projects, we never had XCF files that big as yours. So I would guess that's probably what you have to work on to improve your workflow. :-)

Appreciate the input, thanks Jehan!

Well I've definitely got the message about breaking my work up into smaller parts first, I'm doing that now and that does help, at least my work is intact..

I'm attempting to upload an xcf (one of the corrupted ones) to my Google Drive, my internet connection is not the fastest by any means and as the file is just over 2GB this could take some time (currently it's telling me it will take 4hrs 45mins!), after that I will link it on the bug report site you mentioned. As for the reproduction steps.. what I do is simply make some artwork, then add to it or modify it in some way at each step (layer) often employing plug-ins and scripts to enhance things of course.. sometimes completely changing views from one frame to the next .. all of this is usually problem -free, but like I've said before, once I reach that 2GB mark, things seem to become problematic and the newer saves can be corrupted, missing frames, disordered in some way.. hopefully by my keeeping them smaller in size that won't happen again.

Thanks for the animation tips, I'm not in any way, shape or form a serious artist, more of a doodler lol.. the stuff I produce (which I refer to as 'abstract animation', although I'm not sure that's a precise definition..) is usually just a lot of colourful patterns and weird effects put together with no real vision as such, I often complete a work, then use GAP to animate it, after which I make some adjustments and then put music or other sound to it.. here's an example of one of my latest efforts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edCZ-ZpUgnE (best viewed in 720p)

So, I'm not sure how else to achieve the results I want with animating without simply adding layer upon layer, to me this is similar to one frame following another frame and so on.. but maybe I'm wrong on this (I DO understand the concept of individual layers in general and how they work in relation to single images, and in fact some of the layers that I use as frames are themselves flattened images from multiple layers) - how would you approach it differently using GIMP as a base?

I'll update when the xcf file is uploaded... that reminds me, I'd better create an account on the GNOME bugzilla. site

MANY THANKS!!

Which category should I put the bug report in btw? The choices are: Data / General / Gimp-Python / Jenkins / libgimp / User Interface / Windows Installer (I left a few out that are not relevant)

If anyone is interested the following link is to one of my .xcf files that is large (2GB - although only about 750 layers) and got corrupted somehow: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1KF4x ... sp=sharing

Cheers.

I can not immediately reproduce the saving xcf error. Using one of ofnuts clever plug-ins, duplicated existing layers to create a larger file - 994 layers. That saves (2.8 GB) and opens ok here - linux laptop 8 GB memory


That little linux utility xcfinfo lists the layers in a file and reports what is expected,
original file: Version 0, 1218x914 RGB color, 751 layers, compressed RLE
larger file: Version 0, 1218x914 RGB color, 994 layers, compressed RLE
so no 'missing' layers reported.

For video:
You do need a uniform frame (canvas) size and frame rate (fps) for easily joining parts into a complete file.
Not entirely true of your file which has some small layers. The timing though, is uniform throughout 100ms = 1/10th second. So you then have a choice, use a video frame rate of 10 fps and 1 layer per frame, or say 20 fps and double up each frame. That is what that little batch file does, uses ffmpeg to generate 2 or 3 video frames for each image layer.

I read that as meaning that some aren't

Indeed not

Means another one of the total clever plugins available at

http://sourceforge.net/projects/gimp-to ... s/scripts/

Interesting.. thanks again for the input.. why would some layers be duplicated though? Or did I do that originally.. don't quite get it.
Anyway, this is the error I was shown when I opened the file before uploading it onto my Drive:



SO, it was missing some content, not sure how much now but could have been as much as 20% of the original if I remember correctly.

Also, with this file there is a lot of strange pixelation going on that was definitely not there to start with..

Oh yeah, the batch program works fine thanks, but the anitools thing, I'm not sure how to get that to work in GIMP, obviously you gave me a link to anitools.py.txt and told me to remove the .txt part, do I have to use the Python_Fu part of GIMP for that (which I've never used before.. no idea how to.. not being a programmer or anything !) or is there something I'm missing (probably!)

I'll be looking into Ofnuts' Gimp Tools - cheers.

Oh btw.. as you can see - when the file was opened the filename doesn't appear it just says 'Untitled' at the top - this happens every time an xcf file goes bonkers.

Must be some kind of protection. There are several reasons for a file to be corrupted on load, and some of them do not mean that the initial file is damaged (network error if it is on a remote system for instance). So this would prevent you to overwrite the "good" file with the partially loaded copy.

Looking more-and-more like a problem with something in Zero01 Windows installation. From previous post plenty of resources available, more than my linux laptop which has 8 GB mem with storage linux ext4 filesystem.

The attached is the layers listing (orig.txt - remember to unzip it) from the frx.xcf file . That shows as 2,148,562,803 bytes as downloaded.

The list starts at layer 115 and goes to layer 866 so there could be 0 to 114 missing in that file. Do not know, might have been removed elsewhere.

I have a feeling that the old run-length-encoding (RLE) compression is a problem with very large files, Supposedly this was made more robust recently. Might be better when Gimp 2.10 comes around, The dev 2.9.x uses zlib by default with rle as a legacy option.

The only sensible solution is use multiple smaller files, even if just as a backup.

Python plugins, either anitools.py or Ofnuts plugins, or anything.py. These go in your Gimp profile plugins folder
C:\Users\"yourname"\.gimp-2.8\plug-ins They can end up in various menu locations. Generally, use Help menu -> Plug-In Browser, put part of the name in the search, right side shows the menu location.

Nothing to do with the truncated file problem but a bit of an experiment using your 751 layer frx.xcf file

It is possible to generate a video as described earlier, using some utility (anitools) to write the layers to individual files then generate a short (2 or 3 frame) video from each using ffmpeg. The problem is trying to get some frame timing using ffmpeg, you might want a 2 frame video but you are more likely to get 1 frame or 3 frames.

However as an example: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10581986/final.avi 21 MB with some very strange effect in the middle for those small layers.


The 751 xcf layers becomes 2002 video frames @ 20 fps = 1min 40 sec duration, a little longer than an equivalent .gif run. You can easily change the duration by changing the frame rate, say 15 to make the video longer or 25 to make it shorter. The number of frames remains the same.

Just a comment on the image size. 1218 x 914 is not a standard video size. For avi, width and height should be multiples of 8. For YouTube, they will re-encode your work at the drop-of-a-hat if it varies from their requirements and wreck it. Stick with 1280 x 720, for audio - mp3 is ok.

OK .. well I got the anitools to work didn't realise it was as simple as that (although I've dropped plenty of plug-ins in that folder before just none that were ostensibly text files - you live and learn..)

Ofnuts - sounds about right.

Well I'm going to look into re-installing GIMP and see what happens, I've always put extra scripts in the share/gimp/2.0/scripts folder, but I saw somewhere that they should go in the User/*name*/.gimp2.8 folder - so I may try that. (Edit: Just realised that scripts folder doesn't exist, maybe I should create it(?))

Well since this all started I have done as people have been saying and doing smaller pieces, saving them then creating new files (all in this case 1024x768) and eventually made them all individual avi's (using GAP) then stitching them all together (in this case with "Shotcut" video editor) and adding music, the final result of which can be seen here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpIneXXqUgU

Sorry if you don't like the music, I'll be doing another soon with music by The Fall (early stuff) ... right I'm off for a cuppa.. cheers.