constant crashing - win xp p2 2.5 gb of ram

[Pixelgraft]

help!!! - ever since I booted up this morning I cannot get to silhouette work without crashing.

I have enabled the 3gb switch and it still crashes about 10 frames in. Silhouette was not crashing on me last night when I was scrubbing, rendering, etc...nothing has changed on my system since this time.

I have also tried the preferences and changed things with the "render" area as well as the taking my ram cached up to about half way. I have both enable and disabled "cache outout" in the render pref and I get crashes either way.

Thoughts?

[jbills]

Hmmmm... what's strange about this is that you've had no changes to your system and it was working recently.

The only real "bug" with silhouette, if you could even call it that, is that the memory management is manual enough that you could set it too high.

One thing to keep in mind is that changes to the maxRAM pref don't take effect until you restart silhouette. That said, you might double check those settings and restart the software. Even the whole computer, but I imagine you've tried a few reboots if you were doing things like tweaking for the 3GB switch.

If it's crashing in your project on a repeatable frame, but seems to be working otherwise (say if you skip to later frames), you might have a corrupt frame in your source footage that is kicking silhouette off. Can you open the frame in question in another program ok? Or can you open a new session in Silhouette, and scrub up to that frame?

In the event you can scrub without a crash in a new session, another idea is you might have a bad shape. Small chance, I've only seen it once or twice, but we've had a couple projects along the way here at Weta where a shape has gone "bad" and kicked back a crash with an error in the linux shell that said something like "floating point exception." (??)

If this is your problem, what you can do is turn off all of your shapes, go to the "crashing" frame, and then turn them on 1 by 1. When you crash, you've found the bad shape. You might try deleting the keyframes around that frame, copying and pasting the shape, or eventually deleting the entire shape and redoing it if necessary.

But the thing about that is it will only crash on "output" mode, usually not foreground if I remember right. It has to render.

eh, if none of that helps, give more info on your setup and exactly what you do when the crash happens, or maybe send silhouette a project (they're usually very responsive and helpful)
support@silhouettefx.com