[Richard Kosnar]

Hello Jonathan,

Thank you for your contribution, but I may also add that I am fully aware of what photoshop is and isn’t capable of doing. I’ve used several software packages for mixing and editing my projects, and have refined and valid reasons for which applications I choose to use. This project is a classically animated short, in which every cell is hand painted. The only thing that comes even remotely close to photoshop for this medium is tv paint which is just simply to expensive for a personal license.

Firstly, you are mistaken in assuming I am using photoshop to cut/edit and composite this project. The only media imported to the timeline in addition to the raw cells painted in photoshop are two tracks, one 3 mb MOV file (which is a rough animatic comprised of sequential storyboard panels) and a low bitrate audio track which is being animated too. I completely reject the notion that Photoshop is incapable of handling this. I have been working on this project for months on a variety of different computers with half the hardware capabilities this newly built computer of mine has. Everything played back flawlessly at 24 FPS with no lock ups or lag.

As mentioned in the OP, a friend with a worse computer had loaded the very same file in photoshop and experienced no lag what so ever, with lesser hardware. Upon further investigation, I found that once I deleted the two media files (MOV, and MP3) The animation played back smoothly and had no struggles rendering the frames. With that I’ve discovered it must be an encoding problem, since the computer is brand new, and must have some problem with the codecs. I’ve installed Quicktime, and K-lite’s codec pack, which solved an issue with being unable to import MOVs into premiere, yet the problem still persists with photoshop. Even a new document with 1 frame will have the same trouble playing back anything with an imported audio track.

I am still looking for a solution as to why Photoshop is unable to play these simple media files flawlessly, when it is most certainly capable of doing this simple task regularly. Is there any other codecs required? or any other factors to consider with a new machine?