Saving takes as long as rendering ?

When I save an image that has already been rendered there is no delay. Perhaps your image was still anti-aliasing at the time.

If you go to the FF options, under the "Rendering" tab, and select "Show Elapsed Rendering Time" you'll know exactly when the image has rendered and how long it took.

Does this happen with all filters?

the only time that shld happen is when you are 'rendering' with the image not at full pixel size. then, the image has to render the full size image to save correctly, since it's not been rendered to full size previously. go the menus and pick 'view' and then 'preview size' and set it to actual. shldnt be a problem after that.

yes, i understood. i tried it on a 1200 x 1200 and it worked fine for me. you might have something different set in your options?

Could be a ram issue. Make sure FF is set to use all the ram it needs.

jffe, I have the same issue, but I think it is important to note it really doesn't take the same amount of time as it does to render, it just takes about 20-60 seconds.

If you render anything bigger than 3000 X 3000 it renders, and then after the render a bar does indeed pop up that says saving. It takes a while but it doesn't take the 7 minutes it takes to render.

But I agree this is a wee bit annoying, but may just be how FF has to roll.

I have a dualcore as well set to only use 60% of my cpu at one time.

Errm .. there is a slider to set CPU utilization? I'm surprised greatly!

On the topic -- to increase performance of rendering
1. add more memory or close other programs (so FF has 1.5Gb of physical memory for it's own needs, usually having 3Gb of memory is good enough if you plan to keep something like Photshop in the background)
2. use standalone version
3. crank up memory usage slider to 85% (almost no use upping it above that)
4. get a faster hard drive, or even better, get another hard drive and put Filter Forge temporary folder there

Explanation:
When FF renders and hits the memory limit set in the options (there's an additional 1.5Gb limit for rendering blocks), it swaps. Fortunately it does not use Windows swap file (well, not unless you crank up the memory usage slider and then run some memory-hungry programs, eagerly awaiting the "eternally flashing disk activity LED"), so it dumps the contents of memory to disk (in a much more intelligent way than swapping does), freeing memory for new rendered data. When the rendering completes and you're going to save the data, FF needs to access previously rendered image (the contents of the preview area is not what is saved into the files -- saving to files is done using high-precision internal image), but if the data was swapped out to disk -- it needs to read it back, hence the slow saving.

ok, so as long as you're under your limit of memory, like i was with the 1200 x 1200 image, the rendering on a save wont show. but, if you've exceeded your memory limit and are using the swap, then things may slow down during the save due to what you said. cool. thanks, onyx

The "Rendering", "Saving" and several other progress bars show only after an internally specified time of the specific activity (so when it's fast it doesn't annoy user with popping up and instantly disappearing windows, and when it's slow it displays the progress so you won't think FF is hung, and gives the ability to cancel).

Quote
onyXMaster wrote: Also I see that you have only 2.6Gb free space -- that may be too low for some large renders. Also, Windows disk performance suffers when there is less than 20% disk space left if you're using NTFS.

----That makes maybe the most sense (of problems on my end), however, I do look occasionally, and FF has never paged more than 1.7gigs when rendering, so my 2.6gigs available is more than enough when rendering to .png files that are about 8-14megs each in size.
----The whole saving takes as long as rendering thing just caught me offguard when I started doing larger renders (as opposed to 600X ones), so I thought I'd post about it and get some feedback. It's somewhat unlikely I'll be able to free up 20gigs of space, so I'll just havta live with it for now. Thanks for the info though.

jffe

CPU dropping from 98-100% when rendering is usually because of the disk activity, so the real bottleneck is the disk drive.