I haven't gotten anyone else to try loading my project. I haven't approached technical support, yet, as I was not sure if this was a technical issue. I'd be willing to share my project to anyone trying to load it on their system. Thanks for the suggestion!

Here is a question have you tried to let someone else load your project? to see if they have the same issues you are having on their computer.
You could send reallusion or one of us other users the project files and see if the problem occurs on someone else's computer.. just a suggestion.

Have you tried to re-compress your mp3 sound files? Maybe try a WAV file? 

Freelance Artist Kevin.S



  

Email: animatemyart@gmail.com - Web Site:  www.animatemyart.com

I was finally able to get a screen recording of the loading behavior. Here is the link:


The video compares my loading time with a 2D Actor model having an empty voice layer and with a 4-min voice clip. All I'm doing is switching the 2D Actor eye accessory. It seems like any action that I do when a 4-min voice clip is loaded has a significant pause. This is the same delay behavior when I do a real-time Playback of the model with the voice clip. The sound starts playing before I can do anything on the screen.

I'm still researching on my video card options, so I have not replaced my setup, yet.

I have crossed out the Quadro cards from my list and have focused on the AMD cards more recent than my 7700 HD. I really do not play games on my system, so I did not even bother to look at the gaming focused cards. I'll also look for cards with high memory as suggested.

I have Windows Defender running in the background. I also use a combination of CCleaner and MalwareBytes to monitor my system. These two programs do not run in the background.
In terms of defragmentation, my system automatically defrags the hard drive. I checked defrag and it appears my drives are in OK status. The two volumes with strange names refer to my system recovery files. From what I've read, I should not worry about them.



As far as I know, I have the latest updates to my video drivers. This is what I currently have.



Also, when my system is idle, this is what my system resources look like.


The only thing that I remember about my setup is that I have a 32 GB mSATA SSD along with my 2 TB mechanical hard drive. The SSD is used as a system cache, from what I've read. Here is Dell's snapshot of my system configuration.



Also, I tried minimizing the total frames from 16500 to 4000. It appears that it did not help. When I click play, there's still a lag - with the audio track playing first before I see the animation. 
I also timed the loading time of this particular project. When I launch CT and open this project first, it takes about 70 seconds to load. The loading status bar gets stuck at 60% for a while before the project loads.

Thanks!

When was the last time you defragmented your hard drives this is important for smooth file playback..? Have you updated your video card drivers? Have you tried to make a new test project to see if the same problem exits in the new test project? Cretin virus software can also interfere with files check it. Also have you checked for Malware? Does this problem exist in any other software you are using? Do you have some background programs running, Have you checked in the task manager to see what Processes are running when you have crazytalk open? You may see a list of background software running that does not need to be, Check the hard drive usage. Have you gone to HP website and run the system update for your model HP that updates sound drivers and all the other hardware? Have you check for windows registry errors? You will have to trouble shoot a little, I highly doubt it has anything to do with crazytalk 8.

Defrag
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/17126/windows-7-improve-performance-defragmenting-hard-disk
HP
http://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers
Tips
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3030200/windows/how-to-make-windows-10-faster-5-ways-to-speed-up-your-pc.html

A compute card wont work for you with iclone it may work great for other 3d software like maya, 3d max, cad etc, but not iclone unreal unity or games etc. A gaming card with lots of video memory :-) would be best.


Freelance Artist Kevin.S



  

Email: animatemyart@gmail.com - Web Site:  www.animatemyart.com

The size of my project file is 62 MB. For this one, I opted to create a 2D actor as my first try. Nothing fancy. I just took a front facing picture (JPG) of a person and followed the instructions to creating a 2D actor. I have an MP3 file of the song as my Music layer. The Voice layer is just my voice sync with the singer's voice, but at zero volume. This layer merely drives the lip sync, per the YouTube tutorial. The AutoMotion layer is set to Default2D(0)(Idle), so the only motion I see is the character's eyes blinking and mouth moving. Currently, my Time Settings is set to 16500 total frames with a Time Unit of Time (instead of Frame).

If I just click on a Timeline position, the performance seems to be fine. But once I try to hit Play from that position, the hourglass comes out (mouse icon indicating loading), but the Voice layer starts playing while the screen freezes. Three seconds later I see the character move and the timeline position bar move again. It doesn't do me any good since I can't tell what settings to set the Lips editor. 

If you are looking for a new video card, stay away from Quadro cards as they are not optimal for RL products. The game-related NVidia and AMD cards are better. There is an issue with Sony Vegas not supporting the latest NVidia cards with respect GPU acceleration; hopefully Magix will fix this in Vegas 14 (users should make themselves heard!).

I'm surprised CT8 would be so memory-hungry, as a scene is so much simpler than an iClone 6 scene, for example. I have plenty of RAM and VRAM so I didn't really check.

However, I loaded some projects I have and on average a project uses 300 MB RAM and 200 MB VRAM (difference of VRAM between running CT8 and not running it).

The size of your audio isn't really a factor for your card and is relatively small anyway: a 4-min WAV file at CD quality is about 41 MB. I can't imagine that the lip-sync data would take enormous amounts of RAM or VRAM. Just out of curiosity, what is the size of your project file?

I assume you use a 3D head. Does the project work with a 2D head? (You would probably need to create it; I'm not sure if the data form the 3D project can be reused in a 2D project.)

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Uploading a zoomed in version of the Afterburner screenshot.

It turns out that I have Windows 10 Home, so by default I do not have Hyper-V installed. I decided to try MSI Afterburner. When I played my saved CrazyTalk project, the card memory showed 1125 MB. However, this seems to be the capped and it did not go further beyond this value.If my video card has 2 GB of memory, then what would an additional memory get me if the usage only maxes out at less than the card memory?