Merge Visible Layers bug

[MakeTheMostOfLife]

Camera A7r3 shooting uncompressed RAW

New Stack 250 raw into Affinity, takes a bit of time but no problem

When done and click Merge Visible, Affinity starts to use CPU power to process but then seems to give up. Currently it's still in the task and using almost zero CPU. It sometimes goes up to 100% and then back down to almost zero.

This is the 2nd time like this.

First time was the same, and it took hours but eventually it started using CPU again and got the task finished.

Why is Affinity not using the CPU to finish the job?

[Chris B]

Hey MakeTheMostOfLife,

It sounds like the CPU is waiting for the swap memory.

If you have 250 raw images, assuming around 24 megapixels (probably 6000 x4000) - each one of those raw files is being developed to 16 bit and occupy approx 200 MB in memory with the mipmap overhead. So now 200 x 250 = 50,000 - unless you have 64GB of RAM I will hazard a guess that this is the issue.

I am a little surprised you waited for the raw files to process and get put in a stack—how long did that take?

[MakeTheMostOfLife]

Hey,

Thanks for the reply.  Ok, that makes sense. It's behaving like it's waiting for something.  For the RAW photos to process into the stack I don't think was super long. Not sure the exact time as I left and came back to it later. Maybe about 15-30 mins. 

My MBP is 32gig Ram The photos were 43 megapixel... so I guess I totally killed the RAM and Swap.

On this last attempt with the 250 photos (the first one that did complete merge visible was around 195 photos), I just cancelled it in the end with so long of it seemingly doing nothing.

If I had just waited will it eventually allocate the swap it needs for such a large merge visible develop?

The project is a 2 hour 250 frame Astro Time-lapse to making star trails.

[lepr]

2 hours ago, MakeTheMostOfLife said:

32gig RAM [...] 43 megapixel [...] 250 photos

Try merging 25 photos at a time so you have 10 results and then merge the 10 into one final result. You might need to close Affinity after each merge to make sure memory is freed before trying to do the next batch.