*Thanks for watching.* Timecodes for skipping the video and links are in the description Want to learn more about OpenToonz and Tahoma? Check out my Udemy course (follow this link to help the channel): *A complete guide to OpenToonz for traditional 2D animation: **bit.ly/OpenToonzCourse*
All my OpenToonz tutorials: *ua-cam.com/video/saDNGVj46Xc/v-deo.html* For help setting up and using OpenToonz, chat with animators & developers and enter animation challenges, join my OpenToonz Discord: *discord.gg/FYy4Mg7*
That sounds strange. If have to see a video of that too see what the problem could be. I've used that a lot because it's a good way to have a transparent background to an imported image. Use the selection tool to copy the main part of the drawing to a raster level and then erase the extra parts. Are you definitely using a standard raster and not a Toonz Raster?
This was sooooo helpful. I was making a project for school, and I drew an animation that took me days. The few drawings that I was proud of within that animation disappeared because my pc isn't the best so OpenToonz crashes often. ESPECIALLY, with onion skin on. I frantically went through the scene to check if I had those drawings anywhere else, and thankfully, I HAD EVERYTHING. All those missing drawings were actually copy pasted twice by me for the animation. (you know many times when animating you have to lasso a part of a frame and paste it on another frame to save a lot of time rather than redrawing the entire thing again with some changes) Then I came to UA-cam and searched "OpenToonz not saving drawings successfully" or something along those lines. Found your vid, now I AM A PRO AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA. (Tysm for the vid)
What i've noticed is that saving (Ctrl-S) then clicking somewhere while the cursor is still turning makes OTZ crash and then last levels gets red when restarting the program. This is annoying because for some reason, OTZ is relatively slow to save, so it happens often!
Thanks for the tip. Yes, saving is very slow and patience certainly helps. Whenever OpenToonz pauses, don't click anywhere. Just wait for it to finish what it's doing before continuing.
I think we've all been caught my that at one point or another. I hope you'd saved at some point while animating. I'm saving at least once every 10 minutes. Not just in OpenToonz/Tahoma, but all of my programs. I've had far too many crashes to not do so.
hey, the video is a little older now but maybe u can still help me... is the .pli file the one with the drawings or the .tlv or the .tpl ? aaaand Opentoonz always crashes if i try to import a second image to my scene and then all my drawings are gone and theres no back up left. can i do smth to prevent that? i already checked the size of the images i imported and my pc is also not the worst one...
The .pli file is the colour palette file. The .tlv file is the Toonz Raster Level. The .pli is the Vector drawing file. Regarding the crashing. Does it crash on a particular image? It's worth trying another. Download another image from Google Image search or similar and try that. I can't think of anything that you can do to help with the crashing, so hopefully it's the drawing type.
Man what’s another free Animation app I don’t even want to use this shit 🤦🏾♂️ it’s so frustrating it’s deleting all my files off the project and hiding them in Extras folder and I don’t even have a .pli file anywhere
Thanks for the help. I understand more but still hasn't solved my problem. In addition to saving often and Save ALL, for a long project I also Render sections of it and save them outside OTZ. I have the latest version and a very good computer but it still crashes and things go lost.
Yes, when crashes happen, your files can corrupt and when they don't, they can just not be saved, so you lose some work. The main thing to help this is to create as small a scene as possible and have many of them to make up a project. That will help to stop these kinds of errors and is just a good way to work, to separate the assets in each scene and will help keep the program running quicker.
Hey Darren!! Thanks for this usefull video!!! But I have a little problem. At first, in the timeline, the frames appeared with a black dot. Recently, I don't know what I touched, but the dots disappeared and the names of each frame appeared. How can I recover the points? Thanks for your time!
At the bottom left of the timeline is a slider to change the zoom of the cells. If they're larger, you can see the drawing level name and drawing numbers. If they're smaller you only see dots. I always recommend showing the drawing numbers at first, so that is clear when you're drawing on a drawing that is used elsewhere.
Thanks for the great video. Unfortunately, I seem to have a different problem. ALL the frames to turn red and do not load? I have no idea what happened. If I check the level settings the drawings are where they are supposed to be. But the scene can't find them.
If the level is being found, then the drawings are just not in there. You either didn't save the level (use save all to save) or the program possibly crashed before it could be saved.
@@DarrenTAnims Actually, seems to be a different problem. The drawings are definitely there: I can open them in other graphics viewers, etc. Also, the scene has about 20 levels. I have another scene that uses like 15 of the same levels(drawings) and that scene works fine. Also, I can create a new level using the drawings the scene can't find, and that loads fine. - so pretty good work around. I think something odd happened to the scene file itself. At any rate, I just saved as a different scene name, made no other changes, and all but 2 of the levels loaded fine. Then I just created new levels using the drawings that wouldn't load from the original levels and I was pretty much back to where I started. So, yeah, still a mystery, but at least not total disaster. Thanks for your efforts. I thought you might be interested in this odd error. Hopefully it will never happen to you.
I hope it doesn't. But I'm glad you've got it sorted. Yes, starting a new scene an reloading your levels in is a great way to check if the levels are the problem. Thanks for keeping me updated. All the best.,
Because some users, particularly animation studios, separate the process of drawing the images and timing them. And they have different users found them, so if you're job is to time the animation and you accidentally draw on an image, you need to be able to only save the timeline and not the drawings. Or if you know you've correctly set the timing on the timeline and want to discard the drawing changes then it's useful to be able to do so. But for most users, this isn't necessary and I world prefer to have a single save button, with those other buttons hidden.
So Darren all of your tips have been helpful but you remember when u said if I export an animation ad a gif the background would be transparent well... it’s not it’s just a white background help
If you haven't added a background or changed the alpha setting in your scene settings, then yes, it will be transparent. But when you play your animation your player will obviously have a background colour showing. It might be white or black, but playing your gif on a web page and overlaying it over something, like in a video editor, it will be transparent. I only use Windows though, so they're could be differences on mac and linux.
@@hisknight_If you haven't changed the background alpha values in the scene settings, then it will be set correctly. You get to the scene settings from the xsheet menu in OpenToonz or the scene menu in Tahoma.
You don't want to. They're the play makers and they specify which frames to play. Drag them around to change which frames play when you press the play button.
I've re-done the work twice now and it goes to red frames both times. I'm patiently saving all and it remembers some other changes, but these particular drawings turn to red frames.
Fixing it depends how you broke it. If you've loaded the same level into another scene (by dragging it in or choosing the Load Level command, or by copying a scene or choosing save scene as) then you're referencing the same drawings. If you add more drawings in one scene or change them or delete them, you'll see the change in the other scenes where the level is used.
the level i have lost is Q, when i check my drawings folder Q is there and is completely fine, i really dont wanna have to re-start having done 3 months work on a music video. some help would be much appreciated thank you :)
When you say that your Q level is completely fine, are all the drawings there? Have you loaded it into another scene and viewed the drawings? If so, then it sounds like your scene file is looking in the wrong folder.
Sorry to bother you again, but I'm now starting to have problems with the selection tool when copying and pasting images. When I copy and paste into a new raster level the drawings dont appear at all.
If there's no .bak file and your original file isn't working, then no, there's nothing else you can do. But be sure that the file isn't working. Try starting a temporary scene and loading the drawing level into it.
I've been so careful to save my project every second, opened the application, waited not touching anything, and red dots still occurred. I had one red dot before I closed, I fixed that, rendered drawings I had and that drawing came up missing again. The drawings are missing in the browser too. Thoughts? Suggestions?
Are you using Save All to save? Often new users use one of the other commands to save, often Save Scene. Saving the Scene with this command doesn't save any drawings. Always use Save All.
Great stuff! I still have the problem though - not sure if it's a glitch in the program, or am I doing something wrong... So duplicated one drawing several times (a gear wheel) to create moving parts. Saved all for sure and saved scene just to make sure it saves. Reloaded and the duplicated levels are still there, but in the column section - it's all in red. I tried to look for the '.pli' drawing file - but only the original was there. Looks like the duplicates didn't save a separate drawing at all. How come they are still there in the level view... Any thoughts / advise on this problem?
Ok, thanks for sharing this. Firstly, they'd no need to save a scene after doing Save All, "just in case". Save All does save everything. How did you duplicate your drawing? If you just created a duplicate drawing in the same level there won't be any new files. The duplicate drawings will be part of the same level. If you used clone, then you'll have given them a new name. You said that the duplicated levels are there, but also that the drawings are shown in red. Are the levels empty? Do the levels have a different name and have you looked for those names on disk?
@@DarrenTAnims Thanks for answering so fast. I duplicated the drawing in the same level. There are all under the same name - which I thought to be odd, but it is possible that I just don't fully grasp the concept of all this level and layer/column. Anyhow - So, I have this layer with a couple of drawings (duplicated) and I click and drag them to a new column to animate them all separately. After changing the position and rotation off all columns - the animation is what I wanted it to be - it works fine. But then I save it and relaunch the program and it just has empty cells with the saved animation, but no picture in it - except the original...
@Darren T I found a way to work around my problem (thanks to your reply) - at least until I'll get the full understanding of how things work - not very sure about the difference between duplicate and clone - but I now I just used the clone option and named each drawing and seems to work for me even after restarting :)
@@olovibes582 Duplicate just creates new drawings in the same level, copied from the drawing you duplicated, but you can edit one copy without changing the other. They will have the same name because they are still in the same level. They shouldn't disappear though. Are you clicking Save All? It sounds like you're clicking Save Scene.
@@DarrenTAnims I'm pretty sure I saved all - that's why I was saving both - each save was a click on the save scene and on the save all - just not to make a mistake and save only the scene. But who knows - maybe that one time - I saved only the scene? Anyhow - thank you very much for your help on this one - maybe I will figure out what I did wrong at some point. Your advice with the clone seems to work for me better anyway - for now... Thanks again for your hep - and thanks for all of your great tutorial videos you make!
I'd need more information to be able to help. The video shows why you see the red frames and how to reconnect missing levels. Which part doesn't work for you?
I don't think you can actually duplicate an imported image. The best thing to do is to create a standard raster level, then use the selection tool to highlight the imported image, then copy /paste the selection into your raster level. You can the edit it or add new drawings to the same level.
@@cartycartoons5594 There's a few ways. I like using the toolbar if you've got it visible (you can right click on a column header and choose toggle toolbar or similar). Or just right click in a frame and choose New Level, then select Raster from the drop down.
i m not able to recover the file cuz i even deleted the image after importing so there is no image folder there gosh i want to cry i need to give the project after tommoroow now it lost🥲😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭
If you imported an image and choose import, not load, then the image will be stored in the extras or details folder, inside your project folder. But if you chose Load, then OpenToonz will be trying to look at the image in it's original local, so if you deleted it from there, OpenToonz can't load it.
*Thanks for watching.* Timecodes for skipping the video and links are in the description
Want to learn more about OpenToonz and Tahoma? Check out my Udemy course (follow this link to help the channel):
*A complete guide to OpenToonz for traditional 2D animation: **bit.ly/OpenToonzCourse*
All my OpenToonz tutorials: *ua-cam.com/video/saDNGVj46Xc/v-deo.html*
For help setting up and using OpenToonz, chat with animators & developers and enter animation challenges, join my OpenToonz Discord: *discord.gg/FYy4Mg7*
That sounds strange. If have to see a video of that too see what the problem could be. I've used that a lot because it's a good way to have a transparent background to an imported image. Use the selection tool to copy the main part of the drawing to a raster level and then erase the extra parts.
Are you definitely using a standard raster and not a Toonz Raster?
This was sooooo helpful. I was making a project for school, and I drew an animation that took me days. The few drawings that I was proud of within that animation disappeared because my pc isn't the best so OpenToonz crashes often. ESPECIALLY, with onion skin on. I frantically went through the scene to check if I had those drawings anywhere else, and thankfully, I HAD EVERYTHING. All those missing drawings were actually copy pasted twice by me for the animation. (you know many times when animating you have to lasso a part of a frame and paste it on another frame to save a lot of time rather than redrawing the entire thing again with some changes) Then I came to UA-cam and searched "OpenToonz not saving drawings successfully" or something along those lines. Found your vid, now I AM A PRO AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA. (Tysm for the vid)
That's great. Glad it helped. Keep at it, Pro :-)
I Appreciate your effort for making this Video Darren. Really helped.
Then it was worth it.
I'm glad it helped
This video saved my life in ways u can't even imagine! thank u for the information
I'm so pleased it helped 🙂
Thanks youuuuuu !!!! You saved my project with your video !!!!!
I'm so pleased to have helped 😀
you have no idea how much it helped me...Thankkkkkk uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu so much
Awesome. I'm so pleased 😀
You Sir saved my bacon, THANK YOU!
I'm so pleased it helped 😀
Reason 4 is what saved me thank you!
Excellent. I'm glad this helped. There's nothing worse than thinking you've lost drawings.
What i've noticed is that saving (Ctrl-S) then clicking somewhere while the cursor is still turning makes OTZ crash and then last levels gets red when restarting the program.
This is annoying because for some reason, OTZ is relatively slow to save, so it happens often!
Thanks for the tip.
Yes, saving is very slow and patience certainly helps. Whenever OpenToonz pauses, don't click anywhere. Just wait for it to finish what it's doing before continuing.
Thanks for another video man!
Any time!
Thank you know I know how to fix them
This is one of the most common questions and a difficult one to track down for each user, so I hope this video helps.
I spent 3 hours drawing the one Animation I made. I already finished it but then OpenToonZ just crash.
I think we've all been caught my that at one point or another. I hope you'd saved at some point while animating. I'm saving at least once every 10 minutes. Not just in OpenToonz/Tahoma, but all of my programs. I've had far too many crashes to not do so.
@@DarrenTAnims thank you for tutorial by the way.
Oh my god THANK YOUUUUU!!!
My pleasure. I hope it helped
hey, the video is a little older now but maybe u can still help me... is the .pli file the one with the drawings or the .tlv or the .tpl ? aaaand Opentoonz always crashes if i try to import a second image to my scene and then all my drawings are gone and theres no back up left. can i do smth to prevent that? i already checked the size of the images i imported and my pc is also not the worst one...
The .pli file is the colour palette file.
The .tlv file is the Toonz Raster Level.
The .pli is the Vector drawing file.
Regarding the crashing. Does it crash on a particular image? It's worth trying another. Download another image from Google Image search or similar and try that. I can't think of anything that you can do to help with the crashing, so hopefully it's the drawing type.
Man what’s another free Animation app I don’t even want to use this shit 🤦🏾♂️ it’s so frustrating it’s deleting all my files off the project and hiding them in Extras folder and I don’t even have a .pli file anywhere
Thanks for the help. I understand more but still hasn't solved my problem. In addition to saving often and Save ALL, for a long project I also Render sections of it and save them outside OTZ. I have the latest version and a very good computer but it still crashes and things go lost.
Yes, when crashes happen, your files can corrupt and when they don't, they can just not be saved, so you lose some work.
The main thing to help this is to create as small a scene as possible and have many of them to make up a project. That will help to stop these kinds of errors and is just a good way to work, to separate the assets in each scene and will help keep the program running quicker.
Hey Darren!! Thanks for this usefull video!!! But I have a little problem. At first, in the timeline, the frames appeared with a black dot. Recently, I don't know what I touched, but the dots disappeared and the names of each frame appeared. How can I recover the points? Thanks for your time!
At the bottom left of the timeline is a slider to change the zoom of the cells. If they're larger, you can see the drawing level name and drawing numbers. If they're smaller you only see dots. I always recommend showing the drawing numbers at first, so that is clear when you're drawing on a drawing that is used elsewhere.
Thanks a lot!!@@DarrenTAnims
Thanks for the great video. Unfortunately, I seem to have a different problem. ALL the frames to turn red and do not load? I have no idea what happened. If I check the level settings the drawings are where they are supposed to be. But the scene can't find them.
If the level is being found, then the drawings are just not in there. You either didn't save the level (use save all to save) or the program possibly crashed before it could be saved.
@@DarrenTAnims Actually, seems to be a different problem. The drawings are definitely there: I can open them in other graphics viewers, etc. Also, the scene has about 20 levels. I have another scene that uses like 15 of the same levels(drawings) and that scene works fine. Also, I can create a new level using the drawings the scene can't find, and that loads fine. - so pretty good work around.
I think something odd happened to the scene file itself. At any rate, I just saved as a different scene name, made no other changes, and all but 2 of the levels loaded fine. Then I just created new levels using the drawings that wouldn't load from the original levels and I was pretty much back to where I started. So, yeah, still a mystery, but at least not total disaster.
Thanks for your efforts. I thought you might be interested in this odd error. Hopefully it will never happen to you.
I hope it doesn't. But I'm glad you've got it sorted. Yes, starting a new scene an reloading your levels in is a great way to check if the levels are the problem.
Thanks for keeping me updated.
All the best.,
WHY TF DOES THE SAVE SCENE EVEN EXIST IF ITS NOT GOING TO SAVE THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF MY PROJECT
Because some users, particularly animation studios, separate the process of drawing the images and timing them. And they have different users found them, so if you're job is to time the animation and you accidentally draw on an image, you need to be able to only save the timeline and not the drawings.
Or if you know you've correctly set the timing on the timeline and want to discard the drawing changes then it's useful to be able to do so.
But for most users, this isn't necessary and I world prefer to have a single save button, with those other buttons hidden.
So Darren all of your tips have been helpful but you remember when u said if I export an animation ad a gif the background would be transparent well... it’s not it’s just a white background help
If you haven't added a background or changed the alpha setting in your scene settings, then yes, it will be transparent. But when you play your animation your player will obviously have a background colour showing. It might be white or black, but playing your gif on a web page and overlaying it over something, like in a video editor, it will be transparent.
I only use Windows though, so they're could be differences on mac and linux.
@@DarrenTAnims what alpha setting
@@hisknight_If you haven't changed the background alpha values in the scene settings, then it will be set correctly.
You get to the scene settings from the xsheet menu in OpenToonz or the scene menu in Tahoma.
How do you get rid of the 2 white like triangles above your frames??
You don't want to. They're the play makers and they specify which frames to play. Drag them around to change which frames play when you press the play button.
@@DarrenTAnims yeah I figured it out thank you I appreciate it
2nd comment thank you beacause of you now i can have facecam in my videos
You're welcome, but how did I help? 🙂
@@DarrenTAnims this might seem weird but now i will have animated facecam with lipsync (it is hard not so it will take me a month to figure out)
@@kapeshaha I look forward to seeing what you've done 🙂
I've re-done the work twice now and it goes to red frames both times. I'm patiently saving all and it remembers some other changes, but these particular drawings turn to red frames.
You must be using the same level in a different scene for that to happen.
@@DarrenTAnims That isn't the case here. "Replace level" with what it already was, worked.
Pls @@DarrenTAnims can you elaborate about using the same level in another scene and how I can fix it
Fixing it depends how you broke it.
If you've loaded the same level into another scene (by dragging it in or choosing the Load Level command, or by copying a scene or choosing save scene as) then you're referencing the same drawings. If you add more drawings in one scene or change them or delete them, you'll see the change in the other scenes where the level is used.
the level i have lost is Q, when i check my drawings folder Q is there and is completely fine, i really dont wanna have to re-start having done 3 months work on a music video. some help would be much appreciated thank you :)
When you say that your Q level is completely fine, are all the drawings there? Have you loaded it into another scene and viewed the drawings? If so, then it sounds like your scene file is looking in the wrong folder.
Sorry to bother you again, but I'm now starting to have problems with the selection tool when copying and pasting images. When I copy and paste into a new raster level the drawings dont appear at all.
Never mind apparently 😅 I had the images for my animation to far apart from the canvas, it works now though sorry.
Glad you've figured it out
hello, my file crashed and now it's gone, when i checked my folder there is no bak file :' can this still be fixed? or should i redo everything?
If there's no .bak file and your original file isn't working, then no, there's nothing else you can do. But be sure that the file isn't working. Try starting a temporary scene and loading the drawing level into it.
I've been so careful to save my project every second, opened the application, waited not touching anything, and red dots still occurred.
I had one red dot before I closed, I fixed that, rendered drawings I had and that drawing came up missing again.
The drawings are missing in the browser too.
Thoughts? Suggestions?
Are you using Save All to save?
Often new users use one of the other commands to save, often Save Scene. Saving the Scene with this command doesn't save any drawings.
Always use Save All.
Great stuff! I still have the problem though - not sure if it's a glitch in the program, or am I doing something wrong... So duplicated one drawing several times (a gear wheel) to create moving parts. Saved all for sure and saved scene just to make sure it saves. Reloaded and the duplicated levels are still there, but in the column section - it's all in red. I tried to look for the '.pli' drawing file - but only the original was there. Looks like the duplicates didn't save a separate drawing at all. How come they are still there in the level view... Any thoughts / advise on this problem?
Ok, thanks for sharing this.
Firstly, they'd no need to save a scene after doing Save All, "just in case". Save All does save everything.
How did you duplicate your drawing?
If you just created a duplicate drawing in the same level there won't be any new files. The duplicate drawings will be part of the same level. If you used clone, then you'll have given them a new name.
You said that the duplicated levels are there, but also that the drawings are shown in red. Are the levels empty? Do the levels have a different name and have you looked for those names on disk?
@@DarrenTAnims Thanks for answering so fast. I duplicated the drawing in the same level. There are all under the same name - which I thought to be odd, but it is possible that I just don't fully grasp the concept of all this level and layer/column. Anyhow - So, I have this layer with a couple of drawings (duplicated) and I click and drag them to a new column to animate them all separately. After changing the position and rotation off all columns - the animation is what I wanted it to be - it works fine. But then I save it and relaunch the program and it just has empty cells with the saved animation, but no picture in it - except the original...
@Darren T I found a way to work around my problem (thanks to your reply) - at least until I'll get the full understanding of how things work - not very sure about the difference between duplicate and clone - but I now I just used the clone option and named each drawing and seems to work for me even after restarting :)
@@olovibes582 Duplicate just creates new drawings in the same level, copied from the drawing you duplicated, but you can edit one copy without changing the other. They will have the same name because they are still in the same level.
They shouldn't disappear though. Are you clicking Save All? It sounds like you're clicking Save Scene.
@@DarrenTAnims I'm pretty sure I saved all - that's why I was saving both - each save was a click on the save scene and on the save all - just not to make a mistake and save only the scene. But who knows - maybe that one time - I saved only the scene? Anyhow - thank you very much for your help on this one - maybe I will figure out what I did wrong at some point. Your advice with the clone seems to work for me better anyway - for now... Thanks again for your hep - and thanks for all of your great tutorial videos you make!
save scene huh. I feel for its trick twice Img gona km 💀💀
Save all. Save all. Save all !
Sorry but it's not working please help me
I'd need more information to be able to help. The video shows why you see the red frames and how to reconnect missing levels. Which part doesn't work for you?
I need help. Whenever I try to duplicate an imported image and save all, the importated image disappears anyway leaving me with the same red frames.
I don't think you can actually duplicate an imported image. The best thing to do is to create a standard raster level, then use the selection tool to highlight the imported image, then copy /paste the selection into your raster level. You can the edit it or add new drawings to the same level.
@@DarrenTAnims thanks for the reply, so how do I create a raster level, I'm still kind of new to this program and I want to animate.
@@cartycartoons5594 There's a few ways. I like using the toolbar if you've got it visible (you can right click on a column header and choose toggle toolbar or similar). Or just right click in a frame and choose New Level, then select Raster from the drop down.
@@DarrenTAnims ok thanks
i m not able to recover the file cuz i even deleted the image after importing so there is no image folder there gosh i want to cry i need to give the project after tommoroow now it lost🥲😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭
If you imported an image and choose import, not load, then the image will be stored in the extras or details folder, inside your project folder.
But if you chose Load, then OpenToonz will be trying to look at the image in it's original local, so if you deleted it from there, OpenToonz can't load it.