Recovering a faulty workspace ?

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davidh
Posts: 835
Joined: June 9th, 2009, 2:16 am

Recovering a faulty workspace ?

Post by davidh »

A few days ago I saved a workspace for later but when I clicked Restore from the last, PWP crashed. After some chasing for the Cancel button during loading, I managed to click the button and load the rest of the workspace with some red thumbnails. I went on reopening one red thumbnail after another until I arrived at the culprit, a clone step. It did fail to reopen and brought PWP down.
When I reloaded the workspace again and removed the clone thumbnail from the branch, the workspace opened without any problem.

This brought me to a question, what to do if the Preference setting On startup was "Restore previous workspace" and not "Ask to restore..." or "Do not restore..."
The workspace with the corrupt clone step had about 7 branches with up to ten thumbnails each, also my PC is not the latest state of art, so I had some time to try and click the ever dodging cancel button on the loading progress bar. With a powerfull up-to-date PC this would be highly impossible to achieve.

I think that a partial solution might be a short cut to bypass automatic loading of a workspace on start up. This would enable to start with another session, but would not recover the workspace.

Is there any chance to catch the problem with a corrupt transformation and disable it, displaying only a red error thumbnail, before the whole PWP crashes?
If not, perhaps as a last resort, a few hints how to manually disable branches or individual transformations in a script would help. Of course, it would always be just a trial and error process.
jsachs
Posts: 4203
Joined: January 22nd, 2009, 11:03 pm

Re: Recovering a faulty workspace ?

Post by jsachs »

I added a feature for the next release that lets you bypass the automatic reloading of the previous workspace file by holding down the Shift key while PWP starts up.

Can you email me the script file that failed so I can see what the problem was?
Jonathan Sachs
Digital Light & Color
davidh
Posts: 835
Joined: June 9th, 2009, 2:16 am

Re: Recovering a faulty workspace ?

Post by davidh »

Unfortunately I have dismantled it gradually by now as it served just for testing purposes and has grown too wide in the meantime. Anyway, as I mentioned, the corrupt thumbnail was a Clone job with the following settings: Darken Only, Continuous, Fixed !, No, Yes.

There was another Clone job, with settings (I guess) as above, in an antecedent branch which loaded without any problem. The latter branch was probably cloned from the previous one, but not the Clone jobs. They were inserted separately afterwards. So if they differed, it was only in Radius and Transparency.

If I can guess, the problem was caused by the Fixed cursors usage, which needed repeated switching between Fixed and some of the other cursor options to set the source point, as described in another post.
jsachs
Posts: 4203
Joined: January 22nd, 2009, 11:03 pm

Re: Recovering a faulty workspace ?

Post by jsachs »

I recently received a script file from another tester that crashed when it got to clone, and I have seen something similar here with the paint tool. It turns out the problem is a limit I placed on the length of a command line, which you can exceed if you do a lot of complicated cloning on an image. I need to look into restructuring the code to remove the size limit or else make it a lot larger.

Of course it is possible the problem you experienced was unrelated.
Jonathan Sachs
Digital Light & Color
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