Tips for working with the uploader's recompression?

I know there have been a couple threads about this over the years, and my impression is that the official line is "we need to make the files fairly terse to keep the download size down, the exact algorithm is complex and is supposed to retain a degree of subtle motion", but clearly one could wish for some improvement there. To some extent you can see a correllation between large/fast movement and the likelihod that the data won't just get tossed out, but has anybody come up with any helpful ways to predict or at least work with the uploader to minimize loss?

My current case: testing a short looped segment of an animation for general appearance before moving on. Keyframes at 1, 2, 50, 100, 150, 200. Changes happen between 2 and 50, then 50 and 100 are identical. Everything changes back between 100 and 150, then 150 and 200 are identical. All splines are broken.

The results in the uploader preview?

About a third of the movements seem fine; joints move, pause, move back, pause again, continue.

About a third of the joints have no motion. Par for the course, I need to take my more subtle work and make it exaggerated for it to "take". Been there done that.

What's killing me though, is in the remaining third the motion is being interpolated smoothly between frames 2 and 100, and again between frames 100 and 200, with no pauses whatsoever. This despite there being *zero* changes from 50-100, and from 150-200. It seems completely backwards from the usual way the uploader algorithm screws up animations, and it also seems completely arbitrary and really much more severe in that I'm left with no sensible strategy to make it stop. Ironically these broken movements are going a lot slower than can be accomplished intentionally, and it would be a nice effect if I could make it happen at will instead of the uploader deciding it's going to do me this favor at random, and generate slow smooth motion where it wasn't specified in the first place.

So, rant mode off. Anybody have any helpful tips for making this stuff work in an intuitive manner, or at least in a reasonably predictable manner? It would be much appreciated if you could share

My guess would be keyframes are too far apart and the no movement between 50 and 100.

Way to trick it so the keyframes are close enough together and still runs like how you want? Drop the fps to like 10. This allows for intential slower movements then one would think impossible.

As for the pause, good luck if you want it long. What a lot of people do is move one bit like the tapping of the foot or hand. Personally I move the head around. That pauses *most* of the body and having SL not throw it out.

What you might also be seeing is the hip bug thats been around for too long now. Something like I've seen where the arm begins to move before it should but the entire movement is a lot slower then what it's supposed to be. This is a quarky bug is its difficult to reproduce.

I've been playing with the fps lately. Besides allowing you to get slower movements, does this affect filesize? Obviously it affects the bvh filesize, but that doesn't necessarily correlate to the size of the optimized file after upload. If it is a smaller file, that should make the animation playback less prone to lag.

Luth, many thanks; you cleared up a few things for me. I did not realize pauses were problematic, and thankfully my final animation does not require the pauses at all. I only injected them temporarily in order to make it easier for me to check the fit of this couple's animation I'm working on. I'll move forward and see what I end up with.

Good tip also about dropping the fps further. I'm working with 20 fps now, I shall drop it way down if it seems necessary down the line.

Johan:

That doesnt really seem to matter actually. And shouldn't be too much of a concern because there are many more things that will lag out SL then an animation will. But anything under 20fps will help showing the movements when someone is in lag.

For instance, in my Studio high up in the sky I get 60 or so FPS. If I play an animation that is 30fps and one that is 15fps but are designed to work with each, they will look the same. But those two same animations in a place where I get say 15 fps I will miss parts of the 30fps animation where as the 15fps one will look just fine. The 30fps animation will have missing movements. But then again, most people wouldn't see much of a difference

Okay, that's pretty much what I suspected, that it doesn't make much difference. I started to think I should redo all my animations to 15fps to lower the filesize, then I realized that would probably be a waste of time.

'eh just make the new ones at 15fps to make them a bit smoother in laggy situations and for those with less computer oomph then me