V0.4 Troubleshooting Rendering Issues
This page is currently under construction. I'm trying to get Octolapse V0.4 stable released ASAP at the moment, and this has led to some documentation shortcuts. As you might know, Octolapse v4.0 has a TON of documentation built right into the plugin that may help. Click on the various help icons (blue question marks) throughout the system to see detailed help on almost every setting. There are also help buttons that will show up for many error notifications. ALWAYS click on those if you need help.
For the most part, rendering is pretty stable, but problems can occur. Below are some common problems and solutions.
You may get this error after your print completes. At least two snapshots are needed to render a timelapse, though you will need a lot more frames than that to have an interesting timelapse. I recommend using the Smart - Compatibility trigger to help debug this issue, since it will provide a preview of your snapshots before you actually start your print. It will even provide some help if it detects a problem. Click on the blue question marks in the snapshot preview to get help for these issues:
If you are printing in vase mode, do not use any of the High Quality triggers. I would recommend that you do not use Octolapse when printing in vase mode, but if you must, consider the Smart - Snap to Print or Smart - Snap to Print - Smooth trigger.
This could also indicate a problem with your printer profile settings, especially the Priming Height setting. See the Troubleshooting Printer Profile guide for details.
If you are using the H.264 or H.265 output format (codec):
you may not have enough memory to render a video, especially if you are using a DSLR or a high resolution webcam. Even a Pi3B+ does not have enough memory for these codecs to work every time (I have not tested a Pi4 yet). I recommend using the regular MP4 codec if you are having trouble here.
First, make sure that your snapshot images are not low quality. You may need to increase your camera resolution, increase the lighting, adjust the camera settings, or increase your camera's bitrate to increase the snapshot quality. If your snapshot quality is bad, your rendered video will also look bad.
If your snapshot quality looks good, you may need to increase your video bitrate:
The correct setting here will depend on the resolution of your snapshots. The higher the resolution, the higher the bitrate will need to be. If you go overboard here though, your videos will be huge, rendering will take a long time, and you may run out of memory.
First, make sure rendering in enabled by checking your rendering profile:
If rendering is enabled, there may have been some kind of error. See if the snapshots exist in the Unfinished Rendering popup. If you see this button on the Octolapse Tab:
You will be able to re-render the timelapse, or download the images and render them manually:
Click the blue question mark in the upper right hand corner for more details.
If you do not see this button, try rebooting and see if it appears. If it does, consider reporting the issue to help me debug and fix the problem.
You can also check for timelapse images manually. If you are running OctoPi, you can connect via SFTP (Filezilla works great) and browse to the following location to find your timelapse images if they exist (provided you did NOT change the default snapshot temporary directory):
/home/pi/.octoprint/data/octolapse/tmp/octolapse_snapshots_tmp/
You should see some directories that look like this:
Drill down into these subfolders and see if you can find your images.
Fortunately for you, the ability to download your snapshots was recently added to Octolapse! There are two ways to enable this feature:
- Disable rendering - Octolapse will always generate a snapshot archive if possible when rendering is disabled.
- Enable Snapshot Archive Generation - If rendering is enabled, you can edit your profile to force Octolapse to create a Zip file containing all of your images after the print has finished. Find and enable this setting in your rendering profiles:
You can find the snapshot archive by clicking on the Videos and Images... button within the Octolapse tab:
Switch to the Saved Snapshots tab and click the download button next to the archive:
Check the Pre-Roll and Post-Roll settings in your rendering profile. If you don't want any Pre or Post Roll, set these to 0:
Note that the default value of 2 seconds is shown above.
Rendering video is very processor intensive. If your hardware has multiple cores, you can take advantage of that to speed up rendering by increasing the Rendering Thread Count:
I recommend using one fewer threads than your hardware has processors. For example, my Pi3B+ has 4 cores, so I use 3 threads. If you use all of your cores (or worse yet MORE threads than you have cores), you will experience poor performance while Octolapse is rendering. Setting this value too high may actually decrease performance!
Note: NEVER print while Octolapse is rendering.