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-<chapter id="introduction">
-
- <title><acronym>Introduction</acronym></title>
- <para>Synfig, like most every other competent graphics program, breaks down
- individual elements of a Canvas into Layers. However, it differs from other
- programs in two major ways:</para>
- <orderedlist>
- <listitem>
- <para>An individual layer in Synfig usually represents a single "Primitive".
- ie: A single region, an outline of a region, an imported JPEG, etc... This
- allows you to have a great deal of flexibility and control. It is not
- uncommon for a composition to have hundreds of layers(organized into a
- hierarchy for artist sanity of course).</para>
- </listitem>
- <listitem>
- <para>A layer can not only composite information on top of the image below it,
- but also distort and/or modify it in some other way. In this sense, Synfig
- Layers act much like filters do in Adobe Photoshop or the GIMP. For example,
- we have a Blur Layer, Radial Blur Layer, Spherical Distortion Layer,
- color-correct layer, bevel layer, etc... </para>
- </listitem>
- </orderedlist>
-
- <para>Each layer has a set of parameters which determine how it behaves. When
- you click on a layer (either in the canvas window, or in the Layer Dialog),
- you will see its parameters in the Params Dialog.</para>
-
- <para>Synfig Studio has an autorecover feature. If it crashes, even if the
- current file has not been saved, it will not lose more than 5 minutes of work.
- At restart it will automatically prompt the user to recover the unsaved changes.
- Unfortunately history isn't recovered yet. That feature comes later.</para>
-
- <para>One thing you may notice is that Synfig Studio is SLOW, making it
- practically unusable on hardware that is over 3 years old. The biggest reason
- for this is that all of the color calculations are done in floating point
- because Synfig Studio was built from the ground up with High-Dynamic-Range
- Imaging in mind. HOWEVER, this will not be the case forever.</para>
-
- <para>darco has some fairly major re-implementations and optimizations that
- he plans to implement that should quite dramatically improve the performance
- of Synfig on all platforms. The goal is not a 200% speed increase, it is at
- least a 2000% speed increase. With the optimizations that are planned to be
- implemented, we will be able to pipeline operations in such a way that this
- performance improvement can be realized. It should also pave the way to hardware
- acceleration using todays powerful graphics processors, which should yield
- further performance improvements measurable in orders of magnitude.</para>
-</chapter>
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