SynthEyes Crashed!

SynthEyes is internally quite reliable, and it has been extraordinarily successful at avoiding many kinds of crashes. When things do go wrong, they are typically very specific problems. For example, a user doing something that isn't expected at that time, a scene-specific unusual mathematical situation, or a lingering reference to something that was just deleted or closed. Once we know how to recreate a crash, it's usually easy to track down and fix.

Known Issues

You can see the list of known issues and workarounds in the current SynthEyes 2401 build 1058.

Crashes During Startup

*** IMPORTANT *** SynthEyes 2004+ require the AVX instruction set. If SynthEyes crashes the first time you try to run a new version and you have an older processor, that is likely the cause. We can provide a SynthEyes 1905 download upon request.

Otherwise, an immediate crash on startup is typically due to switching back to an older SynthEyes version, or if your computer previously wasn't shut down properly. You can manually reset the preferences to fix that.

Crash or Hang?

They're different, which is it? If SynthEyes appears to be hung, perhaps it's really just doing something that takes a while, if you just started some particular operation. Be aware that opening a long movie file can take a substantial time, as it must be indexed to locate all the image frames in it. On Windows, you can right-click a task in the Task Manager and select Create dump file to help identify the cause (see instructions for dump files below). On macOS, you can select a process, Inspect it, and then Sample.

Windows Note: The "Nahimic" audio system (NahimicOSD.dll) has a parasitic video overlay that is problematic to a number of apps including SynthEyes, and may cause a hang when entering the graph editor or perspective view. It is present on machines from major manufacturers, including Dell. If so, disable or uninstall it.

Reporting a Crash or Hang

If you see a crash or hang, it's very important to immediately take a full-screen screen capture, and write down exactly what you were doing for the 30 seconds or so right before the crash, as accurately as possible down to the last keystroke or mouse push.

If an "Imminent Crash" dialog appears, immediately take a full-screen capture before hitting Continue. These are a result of SynthEyes self-checking and detecting a specific problem, so if one appears, it's important to find out exactly what problem it saw, rather than you just saying "it crashed" (which isn't really even necessarily the case).

Notice the emphasis on a full-screen screen capture: sometimes people send us little captures of just an error message, but what we really want to know was what was happening in the *rest* of the interface, which furnishes valuable clues.

If you have an error that occurs *during* a solve, please send the SynthEyes scene (sni) file—one you saved, regenerated, or retrieved (see below). We don't need images, we're going to hit solve again and hope to see the problem.

If you see a "really big" problem ("file reading doesn't work!", "planar tracking doesn't work!"), don't assume that you don't need to say anything, or don't need to send much information, because "everybody must be having it." Instead, it's usually just the opposite: there are only a few people having it, maybe just you, due to the particular SynthEyes features being used, or due to particular operating system or processor hardware. So please send a full description of your operating system and processor. (On macOS, you can click the Apple logo, About this Mac, and System Report, do a File/Save and send us that information.)

Windows: Windows will save core dump files for the last 3 crashes. To retrieve them, start SynthEyes, then click the File/User Data Folder item. Go UP two levels to the AppData folder, then DOWN into the Local, SynthEyes, and CrashDumps folders, in that order. Right-click the last dump file, and select Send to/Compressed (zipped) folder. You can email the file if it is a few MB, or post larger files. For more information on configuring dumps using the registry, see this Microsoft article.

macOS: For any crash, please send us the information from the macOS crash reporter. Click on Details, then command-A to select all the text, command-C to copy it to the clipboard, and command-V to paste it into a mail message. There's a lot of information, and some of it can be very helpful! But of course we never know just which part until we look. If SynthEyes disappears without the macOS crash reporter popping up, here's what to do:

  1. Open the Console app, from Applications > Utilities in Finder.
  2. Select Crash Reports.
  3. Locate the most recent (top) crash report for SynthEyes in the list.
  4. Right-click the desired log's file name.
  5. Either command-A and command-C the contents of the lower pane, then paste the information directly into an email, or
  6. Select Reveal in Finder, drag the file displayed in Finder to Mail, and send the crash report as a mail attachment

Linux: You'll need to consult your system's settings to determine where or if Linux has saved a core dump file; every Linux has its own excessively complex scheme. For example, RedHat/CentOS may have the Automatic Bug Reporting Tool (ABRT).

Recovering your SynthEyes scene (SNI) file

In many SynthEyes-detected crashes, SynthEyes will save your current SNI scene file. When you restart SynthEyes, click File/User Data File. The saved file is crash.sni there; you can check its date. Don't use it to replace any earlier versions of the SNI file you may have made; use it as a next version. If you've been using SynthEyes's auto-versioning features, you should also have a sequence of earlier versions.

If you got an error about running out of memory, check that you have plenty of free disk space on your main system drive. Your operating system likes to think ahead, and make sure it has somewhere to keep SynthEyes if it needs to move the running application to disk temporarily. (Technical explanation: it wants backing store for the virtual memory, even if the physical memory exists.)

SynthEyes easily is the best camera match mover and object tracker out there.

Matthew Merkovich

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