I’m working to create an animation with some mid-size 3D regular grid/image data, ~500MB per tilmestep.
It’s heavily compressed to reduce disk footprint (i.e. LZMA level 7), with each timestep stored in a separate vti file. I’m observing a long load time between each timestep as the files get inflated and paged into memory.
With geometry caching, the playback becomes super fast once every time step has been seen once. But this effectively means I need to wait for all the data to load once in order to achieve “smooth” playback (speeds up animation export, also).
I’m wondering if there is a mechanism to “warm start” this process. Can I specify that I would like every single time step to load right away when I hit “apply” (assuming I have the resources available)? Or perhaps in batches, something like “load the first 50 time steps upon import”?
Alas, there is no such mode generally available. Since your goal is to load the timesteps as fast as possible to play through them, optimizing the reader is really what is needed. Loading ahead of time ultimately won’t save you anything because you’ll just have to wait for the timesteps to load before you can play through them, so you wait before or during your animation.
On the other hand, if your workflow was to load a dataset and then putter around in ParaView before starting the animation, there is a potential opportunity to preload files while you are puttering. This would require asynchronous data loading, which ParaView does not do, but would be in the realm of possibility in a future version of ParaView that incorporates asynchronous project. Kitware has been working on such a project (ParaView Async), but development is paused for now while we figure out how to fund the remainder of the work.