Timeline crashing

Support
1

Hi,

I was going through the winners timelines, trying to learn a thing or two and make some changes. But I am having severe crashes like I’ve never seen before on my computer. It completely cripples my computer and the graphics turn into solid colors/shapes as seen here Imgur: The magic of the Internet only way to fix is reboot, but it makes editing the timeline impossible.

I am running 103B5

Sonoma 14.1 w/ 3.3Ghz 12 Core W5700X 16GB and 48Gb Ram - i can’t see how it would be a specs issue.

2

oh no! It seems like everything is going wrong for your installation! Is anyone else having these kind of issues with 1.0.3?

Unfortunately I can’t see the imgur image in the UK.

I think at this stage you need to zip up your working folder and email it to me support@liberationlaser.com

Then completely reset your working folder (ie delete it).

Let me know what you find!

All the best,
Seb

3

Yes 103 does not like me! However this is two seperate computers, I am timecodings on my desktop. The network issues were on my laptop for shows. It seems like the timeline is working fine on my laptop with 103B5 but running on Sequoia 15.0.1 - I am going to try updating my desktop to Tahoe 26.3 in the meantime

Here is the working folder and screenshots, let me know your thoughts.

4

I spoke too soon. Upgrading from OSX 14 to 26 resolved alot of the instability, but working on a new timeline an hour later it crashed again. Not nearly as severe though. Able to reopen without restarting computer and losing visuals. Edit: crashed again and back to the geometric shapes.

5

if i see graphical glitches like this i immediately start to suspect the GPU VRAM to be the possible culprit…. RAM could also be the issue if its shared gpu ram…

do you have any other issues with the machine outside of Lib?

6

Hi Nils,

Thanks for sending the files and screenshots - that’s really helpful.

A couple of things stand out to me.

There’s definitely something going on with your GPU there! At this stage I’m not sure if it’s directly caused by Liberation or whether a heavy GPU load is just triggering it.

Could you try capturing the glitches with Cmd + Shift + 3 (a normal macOS screenshot)? That will help narrow things down:

  • If the glitches appear in the screenshot, that means the corruption is happening inside the GPU/compositor pipeline.
  • If the screenshot looks normal but the monitor still shows the glitch, then the issue is happening later in the display chain (for example the monitor connection, adapter, or display output stage).

It’s plausible that Liberation could be sending a corrupt vertex (for example NaN or Inf values) to the GPU. That can sometimes trigger strange behaviour in some graphics drivers and not others. I’m doing a full audit of the rendering code to double check that nothing like that could be happening.

You mentioned you’re running two monitors - could you try temporarily running with just the internal display (or just one monitor) and see if the issue still occurs? Sometimes external monitors or video adapters can trigger odd GPU behaviour, especially when something is pushing the graphics system hard.

Also, are all of your Macs Intel machines? I realised that these days I mostly test on Apple Silicon, and the graphics stack is quite different. It might be relevant here. If you are still on Intel hardware it’s definitely worth considering an upgrade at some point - the Apple Silicon machines are exponentially more capable, and Liberation tends to run much smoother with higher framerates, which results in cleaner laser output. (But of course I would still like to support Intel Macs for a while!)

The other major thing I noticed is that your working folder doesn’t look right at all. It doesn’t look like files are being written there properly.

Normally when you run Liberation for the first time:

  • The default project content should load automatically
  • When you quit and reopen the app, you should see exactly the same state you left it in

If that isn’t happening, it usually means Liberation can’t write to the working folder, which can happen if macOS permissions get confused.

Could you let me know:

  1. Did deleting the working folder make any difference?
  2. When you reopen Liberation, does it restore the previous project state, or does it look like a fresh start each time?

That will help narrow down whether this is a permissions issue or something GPU-related.

Thanks for helping track this down!

Seb

7

@nskaane Can you try this latest build 1.0.4 and see if the ether dream discovery / GPU issues are resolved?

Thanks!

Seb

8

Hi Seb - I’m traveling for 6 days but I will pick this up where we left off. I really appreciate your attention to this

1 Like
9

OK great thanks let me know when you’re ready and I’ll send you the current build.

All the best,
Seb

10

Is 1.0.4 still available to test and download? I can’t find it

11

Hi Nils, let’s continue in private mail, I’ll send you the link there

Seb