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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 today's powerful graphics processors, which should yield 
 further performance improvements measurable in orders of magnitude.</para>
</chapter>
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