<chapter id="introduction"></chapter>

 <title><acronym>Introduction</acronym></title>

 <para>Synfig, like most every other competent graphics program, breaks down </para>

 individual elements of a Canvas into Layers. However, it differs from other 

 programs in two major ways:

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    <para>An individual layer in Synfig usually represents a single "Primitive". </para>

    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).

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    <para>A layer can not only composite information on top of the image below it,</para>

    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>Each layer has a set of parameters which determine how it behaves. When </para>

 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>Synfig Studio has an autorecover feature. If it crashes, even if the </para>

 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>One thing you may notice is that Synfig Studio is SLOW, making it</para>

 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>darco has some fairly major re-implementations and optimizations that </para>

 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.