Update #19 - Computer Issues - Not Deadly Ones (Patreon)

This post is a lot earlier in the day than usual, but I wanted to make sure everyone was updated as soon as I knew what the deal was. The video was already going to be over the weekend, as I realized the day before that Thanksgiving was nearly a week earlier than I'm used to so I wasn't going to be able to work on the video that day or part of Friday. Well my PC took vengeance on me and I came back to it not being able to start up.

I'm honestly surprised it's taken so long for me to get a "full stop" kind of computer issue like this considering all the weird tools, codecs, software, and other stuff I've fiddled with over the years. I'm still not entirely sure what caused it, but I managed to get it fixed up after several hours. Interestingly enough, a system restore "failed" but also managed to get the computer to start up so I was fine with that. After running several tests afterwards I can confirm it wasn't hardware failure, but definitely something in the system getting corrupted. So the workstation is back up, but here's the damage.

The bad news is that the video project file I was working on is gone. I actually make around 3-4 back-up files per video which I shift the saves around to in case one gets corrupted, but in this case they're simply vanished. The same deal for most of the audio I had done, with only some weird fragments remaining at seemingly random. So essentially I'll need to start over with the editing. The only remnants of the lost video are some test renders like the one I'm including in this post. This doesn't mean these parts are truly lost forever. 

The excellent news is that everything else is backed up and safe. Most importantly, just about every piece of Cultist Simulator footage I recorded is accounted for except some tidbits of more recent stuff which I've already re-recorded. Losing this would have been by far more devastating, since wiping the PC completely and reinstalling all the software would've still been faster than not having the footage. This saves me having to play the game another few dozen hours to get everything again, so I'm taking it again from the top. It's the same feeling I had from a few years back when I was doing a university assignment and a page of work I did was lost off of the student drive due to some kind of rollback, and I had to rewrite it again. I knew what to write down, but was in a weird mindset of both trying to recreate what I had written down exactly but also trying to improve on it. I've never had this happen for a video so I'll finally know how that feels. 

Even if I had the project files backed up, the backups of the recorded footage weren't renamed the same as the ones I was actively using so there would have still been a lot of "missing media files" to hunt down and rename correctly. I'm not sure what would've driven me crazier.

Anyways, I'm working on the video so it will be out before December. I hate missing self-imposed deadlines even if it's completely out of my hands, so I'm really sorry for any inconvenience. I started writing this up as soon as I knew how I'd be going forward, since you all deserve that at the bare minimum. Thanks again for putting up with this kind of stuff from time to time. 

Back to work!