The Forest Update #16 - QA process (Patreon)

Good afternoon folks. Last post I predicted that I'd get the final segment - segment 24/24 - complete within that two week stretch. And on that front I largely succeeded. I was able to complete the video by last Friday.

I don't want to use the word "finished" because I know there's some bits in there I want to improve. But for now, yay.

The next thing is the quality assurance process. Essentially just watching the video and fixing stuff. But before that I need to render it. And oh what's a mountain that's turning into.

For unknown reasons Adobe Premiere (the main editing program I use the assemble the clips) has become monstrously unstable these last two weeks. With predictable crashes every two minutes. It has something to do with trying to access the After Effects compositions.

None of my attempts to remedy the problem have worked. As I've run the gauntlet of software updates, cache clearing, preference resetting, following the Adobe forum advice.

Mercifully, one in every thirty or so launches is normal. At which point I just work as quickly as I can, fearful to close the program and awake the Adobe demon.

I'm also in the process of installing Premiere and After Effects on a secondary machine. Which whilst slower, might prove to be more stable. Maybe.

But that's not the most interesting thing to talk about.

For the unfamiliar, rendering (or just exporting media in this specific context), is the process in which Adobe Premiere takes the disparate pieces of the project, currently sized about 1.22 terabytes, and produces a watchable (and more importantly compressed) video at files sizes that a network can reasonably handle.

Said output file can then be uploaded to Youtube for further compression.

It is a necessarily slow process that I normally leave overnight. My first attempt to render last Friday failed.

But oh my god, the woe that was my weekend.

Adobe was absolutely no help. The error messages that followed were non existent, with the program just freezing at a percentage of the render.

It also doesn't help that, even on lower resolutions, rendering is just slow sometimes. And you don't know if the loading bar really has stopped at 18%. Or if it's trying to process a very large file. Meaning there are many hours of just waiting to see.

So without a clear lead on where the problem was - Saturday became a mole hunt.

I would manually render each segment until I find one that fails. Isolating the problem to the specific part of the timeline for removal and later fixing as part of QA. And over many hours on Saturday I was able to find where the culprit lurked.

The results were stressful. Green is a successful render. Red is a failure.

It wasn't just one segment. That is a failure rate of 14 of 24. Something within 14 segment was causing their render to fail.

My attempts to interrogate Adobe Premiere intensified.

I would take a failing segment and render it in pieces. First in halves, then in quarters, trying to isolating exactly when the linear process of rendering failed.

I cornered one of the offending items - an After Effects composition.

But there's absolutely nothing unusual about it. It's not doing anything wrong.

It's a perfectly normal composition in After Effects. Flanked by compositions that are exactly like it. And even using the exact same footage. It's completely innocent. I don't know why Premiere is pointing the finger at it.

Nevertheless, Premiere adamantly refused to proceed. Even attempting to render these 10 seconds of the timeline. It would not budge. And I started taking corrective measures.

• I tweaked a few settings in the After Effects file to do with number of layers, resolution, precompositions, etc. Premiere still refused.
• I created a new composition and imported the details of the original. Premiere refused.
• I cleared caches and preferences in both programs. Premiere refused.
• Then to my slack-jawed astonishment, I even created a new After Effects file under a new name. And copied (not imported, just copied) the elements into it. Essentially creating a completely unrelated file. That had no relation to the original, with the cache cleared out. Premiere refused. I have never seen anything like that. I don't know what Premiere's problem is.

Eventually, after hours of hair pulling, I went to the beleaguered After Effects composition for the solution. For it can render too. Albeit in a different way.

I asked it to produce a "lossless" (that meaning uncompressed, therefore massive) video file of itself. Then remove itself from the Premiere timeline, leaving its file behind. Essentially, place the bottle of wine at the door and leave the party. And this seemingly worked. Premiere acquiesced. Seemingly no longer having a tantrum.

I'm currently ferreting out each of the composition Premiere apparently has a problem with, through rendering trial and error. And unfortunately, this process is incredibly tedious. Requiring at least another 200-300 gigs of hard drive space and hours of my time.

Here's my progress on this repair job. The red segments steadily flipping green.

What's frustrating is that this isn't even the final barrier to the release of the video. This is just the barrier before quality assurance sweeping. Meaning the full watch through of the video will spit out a laundry list of issues to fix. It always does.

So the software is currently wasting my valuable time with this. God dammit Premiere.

TL;DR - Despite having reached the end of editing on Friday, Premiere has been refusing to render. Resulting in hours of frustrating troubleshooting blocking me from starting quality assurance.

Also, dog tax! Whilst visiting my mum last week she appeared to have a strange fuzzy creature, writhing on her lawn. It seemed to like bits of grated cheese. Must be some sort of Slow worm.