The Forest - New Video (post 2 of 2) (Patreon)

So this is the follow-up post concerning the last week of rendering. If you're looking for the link to the latest video, please see above.

What a challenging week its been. Last Friday I was able to clear all of 100 ish issues on the timeline as part of the quality-assurance checking for the entire video. Leaving me confident that the video was finished. And all I had to do was render it over the weekend.

How wrong that assumption turned out to be. For whereas before it was simply freezing on the occasional After Effects Project (.aep file), necessitating their individual repair. Now it was freezing on lots of them!

To provide context - my projects consists of two programs working together. Adobe Premiere and Adobe After Effects. In an approximate 70:30 split of clips on the timeline.

If Adobe Premiere is rendering the whole video, and it encounters an After Effects file on the timeline, it's meant to calmly open it and ask it what it needs to render. Yet for some reason, the progress bar would often just hang the moment it tried to open these .aep files. Never recovering despite huge amounts of system resources available.

Fix attempt number one:

I noticed that some of the offending After Effects files were much longer in duration on their timelines than expected. This is because when you paste in a clip, the maximum duration is defaulted to that of the incoming clip. Even if there's nothing actually there to show.

I wondered if perhaps this was causing Premiere to stumble? It's never struggled with it before? An unexpected bug? Three .aep files I checked at the point of hanging had this problem.

So I started manually going through these After Effects projects to find these offenders. Trimming their compositions to be nice and efficient.

But still no full render. It only reached about 30% before failing.

Fix attempt number two:

I noticed that some of the offending After Effects files were saved in a stable 2019 version. And when opening them they would insist that I save a new version with the tag "converted". So I did that for every single .aep file.

Also then replacing them on the timeline. Individually.

This seemed to make considerable progress. Allowing the full render to reach about 60% before failing.

Fix attempt number three:

Alas, this is where I decided to take a bit of a "nuclear option". For if Adobe Premiere was refusing to communicate with to Adobe After Effects, I could simply do what I did a week ago but dialled up dramatically - cut After Effects from the equation.

I would go through the entire timeline, tell the After Effects file to render "lossless" (uncompressed) .avi video files of themselves. Then put them into Adobe Premiere as just normal clips. Then Premiere doesn't have to talk to any program but itself.

And this worked. I was able to finish the 720p render.

This was however, if you'll forgive the poetic license, a painful process for me as an editor.

Not only is it brutally inelegant and amateurish. Bloating the project from around 813gb to an unfathomable 3TB. But it was ripping great big chunks out of what I'd spent weeks lovingly creating. It felt like I was tearing roses from a flowerbed, only to replace them with HD pictures of roses.

Practically, nobody should notice. But its hard to look at the timeline and not feel like I've butchered it. The gold .avi files showing where I've crudely smashed out gaps like some inept amateur.

And it worries me greatly because there's no reason why this bug couldn't effect future bullshitteries. Am I going to have to similarly go to such extremes in the future?

More pressingly though, this has made the 720p version messier than I'd hoped. As these are completely fresh .avi files from Premiere's perspective. Preserving none of the properties I'd assigned to the .aep files they're replacing.

Are they the correct scale? Are they in the right places? Do they fade out? Do they move? Were they trimmed in such a way that's important to the edit?

Whilst I tried my best, there were so very many, mistakes were inevitable. Such as instances of "black flashes", where the replacement .avi file is but a single frame out of alignment.

My urgent priority is to get these fixed as quickly as possible ahead of the 1080p render. Along with anything else anybody has spotted. Once again I'm sorry to have to present it in such a state. And hope the 1080p one will be stronger.

That's now my one last goal. Get these issues polished and get the proper 1080p version on the channel.