I was occupied last week by a little in-between project, a rocking video of Hell On Earth by Solidary Trust. Finding public domain footage to use and fixing it for usability in a HD project turned out to be a days work. Another two days for editing the video and another two to figure how to work around the f4%!ing bugs After Effects and Première CS3 annoyingly have and that probably never get fixed because CS4 is in the stores now.

Most annoying bugs I still can't figure out:

• (Pr/AE) *Some* proxies, most often certain MPEG2's, will not render out. Applying invisible effects or titles *sometimes* fixes this. After 70 minutes of exporting, another failed shot soon adds to annoyance.
  
• (AE) Non-rasterized layers with other positional data than their parent sometimes completely screw up their position in conjunction with certain effects that actually have nothing to do with the position.
  
• (AE) Like I mentioned earlier (somewhere else) the rotomask loss of sync with the composition apparently also sometimes happen with normal footage. This is really annoying and strange since it shows correctly on screen and in RAM previews, but only fails after a real render. One hour for render and one hour for AVC transcoding because a sequence isn't previewable real time, imagine the joy when you find out the lame bug isn't gone. And with 7000+ frames, my render-to-single-frames script I created to circumvent that same bug in The Encounter is too slow adding 7000+ render jobs to the queue and hangs AE.
  
• (Pr/AE) Too many open frameserve handlers SOMETIMES eats away so much memory that everything stops working. You can fix this with proxies which you'll need to use for the final render also, but take care not to bump into the first bug on this list.
  

Okay blahblah, I guess since I can't do nothing useful when this machine is rendering all the time, annoyance-listing is second best.

So, in better news, the video will probably be online tomorrow. And next week I'll get back to my Sonic Plague video, which will turn out to be a rather dark video when it's done. I mean literally. Not really daytime scenes.

There's some rotofun going on though. Like a real professional, I also mess up my screens. It's like they say in the industry: Green screens are only there to show the compositor where rotoscoping needs to be done.

Some roto- garbage- and transparency mattes in progress: