Space Engineers bullshittery - Update #5

Good evening everybody. Another update on the current bullshittery.

I've been able to complete the keyframing for the second half of Space Engineers bullshittery. The whole thing took me about 2 weeks and 2 days. Pretty much on schedule for just over 12 minutes of keyframing.

That process involved exporting the final cut in Premiere over to After Effects. Turning the timeline that looked like this:

Into something that looks like this:

Each of the .mp4 clips becoming .aep files, with all their assets contained within. There's roughly 66 of them. And the last 2 weeks involved keyframing everything in them. Some are only a couple of seconds long. But the longest is about 30 seconds.

Pre-empting the weird rendering bug, I've also taken a moment to export lossless high-quality .avi clips of each .aep file, layering them on top rather than rendering the .aep files directly. That's the yellow bar here:

For those unfamiliar, there's something wrong with my PC which causes the final render to freeze if rendering too many .aep files in sequence. The creation of .avi files helps circumvent this unknown problem.

An annoying workaround. But thankfully it can be worked around with no major hit to productivity.

Now begins the usual 'QA Process/Phase 2' rework. Where I watch the video in a draft form, spot errors, improvements or bits of weirdness. Making great big lists and fixing them in batches. A repeated daily process until it starts to look smooth.

For years I would keep these lists as .txt files on my PC. But since people expressed an interested in seeing them, I've once again made a public-viewable version - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xNlR3S11T-lJUTTmXkdTIKivVUE2SynJDz7vKh1ZBm4/edit?usp=sharing

I like this sort of thing. The transparency appeals to me. Folks can ask me what I'm doing all day and I can just be like:

And it becomes much easier to quantify precisely what's left. If I can get through X issues per day and there's X issues left, its all fairly straightforward.

Frankly that's also been the story of this project so far. All fairly straightforward. Keyframing has been mostly manual with a focus on auto-tracking suit lights where possible. There's no a great deal of outsourced artwork in this one here (but there is in part 1 shortly).

The only thing to note is that I've tried to avoid first person dialogue where possible, because the Space Engineers UI is so cluttered. Therefore where I would normally have text at the base of the screen, I've tried to put something moving in the middle of the frame.

That means that there's quite a lot of .aep files. Where usually I would just do static text entirely in Premiere.

Frankly, everything is going fine. I expect I'll have much of this done by this time next week and be coming up with near final renders. I'll try to make the next update the delivery.

After that, I'll jump straight into keyframing part 1. Thanks all. Hope you're doing well.