Standing on the edge

Since my last post I continued to render out my Max scene as a png sequence. Somewhere around frame 4 thousand, I saw a flash, that pesky little flash. Just as the others, this color shift started at the first frame of this new batch of renders. So I shut everything down, and I started all over, and usually the first time after re-opening Max (excluding one time - I had to do it twice) I would render over the flash frame, and it wouldn't be there. So after I became aware that it could continue to happen, I would render one frame, pause the render, open up my previous batch of renders in Combustion and compare them to this new frame. If there was a flash I would close all down and try again until I didn't see a flash. What is interesting is that for the 4 thousand frames before, there were no flashes, but once I saw it begin, it seemed to be prone to appear afterwards.
So - with that said. I successfully compiled my pngs in Combustion and rendered them out as a .mov, flash free. I used my new Squeeze compression program and if you can believe it, I compressed the original 6GB file to an 8MB file. Mind blowing. The results of this compression tool are worth every cent of the cost. I can now zip my movie and email it for approval at the size of 5MB. Which I did, and of course there was a change requested afterwards. So I watched my flashes for the replacement fix and on the second attempt got it right, glued them together in Combustion, re-rendered the footage and sent it out again.
So I'm standing on the edge of 6 months of work, awaiting what I believe to be my final approval and credit roll instructions. I can not wait to share with you the reward of all this work - that we have been discussing on this blog and at the cg boards. It's odd, it seems like this last email confirmation is taking the longest, even though it isn't. I just can't wait to raise my hands in the air, take a deep breath and smile.

While I was waiting today I made this Moon Goddess image.



By the way, tonight someone on the boards mentioned the Exposure control (Render_Enviroment pulldown) being on, as having a possible effect with these flashes. I'll have to look into this next time.