Usually I look forward to giving updates that include some sort of new content. Is a good threshold, so I'm not posting every week with trivial details.
I've had some trouble dating back to Dec 17th and it is now (mostly) resolved. I wasn't sure exactly how it was going to resolve itself so any updates up until now would have been a hysterical back-and-forth between doom and not.
In March my operating system became unusable (me installing a shoddy browser plug-in) and I needed to perform a fresh Win7 install. Soon after I began using "Oracle VM" and that was a great place to install shoddy software, and the OS has been stable.
However, I did not re-implement my automated backup script on the fresh Windows install.
Since March I continued to perform manual off-site backups, but in a hit-and-miss fashion. Much more miss-than-hit as December kicked in and my personal non-MSR responsibilities ramped up.
The last time I backed up my project file was on Dec 17th. The last time I backed up my entire RAID volume was... not too long before that, but still earlier than Dec 17th.
And of course right before Christmas my RAID crashed. This was all due to my own stupidity. (More on my stupidity later.)
As of now I'm working to recreate the work I did during that period. So I'm somewhat behind where I was on Dec 17th.
But because I uploaded my work-in-progress to YouTube I can show you work that no longer exists in malleable form. That is the featured video for this blog post... my last-chapter-in-progress as it was ready to bounce of Michael Shellenberger. An MP4 exists but that isn't very flexible (or high quality), so some of it needs to be recreated in PPro.
I did get feedback out of it regarding Shellenberger's portion... he is going to try get me TEDx raw footage so I can assemble his part better. He doesn't like the pie chart, nor the dots at the end of his talk. Which is great feedback to get if I need to re-create that stuff anyway. We both want better camera angles but that depends on TEDx raw footage... kinda unlikely IMHO but he's people who knows people so maybe that can happen.
And I've also been re-recording narration based on this YouTube upload... you can not hear it because it was recorded after this render. (During multi-day file-copy processes.) But it is better delivery and overall that is something my narration needs in every chapter.
I have a different setup for recording narration now... to re-do narration where I take existing crappy narration and dub back over it. I can not do this with my desktop because my PC room is too noisy. That has been the challenge of recording narration... I have a portable recording device but I can't use it in a dubbing-over-video context.
Adobe allows me to install 2 instances of PPro for my single Creative Cloud license... so long as 1 is on PC and 1 is on Mac. So my dubbing happens in the basement with a ZoomH4 connected to a 2008 MacBook running PPro2015. Yup, it can do that. Can't really edit with it or anything fancy, but I can dub over a single rendered MP4 with it. Save that project, import it into my master project. The audio dubs line right up. There's a bit of laptop fan noise but it is much quieter than the PC tower (and RAID).
Now, I can play back what I've just recorded against the video and hear if I screwed up. Because it is amazing how often I'll say a wrong word and not even know it. Or just deliver something completely wrong, or without any similarity to the previous sentence. This is the right way to do it , but I'll always need to lay down a truly crappy narration for the first pass... just for basic timing of visuals and to know if the narration makes sense.
That's where the project is at... I'm still working on it. It won't be finished by 2015 (ha ha, sigh) and is in fact LESS finished than what you see here today. But it is finishable. And I very much look forward to releasing a public 2016 iteration.
GORD STUPIDITY
My RAID was RAID0. The drives were desktop drives. Any one RAID-box was a ticking time bomb.
However, so long as the drives generally held up, and my off-site backup was regular, and my backup script was running, I compensated for this with 3-RAID0-box redundancy. 3x [8x 3TB]. Always something off-site, so the house could burn down, no problem.
But in late December everything that depended on my diligence failed. And I learned a new term that month: "Cascading Drive Failures". When you buy RAID drives all at once, they tend to fail all at once. Because the most stress you'll ever put on drives in a RAID is during a recovery from that first failed drive.
And as far as me losing the latest project file: PPro has an auto-save feature. The default location is in the exact same folder as the active project file. All I had to do was change that to a different drive instead of auto-saving onto the RAID. That's all.
In fact, I've been running RAID0 for years, and have had to occasionally switch from one backup to another as drives failed... no big deal often just lose an afternoon's work. But in all this time, since 2012, it never occurred to me that auto-save should not use the default location.
Of the video assets, most of my lost work was on Shellenberger visuals (which he didn't like anyway), and on capturing GapMinder animations.
GapMinder visuals are mostly known as the Hans Rosling moving bubbles...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo
...Thomas Peterson (Copenhagen Atomics) also featured GapMinder in his TEAC7 talk...
https://youtu.be/CBwEkLVMhgg?t=8m41s
Here is what I uploaded to YouTube...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfaH7SMYUy4
...there's a bunch of those I captured, decluttered, and posted to YouTube for others to potentially use. Looks like I'll end up using them to rebuild the sequence myself.
MULTIPLE RAID FAILURES
My biggest worry during the recovery process quickly became: just how unreliable my remaining 2 backups were.
1 of the 2 remaining instances failed... not in a spectacularly unrecoverable way, but it gave me a read error and that was enough for me to totally panic and not want to touch either of the 2 instances with any readable data on them. So now I only had a single RAID0 that had not given me any trouble... a single instance of the entire project. In my house just waiting to burn down or flood or get hit by a meteorite.
At that point I was feeling completely screwed, because even just buying NAS drives was a cost I could not cover. I absolutely did not want to do anything other than copy another instance onto better-than-desktop drives.
The only reason this is -NOT- a post where I grovel at you all for money, is that someone in my home town of Calgary had once told me he'd be interested in helping financially with the project, should I ever need it. Suddenly I did, and Andrew Jaremko stepped up. He payed for a new RAID enclosure, an mSATA cache, and 5x 6TB NAS drives to go in it.
DROBO 5D
It supports (proprietary) RAID5 over mixed drives. The RAID5 is software not hardware, and consensus is it is slower than hardware RAID5 solutions. However, being able to mix drive models is really a big deal. I don't need to pre-buy a stockpile of drives to swap in for eventual failures... I can buy the latest NAS drive with the biggest size at the best price point at any time. Not a big deal today, but a big deal when I need to expand capacity or replace a failing drive and the older model is no longer available.
Also, USB3. Yay, USB3. Most of today's RAID solutions offer gigabit ethernet or thunderbolt. My motherboard only supports USB3, not thunderbolt. (And gigabit ethernet is much slower than either.)
I'll still perform off-site backup. I'll re-automate my backup script to run every night (local network backup). And now I'll have RAID5 on my work-RAID-box so any single drive that fails will not interrupt editing.
Thank you, Andrew Jaremko.
STATS
Thorium Remix 2011 (my own original instance on YouTube) just cleared 600,000 views.
My entire YouTube channel just cleared 6,000,000 (6-million) views. That's not exclusively MSR stuff... I shot skits and edited some dumb videos in my time, but it is mostly energy related content.
Project size is about 20TB. That's all MSR related content I've ever shot, it is all indexed in a single monster PPro project file about 600MB in size. There's moments from every single conference used in TR2016 and even short clips of audio from the 2009 Google Tech Talks.
I've been working only part-time again, so the December setback really did suck. I should get some good editing time in January though.
NEWS TO BE SURE YOU CAUGHT
Terrestrial Energy announces they've secured CAD $10 million series A funding:
ThEC15 in Mumbai videos online:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0vf-ClMTGjLQiisdk52TaW4E8Ol0TBBT
Atomic Insights transcribed climatologists talking nuclear at COP21: