No real progress since 2016-12-07, although lots of man-hours have been used up.
At 6:06:33 the "Waste" portion has been re-rendered using off-line audio filters to reduce noise. You'll see some improvements at around 4h16m where I've added some b-roll where there was black previously, but most of my time has been wasted dealing with audio processing and fixing some "NASA" section mistakes.
2h1m - Fixed NASA budget claim. I was wrong to say NASA's budget was $7 billion annually (think I read $17 Billion as $7 Billion). So instead comparing NASA R&D for technology development against Ethanol subsidy.
1h37m - New audio filter (iZotope being used off-line) on Dr. Jiang Mianheng. Jeremy Oelke mentioned Jiang's audio was crazy-annoying so I tried to improve it and found that I could. Hopefully this is more acceptable.
The rest of this update is mind-numbingly boring so stop reading now if you don't want to know the sorry details.
I'm ok-but-not-great right now... can work and know what to do. But there's an Adobe bug that's making me less productive than I'd like to be and I've worked with Adobe to replicate it at their end. They now acknowledge that it exists, that they can replicate it, and that it is a bug not just how the software is supposed to work.
Two Software Bugs
So there's 2 bugs I'm facing...
1. Adobe's Audio-Render bug introduced with PPro2017. It makes any re-opening of TR2016 on my PC take 8 hours, because it forgets some audio data and wants to re-create it each time.
2. iZotope's Denoiser bug (which has always existed). It makes PPro unstable (among other things) causing crashes. Any time that happens I need to re-open the TR2016 PPro project, and I then hit the 8 hour delay from bug #1.
Combined, these were a terrible experience.
The iZotope problem was one I should have seen coming.
I thought iZotope fixed the bug (which I'd been aware of) and I'd received an automatic patch (as their software is designed to automatically update itself)... Or that switching from Win7 to Win10 and from PPro2015 to PPro2017 magically fixed it.
Because it is a 3rd party VST3 plug-in for PPro, it involves iZotope, Adobe and Microsoft software... any one of these parties could be responsible for the bug (or partially responsible).
At any rate, after updating to PPro2017 (and Win10 a long time ago) I tried using iZotope again and found I could use it with no problem. So, because it helped improve audio quality and it had a great workflow, I used it a lot. Good times.
During this time I was having issues with PPro forgetting audio renders. Started discussing this with Adobe trying to resolve it. You could say I was distracted and not thinking clearly, as the Audio-Render bug was obvious and consistent, but some other problems ( iZotope problems ) were intermittent.
And then I tried to export my work after finishing a chunk... and PPro would always crash.
Then I tried to copy/paste some clips... and PPro would always crash.
Then I tried to duplicate a sequence... and PPro would always crash. It wasn't until this moment I realized iZotope bug was causing it. (Because I'd never had trouble duplicating a sequence before in my project work except when using iZotope.)
The iZotope plug-in makes PPro progressively less stable until one can no longer perform basic functions, as more and more iZotope instances are used in the project.
iZotope pretty much confirmed this to me in a support email, and suggested I not use it with PPro.
While I've been far less productive with PPro since 2012-12-07 due to the 8h Audio-Render delays, what little productivity I did have was largely wasted first deploying iZotope Denoiser and then removing it again.
My current strategy for reducing noise is to use a single instance of iZotope against a raw-footage audio track, render that filtered audio out as WAV, and add it to a multi-cam sequence as an additional "noise-reduced" audio track. Then deleting the iZotope instance.
That is a crappy workflow, in contrast to how easy it is to use the filter directly whenever needed. But it is what I need to do.
Adobe has noise reduction filters too, but they aren't a direct replacement for iZotope or how I was able to use it. (Had iZotope actually worked reliably.)
So I consider iZotope bug resolved: They don't support their software and I should not keep any iZotope filters permanently in TR2016.
Adobe Audio Render Bug is unresolved.
But at least I'm only dealing with 1 bug at a time now, and here's what I'm doing to let myself work faster. (Because PPro still sometimes needs to be restarted, the 8h delays are less common but still a problem.)
Helped Adobe Replicate the Bug
I duplicated the Adobe bug on a home PC using a dumbed-down version of the project. Had to buy another 16GB or RAM on that machine to do it (so 24GB RAM total). Yay.
Eventually (working with Adobe tech support montioring/controlling my computer) we created a new project from scratch and replicated the bug. No "Thorium Remix 2016" required!
He then stated that PPro forgetting the Audio Render was expected behavior.
I told him it was not. I told him I'd been working on this project in PPro since 2012 and there's no way I'd have gotten any work done waiting for audio to re-render after every reload of PPro.
I asked him if he'd like me to redo everything in PPro2015 to demonstrate the point.
He said he had PPro2015 installed on his PC and he'd try it himself... put me on hold... and he did it. He then acknowledged PPro2015 remembered the audio but PPro2017 does not. (This is a teeny-tiny test project only delaying a couple minues, but just extrapolate the issue to a big project like TR2016 and that's how I get 8h.)
He then escalated the incident to "senior developer" status. Which is great because I'm not the only person with this problems who posted in Adobe forums... apparently I'm just the only guy who took the issue this far with an Adobe tech support.
And that's where it stands as I write this.
I expect Adobe's only course of action is to incorporate a fix into the next iteration of PPro, which would be going from 2017.0.1 to 2017.0.2.
So this isn't a show-stopper but it really makes me less productive. PPro does crash. In fact I'm finishing this update because... PPro crashed.
I woke up at 3am. Worked until it crashed at 4am. And now, while it renders audio and I can't work effectively that gives me "quality time" to type this and hit SEND.
(And I do know upgrading from PPro2015 to PPro2017 was risky... PPro2017 actually crashes LESS than PPro2015. It is just that each crash is an 8h problem instead of a 30m problem. And I'll never get stability with PPro2015... that's like me complaining to Microsoft about Windows8. Microsoft might be contractually obligated to support it but they have no incentive to throw their best people at a Windows8 problem.)