7 Lessons Learned In Post-Production

This sums up our post-production scare in the Summer of 2010.

Here comes the train!
Animation, motion graphics, and video production studios easily get so focused on the daunting task of production that we forget about how hairy post-production can be. We forget that the light at the end of the production tunnel is the train known as post-production coming at us…full speed.

Big studios aren’t immune.
When most of Pixar’s Toy Story 2 was finished, the files were accidentally deleted. In less than 30 seconds critical assets and entire scenes disappeared from their main systems right before their eyes. Even worse, when trying to recover those they discovered that for over a month their back-ups had been failing!

The situation looked bleak until they discovered that one of their employees out on maternity leave had backed up all of the assets so she could work from home and be with her family. This detail-oriented mom saved the day (and hopefully received some extended maternity leave!).

Racing against time to render the final scenes for the feature film Jonah, Big Idea Productions had several unique post-production challenges. Not only did they have to crew up and hire additional lighting artists, they had to obtain 200 more render machines to meet their release date just two months out.

With no room available to store the machines, they had to run fiber optics to the other end of the mall where their studio was temporarily located. On top of that, while rendering final scenes, they discovered that their high-end render farm was rendering some scenes into a black hole!  It was a couple months of chaos!

Our 2010 post-production scare.
Last summer we were wrapping a large graphics package project up when post-production ate our lunch for over five days. Files refused to render completely, audio and video wouldn’t sync and at the lowest point the source files completely disappeared. To this day we still aren’t sure why!

We had so many things go wrong that Murphy’s Law had a few amendments added to it!

We pulled two all-nighters in a row, had files rendering on four different machines in two locations and the project was overdue. I had to leave for a trip after the second all-nighter but a couple of files still didn’t render correctly. So, our creative director worked the weekend, learned three new programs on the fly and earned some major stripes to get it done.

7 Lessons learned:
1.    Block out at least twice as much time you think you’ll need for post-production.
2.    Budget at least twice as much as you think you’ll need for post-production.
3.    Expect Murphy to show up at some point.
4.    What you sow in pre-production is what you will reap in post, so plan well.
5.    RAM is your friend.
6.    Don’t use .aif files in After Effects.
7.    Don’t under estimate post!

Bonus Lessons:
•    One all-nighter can be fun. Two in a row is not…at all.
•    Sabotage and Enter Sandman played loudly will help keep you awake at 3AM.
•    Coffee can only do so much.