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The View Across the Way... — Description
Another test shot... but this is likely to be the last such one for a while... I'm largely "locked down" and in rendering mode. It'll still probably be another week or so before it's ready - and there's the not so small matter of the sound track - so I'm aiming for some time early in the new year... (whew - and I started this the end of August??)

Had a bit of a scare last night. Turning on a piece of gear in the studio, the iMac threw a bit of a fit. Stopped playing music, and the Drobo storage device (where I'm doing all the work) went offline. It came back online a couple of minutes later and the background render seemed to pick up where it left off.

Then an hour or so later - I noticed that even though the POSer Queue Mangler thought it had rendered several hundred more frames... none had actually been written to disk. Then I got a warning that the Drobo had "numerous" serious errors; I decided I needed to cleanly shut everything down. But I couldn't. "Shutdown" claimed the system was busy, even though there were no disk writes going on. My trusty "/sbin/shutdown -h now" only prevented me from doing more. All the while I could hear the Drobo busily accessing the disks. I finally gave up and held the power button on the iMac for 5 seconds. The screen went blank and... lit back up. Even that wouldn't kill it. I finally cut power (which cut power to the chattering Drobo too). I counted to ten and fired it all back up.

No problems found. The renders picked up at frame 4100 or so, even though 3800 or so was the last one written. Re-queued it from there and it's still happily chugging along - finishing up the last of the hand scanner frames likely within the next hour - and you can kinda tell where that scanner is pointed... (there's another clue in the upper right of the console - which is also why this has a Mature flag - and no, that's not because it's so sophisticated!)

Still fun - but it'll be nice to be done with this... though there will be a number of alternate points of view - might as well milk this for all I can get!