Restoring something back to the 80's!?

You know, the last 3 months or so have been incredible, for more than one or two reasons. Business has been better than ever, changes are being made and progress is being made at HSWWC and with the giant vision for the Kingdom. We {Exit 31} had a great business meeting earlier today at the new Indianapolis International Airport, and God was all over it. And personally, I've finally seen what living really is recently.

It almost feels like God is restoring me to a lot of the original greatness, inspiration, and potential {all of which He gave to me of course - can't take credit for that!} that I had as a wee lad growing up in the 80's and early 90's before the sick cold world tried to strip me of it. The story is way too long, and actually the majority of it I'd like to leave as a 2-way convo between God and I mainly because not many could understand if they wanted to, but MAN, it feels good!

So what's this about the 80's? Well, it's pretty obvious that a lot of the world's trends are being retrofitted back to 80's motifs, everything from graphic design to clothes to music, to reestablishing popular 80's franchises {::cough...transformers...cough::} - you name it.

But what I think is particularly cool is the mashup of 2009 and the 80's - pop culture of today just intersects well with pop culture of yesteryear. In fact, I'm not a big fan of 80's influence only. It's gotta be fresh, it's gotta have a twist. An I feel like it's the same way with my life. Yes, the somewhat distant past was cool and full of potential, general innocence, and insipiration, but 2009 is destiny! Every event up to this point, whether good or bad, pre-ordained to become a stepping stone for becoming what God wants me to be.

My life is a mashup, the best of each era. It's a song God is directing for me to make sure I stay on tempo, and right now He and I are bangin' out some on point retro beats.

In celebration of the new era of greatness, here's a song that epitomizes the great mashup sound I'm referring to. It's by a great group called Family Force 5. The album is "Dance or Die". The song is "Dance or Die". Grab the album!

Useful After Effects Tip for Rendering Error

Here at Exit 31, I'm working on a fun new animation for a client. It's going great, but I ran into a small snag a little while ago and want to share the solution.

You see, we at Exit 31 Creative love all things high definition - I love rendering animations in excessive HD even if the client doesn't necessarily request it, and Tyler wants us to be the first company to produce '300 dpi websites', LOL! (Yes, we know typical display devices on the computer are only 72 ppi etc, it's a joke! Sheesh!)

Anyway, as I queued up this latest composition in After Effects CS4 for rendering and pressed that magic 'Render' button, I got a new message a few frames in:

'AEGP plugin media IO plugin...' blah blah blah 'Not enough memory to render...' etc.

Never had this happen to me before since I've got a plenty beastly machine (4GB RAM, GeForce 9600 GT w/ 512mb memory, 500GB storage, Dual Core Xenon E3110 OC'd to 3.2GHz - AAAHHHRRR! ...Sorry... man moment -- and it's almost time to upgrade to that new Core i7 rig I've been eyeballing!).

At first I just thought setting all the usual stuff in Preferences like disk caching, overflow, and memory management options would help, but the same thing happened still, even when switching between OpenGL rendering and normal.

A quick search on the web clued me in on a tip that fixed it though. The key is to purge your display cache during render at small frame increments, similar to how you can purge your cached rendered frames when previewing by pressing 'Ctrl' + 'Alt' + 'Numpad /'.

To do this during rendering, press and hold 'Alt' + 'Shift' then go to 'Edit' -> 'Preferences' -> 'General'. Once that menu opens, you should now see an extra section appear called 'Secret' (best menu name ever!). Go there, and change the 'Purge Every __ Frames During Make Movie' to some value such as 15 or 30. The lower, the higher probablity it will fix your problem, but performance decreases a little as well.

...I had to set mine to 5... although it still went quick without too much noticable degredation in performance.

That's it! Enjoy.