Longer movie organisation problem

#1

Seems to be a little bit difficult to organise a bigger movie-project in AM…

About 2 years ago I tried using folders to kind of sort my items in the PWS.
Since odd things happened I avoided this ever since, these “ghostfolders” still keep haunting these projectfiles ever since though…

So know I gave it another try, since I have 10 Scenes, I made one chor for each scene, and I made folders for the different objects in each scene.

But now , when I open this project again, it says cant open some mdlfiles that I had put into these folders , allthough when its finally open, the models are still there , but kicked out of the folders again and the folders misteriously have disappereared.

So it seems that its still adviseable to avoid folders in the PWS
and to open up one project for each scene? Right?

Please just tell me, how you guys best organize bigger projects
and if its better to avoid PWS folders?
Or maybe you have a workaround for this?

I am on P2.8 ,2GigRam, AM11.1g

That file is much too big to send to Hash-support…

Thank you very much

;>) Jake

#2

Yeah, I too have had problems with folders becoming undeletable and sticking to a model, very annoying so I never use them.

I never use the project filetype, I just load choreographies that contain my models and actions. I find descriptive names work best, even if they get long.

Also I used to have separate folders for models, materials, choreographies, etc… then I got tired of pecking around and decided to lump everything in one folder and trust on filetype, descriptive naming and file date to keep things straight… after all I don’t have anyone else I need to explain where things are… :slight_smile:

Another problem is file ageing… one thing I wish AM could do is successfully open older files without crashing… the way this happens is, say you have choreography “walk in the park” which you made 2 years ago… and in the choreography you have model “Billy the thief”. You finish the chor and never touch it again, but you go on to reuse Billy in many other animations. So when you try to reopen walk in the park, this v8.0 choreography calls a v11 model and things don’t work out so well, and it crashes. Ideally for finished projects you should consolidate and save the whole project with the models and all into one file marked with the version you used, otherwise there’s no assurance you’ll be able to use these older files when you need them.

#3

Hi Bugle,

O.k. Thank you very much for your advice!
I had a hard time to get rid of all the “ghost-folders” in the PWS again.
I found the best way was, to copy the model into a new model-file and rename it,
then the “mysteriously-model-following empty folders” would disappear.

So I learned two things:

Try to avoid using folders in the PWS as much as possible!

and

Just use the AM-project file only for small chops of your movie.
Organise your Movieproject outside the Hash-projectfile in Folders on your harddisk and organise your Movie-Scenes in different chors, on which you work
always just one chor in one projectfile. If you open up a different Scene.chor, then in a new projectfile! it will automatically find all the objects inside as long as you dont have moved them away in the meantime.
Working in this manner increases stability and fastness of your projectfile you work on at that specific moment!
Maybe it was kind of naive to think I could take a different aproach ,
but what seems to be obvious for the veterans may represent a kind of a trap for newbies and beginners, since the ending .prj = project could be taken for being able to manage bigger projects as well.
So I guess its better to clarify this to avoid some useless frustrations.

Thank you again for your help and the advice regarding file-aging!
Guess now I am settled to start working on my first 10 Scenes -movie…

;>) Jake

#4

I dislike using the project file format, and since choreography stores pretty much all the info you need I usually go with that.About the only thing the project file controls directly is the frame rate

Something else to bear in mind is that occasionally files get corrupted, this seems to happen especially when you have many things open at the same time so you want to make plenty of backups, as sometimes your model will pick up garbage from other open files (For example, I’ve had constraint poses stop working because I saved while I had a choreography with two model shortcuts and AM decided to save the pose constraints pointing at the second shortcut, which made the models constraints stop working until I figured it out and fixed it)

Even if the files don’t get corrupted (It doesn’t happen that often) you want to keep plenty of backups in case you screw something up. What I usually do is keep the folder open and click on the file I want to backup and quickly press ctrl+c and ctrl+v this copies the file and pastes a copy in the same folder numbered sequentially. So you end up with

billy.mdl
copy of billy3.mdl
copy of billy2.mdl
copy of billy1.mdl

You’ll be really glad to have them if halfway though the project something goes poof or you decide the model looked a lot better before you added all those 5-point patches

#5

If you have 10 scenes in your movie. . . you should have 10 projects. No? Why are you trying to lump them all together in the same project file?

#6

Wegg, please, don’t try to uncomplicate the issue:)

Mike Fitz
www.3dartz.com

#7

>Dont use a projectfile for more then one scene

Did you two guys read my last post?
I just came to the conclusion,that this wont be a good idea!
Its just not that obvious for anybody besides the
old wise guys hash veterans.

;>) Jake

#8

It was. . . kind of long winded. I skimmed it but I guess I missed your conclusion. Sorry.

At Eggington we always went the extra step and broke our shows up into entire project directories. There is a lot of repetition on your hard drive but it does ensure that your project will work within it’s own container every time you need it again. Did that make any sense?

#9

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