.AVI files disappeared from render folder!

[jayjay76]

Just rendered a quick, low-res test animation and when it completed I went to my render folder and all of my .avi animations from the past week are gone. I'm using windows 10 and I can see them listed under "Recent Files" in the quick access tab. I rebooted and they are still missing. Thank god the subfolders with thousands of my still frame renderings are still there, but I'm backing them up now.

My setup:
KeyShot 7.0 Pro
Rhino 5 SR14 without KS plugin
Windows 10 Enterprise
Xeon E3-1505M v5 @ 2.80GHz - 8 cores, 7 assigned to KeyShot
32GB RAM

[Dan Wolf]

I just encountered the same thing and lost everything created by the render queue over the last 12 hours, plus some renderings created late yesterday.  My issue can be reproduced using the Render Queue with one or more images and at least one animation.

I added a number of still images to the Render Queue last night, then an animation.  Both were set to output to the same folder.  This morning, the images were done and animation was still rendering.  I noticed that KeyShot was creating images for the animation frames in the output folder with all the still images that had previously rendered, even though I didn't check the option to output frames.  When I returned to the computer later this morning, the animation was done and the output folder was gone!  I searched the entire drive for the images and animation and found nothing.

To reproduce the issue, add one or more images and at least one animation to the render queue.  Check the Video Output box and uncheck the Frames Output box.  When the queue processes the animation, images for each frame are created in the folder where the images were rendered, even if the animation is set to output to a different folder than the images.  When the animation is completed, the entire folder where those frame images were created is deleted.  Bummer.

If Video Output and Frames Output are both checked when adding the animation to the queue, it's not a problem.  I assume that when Frames Output is unchecked, KeyShot cleans up those "temporary" frame files by deleting the folder they were created in, even if the folder previously existed.  Beware. 

This is with KeyShot 6, but I'll be upgrading to 7 soon.  I'm curious to know if this bug is reproducible in 7.

[Dan Wolf]

This issue is certainly no better in KeyShot 7.2.  I avoid adding images and animations together in the queue because of this issue, but it bit me again.  This time, I had added a single image to the queue and rendered it.  I later rendered a short animation (without keeping the frames) using the render queue and when it finished, it deleted everything in the folder containing my completed renderings.  Luckily, this time, I was doing quick renders to lay out the project so it won't take long to recreate everything.

I would expect that KeyShot would keep track of the files it creates when rendering an animation and delete only those files during the cleanup after the rendering.  Instead, it seems to do a "delete *.*" in the folder where the frames were created.  Frustrating.  I'll have to remember to make backup copies of the finished images and animations every I render images and animations during the same KeyShot session.

[mattjgerard]

as a general rule, yeah, while this should not be a problem, it is common practice when doing animations from any 3d render is to do framestacks, and not let the animation app do the assembly. It would be nice if KS would introduce an option to leave the frames it renders  alone and not delete them. Can't you do that by just enabling both frames and video output? Seems that would be the safest option. I don't believe that it would render everything twice, it will render the frames, then assemble those frames into the video file.  I used to render all my C4D animations to ProRes  4444 files, but if I tried to insert a  couple frames I had to tweak, the noise would look different, just something would trip it up, so now I only render frames and assemble them later. Makes it so much simpler to replace frames, and even more importantly, restart render that crashed 99.999999% of the way through without losing all that time and work because the video file never got written properly.

Framestacks4Ever

[Dan Wolf]

Maybe it's common practice for those who regularly use post processing software, but I don't (at the moment anyway).  I was creating a series of short animations to show someone, so I chose to output the video file, as KeyShot gives the option to do, and forgot to select the option to keep the frame files.

I see your point, and from now on, I'll be sure to always output the frames then just delete them later if I don't need them.

I noticed as well to be careful to specify a different name for the frames when outputting a new animation.  I made a short animation using a range of frames in my timeline, which made files from xxxx.1.png to xxxx.20.png. for the frames.  That one turned out fine.  Then I made another animation with a different name using a different set of frames, but I left the same name for the frame files.  That created xxxx.50.png to xxxx.70.png.  When KeyShot compiled the animation for that second one, it combined all the frame files including 1-20 and 50-70 (because they had the same prefix).  I see what it's doing and I'll be careful to check all the file names, or delete the old frames if I don't need them.

The part of KeyShot that assembles the video files and deals with the frame files is just buggy, or poorly implemented.

[theAVator]

Kinda sucks, but best thing to do is take away some tips and avoid it on the next project. I started the same way with the same issues and just made note to improve upon.

Personally, when I'm outputting, I only output frame (I don't even check the box for video output anymore). But when doing this I always output to the Animations folder, not the Renderings folder and in there I create a folder that will hold the whole project. Then I create sub folders for each series of outputs I do (many times I render up to 3000 frames and have to break it up to increments so I can render overnight and still use my computer the next day). So as an example, if I'm doing a animation with 3000 frames, i know i can do about 300 frames per 14 hour period. So I create a sub folder for frames 1-300 and set them to render into that folder, then 301-600 goes into its own folder and so on. That way there's no mix up between outputs.  Then I just use Premiere to combine them all.

So sorry, hind sight I guess, but hopefully helps in the future. 

Oh, and also I noticed that the name that shows up in the queue is actually taken from the video output, so even if you don't do a video output, its best to go in the field and change the name to what you want and then uncheck it. Otherwise your whole queue will show the same name regardless of what you set the frame output to say.

[Dan Wolf]

Good advice, thanks!