BACKBURNER + WINDOWS 7

Stupid issue with Windows 7 occurs when you try to run Backburner or any of it's components. The fix? DELETE THE PREFERENCE FOLDER.

User\AppData\Local\Backburner

That little evil folder has taken a good 6 hours of my life to figure out. -____-

(EDIT: 2012.JAN.19): Checking the Backburner logs, it seems like there's an issue with Backburner not being able to obtain the MAC address of the machine it's on.

"Error obtaining valid MAC address" shows up as the last line in the log, so I did a bit of browsing and found this:
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/item?siteID=123112&id=5580803&linkID=9241497

As an experiment, I plugged in an ethernet cable after dumping the preference folder, and BAM everything worked. My guess is that Backburner needed a valid connection to a network while creating the preference folders. Otherwise, it just goes "Sorry homie... you're not even connected to the internet, so I won't even bother getting up in the morning."

NUKE: LINKING TRACK DATA

Based on the FXPHD NUKE 102 training:

Use a secondary TRANSFORM node on top of your manual transform to apply tracker data.

WORKFLOW: DE-AGING

- Tracking based Roto
- De Noise
- Soften Patches
- Bring by Detail by Keying or Grading
- Composite Detail back on top of Soften Patches

WORKFLOW: ROTO

Use MOCHA to do planar tracking based rotoscoping, then import in to Nuke.

NUKE: De-Noising (Noise-Capturing)

Found a really cool way to capture real video noise to use in VFX or motion graphics endeavor: Using Nuke Furnace: De-Noise (F_DeNoise) node.

It seems not only to be able to reduce noise, but also grab the noise pattern and spit it back out.

http://www.imagineersystems.com/videos/nuke-beauty-tutorial/view

MAYA: Insert Projection Before Deformers

Keep deformers in the history stack if the UV map projection would be better off projected flat. For example, a curved surface that uses a BEND deformer. The UV projection will be done before the bend deformer, giving a perfectly flat UV projection.

Essentially works as if you had the foresight to project the UV map before actually bending the surface. =)

MAYA: Wordpad Location Replace Layer Texture Issue

My usual workflow is to do the work on my workstation, then pass it off to the render cluster that looks for files on the designated "Z:\" drive. After I move the files over, I do a quick batch search-and-rename using wordpad. The issue I've noticed is that during the conversion, somehow it adds an extra black layer in front of my Layer Texture nodes.

Not sure why that is, but going in and simply just deleting that first added layer fixes the issue.