Looping woes and fixes

I ran into headache after headache trying to manage all the syncing for the spinning fan in my camera loops. I wanted to use segments I could jump between easilly but ran into continuity problems left and right when dolly shots came into play. There would need to be the center loop, a shot dollying to the right, and then a loop on the right. Getting all that to sync up to the music while also keeping the spinning fan in proper motion illusion drove me absolutely nuts. After consulting with Professor Moore yesterday, I came to grips with my over-calculating OCD and decided to drop the fan entirely. I also took up the advice again today when trying to think of an alternative. After about an hour of not getting the cloud particles to properly look or animate like steam, I cut it entirely and just used a metal grate over the opening (to save time and effort, its the same transparent chain link fence texture used on the floor).

With that in place, it was just a matter of rendering out the camera movements. I wanted to set up a particular framework so that the other two scenes could be done much more smoothly. Essentially, I am going to leave all the camera and aim animations the same, as well as the position of the floor and replace everything around those elements to re-save into a new file. That way there is perfect continuity between location changes. I got out some old fashion paper and wrote down where I had the cameras place in terms of timeline frames:

1-40: Drop down intro
67-79: Dolly shot from center to right
79-91: Dolly shot from right to center
91-103: Dolly shot from center to left
103-115: Dolly shot from left to center
116-235: Center loop (4 seconds)
236-356: Right loop (4 seconds)
357-477: Left loop (4 seconds)

About halfway through notating frames, I realized that the start and end frames were in identical locations to the loops. So I cut one frame off each end of each of the dolly shots (68-78, 80-90, 92-102, 104-114, respectively) so that they would fit nicely into the loops and there wouldn't be any potential stutter when switching between clips.

So with this in place, I can delete all external items (besides camera/aim and floor) and replace them with the other setting(s) and re-save them under the appropriate names and such.

WHEW... deep breaths...... OCD OCD OCD OCD.......