Tutorial - My zzOLD Workflow

Ha, lets face it, MOST people won’t post a video on the interwebs about how they NEARLY screwed up and messed up a clients project THAT HAS NOT BEEN delivered yet. However, the point of all of this is to show how good workflow and a healthy dose of CYA can keep you safe even in a sleep deprived state when you KNOW you are going to do dumb stuff. 

I hope this gives you some insite on a way to work to keep you from ever loosing your work and if you don’t adopt MY technique, come up with something that works better for you.

Other After Effects Tutorials

Parenting

Processing a Time Lapse Sequence

Understanding the Render Queue and Presets

Smooth Slow Motion

Simple Logo Animation

Comments

[eric james wood]

Chris, you don't have to move all those layers around to do this. Just set comp in and outs and add to the render que. You can set custom time spans, and that would save you from making all those pre comps as well.

You can also take a look at aescripts.com and get a script called render layer, that will do all this automagically.

[Chris Fenwick]

very interesting eric... but not really the point of THIS post. What I was trying to show is how I screwed up and lost a VITAL comp but saved it thru being paranoid and following my workflows religiously. However... there are other issues with your comment.
Since you didn't see the video there was a lot of overlap that needed to be stripped out and thats why setting up regions didn't work. Also, setting up regions to render does not make for a REPEATABLE WORKFLOW. I always want to work in a way that I can REPEAT something frame accurate therefore i NEVER render a region. I ALWAYS render the whole comp. I set up my Render modules to render whole comp... ALWAYS that way not only I can but ANYONE that has to make a fix to a project can go in, fix a typo or WHAT EVER and then just render without thinking about the REGION to render. Although it make take a little more work to set up this way it makes subsequent fixes MUCH easier. This is stuff that comes up when you work in a workgroup as oppose to just one guy and a machine.
Now... the "Render Layer" script, that sounds interesting.
Thx for reading and commenting.