Last night, as I sat waiting for some compute-bound task to finish, I 
was idly wandering through the contents of my hard drive. Suddenly, I 
stumbled upon something utterly unexpected: I found a render I never 
knew I had.

Literally. I have no recollection of designing this scene, even though 
it's moderately complex. I certainly have no recollection of waiting for 
it to finish rendering - despite the fact that the render time is 
/obviously/ measured in multiple *months*! O_O

Most puzzlingly of all, it /looks good/. Which is extremely rare for 
anything *I* designed. :-o

OK, so I know what you're thinking. You're thinking I got this from 
someone else, right? Well no, that's not it. Quite apart from the file 
being almost 7GB in size and the POV-Ray source code being present, it's 
/obviously/ directly related to all the other files in that folder, 
which I /do/ remember making.

Basically, there's a folder containing a set of animations. Each one is 
roughly 5 minutes in length, and they start off trivially simple and 
gradually increase in complexity. I remember designing them all... 
except the final one, which is much more impressive than all of the 
rest, and would have had a much larger render time.

Come to think of it, I'm surprised I actually finished rendering all of 
these. 5 minutes is a /long/ animation. That's a heck of a lot of frames 
to render. (7,500 to be exact.) Unless you can keep the render time per 
frame below a few seconds, that rapidly spirals into multiple months of 
rendering. I remember sitting through the first few animations, 
rendering low-res previews and tweaking the settings, etc. But I don't 
recall rendering some of the later ones. And, again, the final one I 
have no recollection of it ever existing.

In short, I just discovered a really cool animation I didn't know I 
made. And it's finished! It's complete and everything.

Maybe I should put the whole set on YouTube? Then again, I'd have to 
transcode it somehow. Currently all the videos are uncompressed. Up to a 
certain resolution, that works. But once the image size gets large 
enough, it stops being possible to play them uncompressed; my harddrive 
isn't fast enough. Which is a bit of a problem, since I've yet to 
discover a codec which preserves all the crispness and detail that I've 
waited months to painstakingly render.

Even the mighty H.264 set to 9000 kbit/sec seems to blur and smudge my 
works. :-( (And it doesn't appear to be possible to set the bitrate any 
higher than that. The slider doesn't move any further.)

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