Troubleshooting as a skill

Knowing how to troubleshoot is an invaluable skill as an animator and digital artist. We use several different pieces of software, and hundreds of things can go wrong with any one of them. This definitely a skill to be developed over time, but here are a few pointers:

• Google is your best friend!
• If your software gives you an error code, google it!
• Forums are even better.
• Don't be afraid to ask a question on a forum. Users are generally very nice and will answer within a day or so. Even reddit is a good place to ask.
• Your classmates are also a very good resource; they have probably run into the same issue!
• Restart the computer, especially if it has been a couple days (or weeks or months....)
• Become familiar and comfortable using technical terms in your search queries. Check out this glossary of CGI terms on schoolofmotion.com
• Remove variables to isolate the issue.
• Start a new file, restart the computer, close down other pieces of software running, close those 20 tabs on your browser, etc.
• Be mindful of the best time to install a new update or driver.
• If you haven't updated anything on your computer in years, now might be a good time!
• On the other hand, maybe wait to update your software or computer until after you have turned in that big project. Major updates can often introduce unintentional bugs into your workflow.
• Adobe gives you the option to have multiple versions of software installed, which is great for troubleshooting. Turn on the setting "Show Older Apps" in Adobe Creative Cloud preferences.
• Your graphics card is a great candidate to be updated, if you have a discrete card. If you have integrated graphics (graphics that is attached to your CPU), update your processor if available. 
  
• NVIDIA has "Studio versions" of their GPU drivers. These are more stable for content creation and are released less often.
  
• Use only alphanumeric (abc123) characters when naming your files, and use dashes or underscores instead of spaces. (<>:"/\|?*) and other special characters can interfere with how a file name is "read" by the computer, so it is best to avoid them entirely.
• Sometimes your computer is simply underpowered for the software that you are trying to run. Check the software requirements to make sure your computer has the necessary processing power.
• "Gaming" computers typically have enough power to tackle content creation. 
• i7 or higher Intel processors, 16 or more GB RAM, a discrete GPU with at least 4GB VRAM , and a 1 TB Solid State Drive (SSD) is a good starting point for a computer
• Make sure your computer has enough space on its hard drive. Your computer will suddenly not be able to do anything if it runs out of storage. It's good practice to leave about 20% of your storage space empty for best performance.
• Import an image sequence into Premiere or After Effects and it's playing too fast? The default ingest setting is to assign an unlabeled image sequence a frame rate of 30. You can change this setting by going to the Preferences in either the "Import" or "Media" tab.
• Clear out your Disk Cache regularly.