Strategic Sage posted:

The plot stinkens by the way - I had deleted some of the source files but fortunately not the video for the affected section. Here's the fun part; it was 100% intact and fine, no black screen. For some mysterious reason that I'm really curious if any of the brilliant computer scientists on this forum can possibly conjecture at, the sound and video for that six-minute section were simply nuked by PowerDirector in the rendering process, leaving only my voice-over on a separate track intact. Plugging the original back in and re-rendering fixed it, so it wasn't a repeatable flaw.