Ross Scott

Look! A poll: [poll id=4] I'm getting close to deciding on a format in the future for the videos, and I'll probably go with either MKV or MP4, since both of those formats can utilize the x264 codec, which offers some of the best quality to size ratios out there. Before I make anything official however, I wanted to essentially "beta test" the new formats. My biggest concern about .MKV or .MP4 is that in the past I've seen the footage stutter or become choppy under certain players. It's my hope that this is the result of people encoding in a less compatible manner, so I'm trying to make mine as kosher as possible. If you have time and bandwidth to kill, I'd like your help testing this out. I've uploaded some clips from Civil Protection that contain scenes with smooth-scrolling motion. This should make it easy to see if there's any stuttering during playback. In addition to .MP4 and .MKV I've also uploaded a copy of the same footage in Xvid .AVI and .WMV for comparison. If you notice any stuttering in one format, but do NOT see it in another, I'd like to know. Preferably leave a forum post, or you can email me. Including information like your OS, any codecs installed, and what player you were using would be helpful. You don't have to contact me if it stutters in none of the clips or all of them. In those cases, nothing can be determined specific to the format. Also, there's no sound in any of these clips, since I didn't run into any problems with that when encoding. Here are the clips: 1280x720 Test clip MP4 (70MB) 1280x720 Test clip MKV (70MB) 1280x720 Test clip AVI (125 MB) 1280x720 Test clip WMV (172MB) More stuff coming in the future.

Not entirely true. I'm still kind of frustrated the dearth of GUI customization software compared to XP, plus only DAYS ago did that Nvidia color problem get fixed, it was driving me crazy having to adjust that on every bootup. It WAS a problem with their drivers. I read on some forum posts that several versions ago this problem didn't exist, then it got added in, and for the next six releases, it was still present. Their newest beta drivers (NOT the WHQL ones) fix the problem though.

In the early episodes did everything, now Otto does the vast majority of the sound editing. Colton Rappe added this effect I wanted on some of the intro flyby footage. Steven Gosling helped out with some minor stuff for the last episode since Otto was pretty busy at the time. I'll likely have someone new in future episodes for sound once the sound editing contest is finished.

Well I'd say AVI has the most support for editing and while I'm still going to be using AVI on my end, it's not necessarily the best format for release. I mean look at the The Tunnel, that's 26 minutes long at 1280x720. While a lot of my videos won't be that long, having something that scales well I think is important. Also look at it this way: for the same size, I'll be pushing the videos out at higher quality if I use MKV or MP4, you can always convert them back to AVI and it will likely look better (and take up much more space) than if I did it straight to AVI. Can you elaborate on this?

FM 38 download. Well I hope to eventually, I have a pretty killer plot idea for a CP episode that long.

Well today is the last day to submit entries for the sound editing contest. If you need additional time, email me today and let me know and I can provide a small extension. Otherwise I'll review all the entires (about 8 or 10 total I think) and announce the winner in a few days. In other news, the dialogue for the next FM episode is done and I'll start on episode 40 soon. I simply didn't get as much done on the videos last month as I meant to, but hope to get more done this month. I'm not sure when, but you can likely expect another "spree" of FM episodes at some point in the future. Until then, there will probably be a new one every couple weeks. CP is still in limbo because of some bugs with the engine, but I'm confident they'll get fixed. Valve has said they've found the problem, but it may take them a while to roll it out into the next build of the SDK, but we might be able to get access to part of the code that fixes the bugs I was having. Also if anyone has personally confirmed (as in you've done it yourself, not just read about it) how to get lip sync extraction working in Face Poser on Windows 7, please let me know. I've already tried this software, which didn't work for me at all.

This looks interesting, but is this available at higher quality anywhere? I'm normally not too picky, but this is rough to watch full-screen.

Basically the beginning is done, but I'm having complications with where I want to stop the episode versus how the Source engine handles demo recording, so I may have to re-record the later section. I honestly don't know what percentage of the episode is done yet.

Just so people know, I haven't forgotten about the downloadable copy yet, I was just hoping to maybe release it as MKV or MP4 once I do more testing.

Well you have until October, and if you need an extra day or two, you can email me and I'll delay it for any last minute entries.

Nice, now somebody just needs to build this out of legos

I do receive some money from Machinima for my views, though having over 100k views on their channel is not unusual, they've become one of the largest channels on Youtube. I largely see the number of views I have as a result of being on their channel and think I would be getting approximately 10-25% of what I do without them. As for income, contractually I can't say how much I make from them, but they make money from Youtube, so my income is after what they require to make a profit from that. I still watch my finances pretty closely with food, rent, and misc. expenses. All the money that's donated (unless the person specifies otherwise) is going towards future videos, some of which I plan to invest some of my own money in to make, once I'm more confident of the work pipeline. Some future videos I likely WILL be making at a loss just because I want to get them made that much.

Yes, it's been fixed. I spent 4 hours today replying to emails and yesterday I spent the bulk of my time arranging all the files for the sound contest, I work on lots of different things. After going through a lot of the emails I'm thinking I should step up my efforts on getting the t-shirts moving in the nearer future.

Here's another post I've been meaning to have for a while. While I've overall been quite happy with the sound editing for the different videos, I'm pretty sure I'm going to need additional help in the future. Rather than try to decide by email who is a good candidate or not for sound editing, I thought I'd arrange a small contest to let anyone take a shot at it for one of my previous videos. For April Fool's Day, "Diary of A Zombie" was completed just BARELY in time. Otto Beumelburg, my usual sound editor, was unavailable, so Phai Giron and I ended up doing the soundwork at the last minute, and I think the quality suffered as a result; there just wasn't enough time to do a better job. I'd like to see a better mix made of the audio for this video, since I think it has a lot of potential in terms of the sound. CONTEST: My contest is to do a complete remix of the audio for "Diary of A Zombie." I'm releasing all the unedited, isolated tracks for you to mix as you see fit. In terms of sound editing, this video has just about everything going on. Lots of different sound sources, volume balancing, lots of positional mixing, reverb in different areas, occlusion, audio cleanup, and any additional sound effects you want to add. The goal is to make the best mix you can, by any means at your disposable. Alternately, if you're not the best at overall sound mixing, but think you'll be GREAT at balancing the volume on everything, go ahead and give it a try too. You can download the source files here (includes .wav files + .avi preview for syncwork): Sound editing files (100MB) RULES: The rules, instructions, and guidelines for this contest are included in a text file in the download. The short version is just make the best mix you can. The deadline for this is October 1st. PRIZES: I admit these are kind of lame, but hopefully people will be doing this more for the fun / interest of it than anything else. 1st place: While I cannot change the Youtube version, the downloadable copy of the video will be re-released at higher quality with your sound mix, and your name will be added to the credits of the video. You'll also be a top candidate for additional sound editing jobs in future videos here (if you're interested). Runner-ups: If you do a decent job, your name will be listed when the winners are announced, plus I'll link to any personal contact info you want (email, website, etc.). If your mix is especially good, you'll also be considered for future Accursed Farms videos. People who do a bad job: Nothing. - - - I'd wish you all good luck, except logically that doesn't really work when there can only be one winner. So I hope everyone who works on this has some fun doing it, I'm looking forward to the entries! EDIT: If anyone has ideas for other prizes that don't require too much time or money, feel free to list them.

J.C.: The "Orb" one especially is close to what I was thinking. I was thinking slightly less arms and a smaller core, but other than that, basically the same. It's just a photoshop file and is sort of annoying to do, but there hasn't been any progress anyway because my computer was down. And yeah, that's about how long it takes.

Well I'm happy for donation money, but I don't want people to feel like leeches if they don't contribute anything financially. I'm happy to have an audience, especially long-term people. If people never donate anything, but are still watching my videos years from now, I think that's great. I did have all 4 banks filled, but once the problem started I went down to 2, with the stability problems still occurring (and with different sticks). I got the Asus Xonar DX. It's their cheapest PCI-E model, and from reading a lot of reviews, it sounds like the audio difference between this and more expensive models is almost imperceptible. One article had blind listening tests, where listeners could tell the difference between the cheaper models (though not much of one) and the DX, but only one person being able to notice a difference between the DX and more expensive ones. The fact that it solved my recording problem makes it worth it to me alone, but I can absolutely tell the audio difference on songs I'm very familiar with. Don't know how it sounds against the X-Fi, but some users say it has a slightly warmer sound to it. Well I haven't overclocked anything in about 10 years, try to have adequate cooling on everything, more than ample power supply, and make sure things don't accumulate too much dust, I'm relatively on guard against malware and viruses, and my most important data is backed up on external redundant hard drives. Update on the computer: The cheap heatsink replacement didn't even have the right peg sizes for mounting it on the Gigabyte motherboard, so I ended up buying a new one. This one is by Asus, is working fine so far, and actually has a different design so that the northbridge heatsink is completely out of the way of the CPU cooler, so there should be no risk of it getting bumped during CPU installation or in the future. I'll get a new post as soon as I can, the next one will be about the sound editing contest.

Dude, I've been building and repairing PCs for 13 years and have had 3 jobs before as a technician. You seem to be excluding the possibility that I know what I'm doing, plus your tone is kind of condescending. Yes, I have computer problems every now and then. Mechanics also have cars that can break down. The more heavily you use something, the higher your chances are that something eventually goes wrong. Guys I think there's some misinformation here. I'm not running into the same issues again and again. Here are all the problems I've had with my PC in the past year: Currently: Northbridge heatsink came loose somehow and caused overheating to the chipset. This took a while to diagnose since the symptoms are quite similar to failing RAM and/or PSU, which are much more common. Several weeks ago: I upgraded to Windows 7 from XP and from a 32-bit to a 64-bit OS. I predicted this was going to be an ordeal, and it was. I use maybe 100 different programs regularly in all kinds of things. When you use such an extensive array of programs designed for a specific OS, no one has a 100% smooth transition, ask any business. Last year: My videocard overheated and died during the summer, something that is not unheard of for the G92 series. Don't worry about this stuff, I've got it under control. This update was just so people didn't think I was screwing around instead of working on the videos.

Well 90% of my demosmoother shots will have to be in sync with the animation of the scene, so unless the faceposer scene can be playing back inside 3ds max, then it becomes even more of a trial and error process than demosmoother is, I don't think there are any concrete advantages then if I have to guess with my imagination where the characters will be or we're they're facing for each shot in 3ds max.

Ah I think my overall luck is pretty good. I mean jesus, Valve says they'll be repairing a bug that's been in place since 2007, that's pretty lucky. Yeah I don't like how flimsy the mounting system seems for this. In general I don't like to spend too much on a custom heatsink for a part that may already be failing, I got burned by that last year on my 8800 GTS. This was a Gigabyte GA-MA770T-UD3 board, it's kind of a shame, since it has the other features I wanted on it (specifically RAID support and ample PCI-E slots). If you've had any luck with other motherboard manufacturers, you can let me know. The CPU should be fine, it's the northbridge chip that's maybe screwed. At least I was able to finally diagnose this thing, the symptoms were suggesting the PSU or RAM, but weren't consistent enough to make it either. Come on man, we're talking about a motherboard heatsink that got dislodged somehow, not opening mysterious email attachments. It either got bumped hard in transit and is just now having the problems and/or the build quality on the motherboard was a little shoddy to being with. There's not a lot of wiggle room as to what else would cause that.

It's the Cyborg RAT 7, I bought it after my older mouse was dying because of many rave reviews online. I generally don't like it and plan on selling it actually. The shape isn't as customizable as reviews led to believe, it's generally a bit heavy, and most of all the tracking on it feels quite twitchy and slightly imprecise. I haven't gotten around to boxing it up yet and have just been using it for secondary system.

Hey everyone, I'm having some technical difficulties with my system, you can see the current state of things in the picture below: My main system that I do everything on has been unstable for days and I've been spending a LOT of time trying to diagnose what was happening as the errors were varied and very elusive. It will be a few days before everything is back in order as I'm on a backup system at the moment. --- start geeky hardware explanation --- I was having a lot of random restarts and vague blue screen errors, nothing seemingly related to processer or GPU load. All signs suggested that the problem was either with the power supply or RAM, but after days of testing, nothing diagnosed reliably (memtest kept coming up fine, except when the graphics corrupted), it was driving me nuts. What finally DOES seem to be the problem is the northbridge chipset on my motherboard is consistently running way too hot, at over 80 degrees Celcius (the rest of the system temperature is fine though). The heatsink must have come loose from the chip somehow and I'm really not sure how long I've been running it at these temperatures. I've ordered a new chipset heatsink from a local store near me, but it may take them a day or two for it to come in. Assuming the northbridge hasn't been permanently damaged, I should have things back to normal in a day or two. If it IS damaged, I guess I'll have to get a new motherboard. Right now I'm typing this on a secondary system I've built solely for motion capture and it doesn't really seem to be worth the hassle of configuring all my software on another system if this will be down for only a couple days. --- end geeky hardware explanation --- This has brought things to a halt at the moment, but it shouldn't be for very long. Here's the state of everything I was working on before this happened: SOUND EDITING MINI-CONTEST: I was expecting to have a new post on this up by now, but it will have to wait until I get some more files together and my system operational again. FREEMAN'S MIND: I was planning to get moving on Episode 39 and I think people will be pleased for what I have in mind for it. You'll have to wait longer for the downloadable copy of Episode 38 because the raw video files are sitting inside a gutted computer at the moment (see picture). SOURCE ENGINE BUG: After exhausting all other options, I send Valve an email for the first time about the animation bug I was having in particular regarding demo recording in the Source engine. I received no reply. I then contacted a fan who had emailed me in the past and had some contact with Valve, who referred me to contacting someone else there personally. I then emailed them, then got referred to yet another person, who has looked into the problem and I have just recently heard back from, saying they may have a solution. This gives me some hope for staying on the post-2006 engine. MYSTERY VIDEO / SERIES: After spending some time with the toolset of Dragon Age, I've decided to abandon using this engine for the medieval fantasy video I want to work on. In addition to encountering some difficulties that wouldn't happen to me in Source, I've realized the mapping support just isn't there. I've found maybe 10 custom maps created for Dragon Age, versus some 10,000+ made for the Source engine. My new plan is to do this all in the Source engine, which I think is doable, except I'll need a lot of custom rigged humanoid NPC models with face flexes, which is somewhat of a tall order. I've received a couple very promising offers on this however, so I'm optimistic this video / series will eventually get made. ALTERNATE VIDEO FORMATS: Even though opinion on what format I should use is quite divided, the H.264 codec does seem like the best quality to size option out there, which would steer the format towards either .MP4 or .MKV. I was planning on doing some encoding tests to test compatibility. My goal is to find an encoding option that will work on multiple players without having any framerate drop, rendering errors, or the sound becoming out of sync, even on a system with a botched codec install. So if somebody is using VLC Player, ffdshow, MPC-HC, some nightmarish codec pack, whatever, I want to see if I can come up with encoding settings that will work properly on almost anything. MICROPHONE: This is actually a past issue, but I never made a news post about it. Around the time I was getting fed up with volume clipping issues, I was also getting fed up with driver issues on my old sound card, a Soundblaster Audigy. Since I already wasn't a fan of Creative Labs' policy about fixing their drivers, I decided to go with a soundcard from another company, in my case an Asus Xonar. In addition to the sound quality being perceivably better than my old Audigy, the volume clipping problem I had on my old mic has utterly disappeared on this new soundcard. I'm not exactly sure what aspect of it has made the problem disappear, but I'm just happy it's gone. This means I'm no longer in a rush to get a new microphone, I'll probably look into something again later based on all the suggestions I received. That's it for now, I'll try and catch up on email in the meantime.