Ross Scott

Well a few weeks ago you told me it WASN'T possible, the complaints kept escalating, so then I decided to take more final action on it by the time I was told it was possible again.

It was sent to Otto about a week and a half ago, he'll be working on the sound editing while I'll be working on Episode 40.

Well I've reviewed all the entries for the sound contest and I think I'm just a picky bastard in that none of them jump out at me as a clear winner, though some of them are close. I've gone and emailed all the contestants and a few have been eliminated. The rest I've written up a list of things each person could do to improve their mixes. I think after another round of revising we'll have a clear winner. My attention to detail on this may seem excessive, but it's nothing I wouldn't do myself. Work continues on the videos and I hope to have some more work started on improvements to the website (including broken links) sometime soon. As for the video releases, for those that have a preference, people seem to favor MKV over MP4 almost 2:1, so I plan to be transitioning to that. From the feedback I received, there seems to be NO consistency with what stutters on people's computers. It's almost like each format is different for every person. MKV at least has the advantage of being one of the highest quality options, so even if you don't like the format, you'll be working with a better source if you want to convert it to something else. Also if you prefer the existing WMV copies of the videos for some reason, I recommend grabbing them now, because I plan to take them down later and replace them with the higher quality .MKV files.

This is the first game I've ever pre-ordered (if it counts that way since it's pre-alpha). Just the feature list alone had me hooked. My main complaint right now is that I can't play it in fullscreen. I found this link, but the link provided doesn't even connect to anything now. It is pre-alpha though, so I'll probably just wait to play it until that becomes a standard feature.

Really when the forum was created, I just added in signatures because that's generally what people expect in a forum. I don't use them myself in other forums and I think most of what's on a signature would be better for a person's profile page. After seeing huge images and lots of animations since, I've kind of regretted having that. For me, forums are all about information and communication and seeing pictures everywhere (of anything) can interfere with that. Many forums don't even have signatures or avatars, it's not unheard of. I'm trying to appease the majority of people for things I don't have a strong opinion on, signatures were initially like that. The majority of the complaints I was getting were about the images and not MLP, but a significant portion was about that. As for the ponies, even without the complaints (but especially because of them), I'm still not sure what to make of this. What I DID notice was that on multiple threads I was interested in reading, I was seeing 20+ pony pictures per page, when the discussion had nothing to do with that. I was seeing so many pony pictures just from signatures, avatars, etc. that it was outnumbering every other kind of picture type. Since I'm not interested in ponies, living or otherwise, this felt rather weird to see on my forum. So even though people were just expressing themselves, the reality was the forums here were getting flooded with pony pictures, which isn't what I want the forum to be about. It's the same thing if these forums had pictures of marijuana leaves all over them, moreso than any other kind of image. It's not related to the videos, it's not related to my own interests, yet it's somehow dominating my own forum. Anyway, I think removing the signatures makes all of this a non-issue, makes the forums more readable (for me at least), and makes it so I don't have to ostracize any group, which is a losing battle in itself. Today people are upset over ponies, tomorrow it's PETA, the next day it's ewoks, etc. This makes things less of a headache for me so hopefully I have more time to focus on the videos themselves. I'm happy for everyone to watch my videos who are interested in them, regardless of whatever else they're interested in.

Look, you're not the one getting 2+ emails a day complaining about the signatures, with a significant portion of them about My Little Pony. I have plenty of other legitimate emails (about 200) I'm behind on without having to add all these as well. The large signatures in general I wasn't fond of and was told weeks ago it wasn't a fixable situation (though that stance was changed recently). Regardless, it puts me in a position to defend something I don't really care about in the first place. I'd rather focus more on getting more videos out, cleaning up the website, and adding functionality to it. As for the ponies, I don't really understand the burning desire to post them everywhere, but I can understand the perspective of the people complaining about them that they seemed to be saturating the forum. I remember looking at a few general threads and in some of them it looked like half the images, many of them large and / or animated, were of ponies. At that point, the pony pictures are becoming spam, which I don't like. So I'm asking that you don't create manual image signatures to circumvent this, it only recreates the original problem. If you're hellbent on posting irrelevant pictures to every post, you'll be banned for spamming. This whole situation has become way bigger of a deal than it should be. The forum is for taking about topics you're interested in. Signatures are being removed, it's not the end of the world.

The reality is MANY people will be using VLC player, so I tested it with VLC Player and MPC-HC with the Matroska Splitter. I tried to make this as compatible as possible using the "High Profile" setting, I found that almost ANY deviation from this resulted in minor errors in VLC Player. I was using Handbrake to do the encoding, but I'm still new to x264 encoding. Thus, I'm afraid I don't know what you mean by the level 4.1. By all means recommend a better encoder / settings I can test out. Also if I have to use a commandline encoder, it would be highly preferable for me to have some sort of frontend. I don't think so, the results show that the majority of people here don't seem to have a preference as to how it's released. If 70% of people voted for "none of the above", I'd stop considering these formats and figure out what people wanted. People seem divided or to not care about this, so I'm trying to find an option that's high quality and at least semi-compatible with a lot of things.

Yeah, they got taken down, then Jexius suggested text-only signatures, so I said okay, so now they all seem to be enabled again like before. I think he may have gone to sleep, so I guess this will get resolved later.

Some of the complaints were about that, I'm not really sure what to make of it myself, when about half the threads here have been covered in pony pictures seeing as how none of the videos have anything to do with ponies.

Hey, I'm guessing this is going to piss people off, but I've decided to remove signatures from the forum. I was getting several complaints about the sizes of them and the animations being distracting and I generally agreed. I tried to get the sizes lowered, but there was some trouble with that for a few weeks and I'd rather not receive a complaint or two a day on this, since I was kind of indifferent on it in the first place. Sorry if this disappoints people, though ideally people will be focusing on what's being said instead of the signatures anyway.

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.