Ross Scott

I think this section of the sentence caused a minor explosion of pleasure in minds of a lot of people . Or was it an implosion caused by anticipation? I should clarify I didn't do all 3 in one day. I've been working nonstop ever since my move pretty much.

Otto has disappeared, was waiting on sound editing help and recently got some from elsewhere. I'll have voicework done on the next 3 episodes by the end of today.

Ha, this is one of the most impressive monitors I've seen so far: http://www.maximumpc.com/acer_announces_availability_32-inch_b326hk_4k_ultra_hd_ips_display_1000 32" 4k IPS with a standard color gamut and 6ms response time. While 4k gaming isn't very realistic yet, damn, talk about future-proofing your monitor. Also no word on what its input lag is, but assuming it wasn't awful, wow, this has some impressive specs.

Well I may test Chrome then, again, flash video is the only area I've been less than thrilled with for Firefox. I could try and "benchmark" some Youtube videos between the two browsers to see if there would be any difference in dropped frames if I get some time later on (though people are welcome to try themselves also).

I checked, the last time I was trying to use it was in April of 2013. I tried a whole bunch to get it working, using alternatives like Chromium and nightly builds, but simply nothing would work. I can look into it, but what made me especially wary is that this didn't use to be an issue, it was a problem they introduced, then left unfixed for at least 6+ months, possibly a lot longer, I read some threads saying that it had been fixed and broken multiple times, kind of reminds me of Valve. Behavior like that from a developer makes me want to avoid them like the plague, but if they're actually treating alternative shells seriously and not something that can be broken every other release, I could maybe look into it again. One thing I will say is that Firefox has been EXTREMELY stable with me, I seriously can't remember it crashing whatsoever in the past 6 months, maybe longer. I don't know if Chrome has that kind of reputation now or not, but it's not something to be undervalued. My biggest complaint with browsing has mostly been flash video performance, but I don't know how much that plays into the browser so much as Adobe. After I did the Last Stand, I heard some reports of people saying older games were running slower than they used to on modern Flash, wouldn't surprise me.

Wow, you win, I've seen all the top ones you've mentioned, and none of the ones below it. And yeah the 80s were pretty awesome in terms of quality horror coming out, although I actually prefer the 50s version of The Fly, I think it's actually creepier than people might think for a movie of that era. The 80s remake didn't do so much for me, I guess it was too predictable, plus trying to make it a romance tragedy out of it rather than going more for the scares is what made me not like it as much.

Jesus! That's absolutely massive! I mean, I know it's uncompressed AVIs and all, but that's huge. What's the largest amount of raw files you've ever worked with? That might have been it actually. The Strife footage was pretty large, but my shots were more concise, with The Last Stand I had multiple sessions where I just recorded my game sessions and edited it down from that. The thing is, uncompressed RGB footage comes to about 10.42GB per minute of footage (at 30fps). It's absolutely massive and it can be a hassle to work with. This is kind of why I want to find lossless compression that editors can work with. It's also another reason I'm dreading the thought of 60fps for Game Dungeon, but hopefully I'll figure out something if the results end up looking better for that. As for my storage, I use an eSATA dock that I can just plug hard drives in like they're game cartridges. After I received the donation money, I bought two more 2TB drives just to be able to handle more of the load.

Doesn't quite solve the problem, but he definitely gives me some more stuff I can try for experiments, thanks.

I've only tried Vegas once or twice, I've been using Premiere since pretty much the second episode of Civil Protection. I just know it's a decent contender in video editing. Sure, I take gifts, though please don't send me a box of live bugs like your link or something equally awful. As for games, I seriously have had no time for any games besides what you see in the videos lately, so a lack of games to play is really not my problem right now. Well that's the size of the final clip, the reality is I was working with 2.5TB of raw files before editing it down. Yeah I intend to, but these zombies keep coming.

I actually don't like motion blur in many games when I'm actually playing (with racing ones being an exception), but for video watching, I definitely prefer it. And yeah, as others have suggested, I think you mean "subjectively." Again, we see motion blur in REALITY because of how our eyes process things. I'm trying to aim for what looks more real without causing motion sickness. Having a high framerate with no motion blur is good for a lot of games, though it also creates a sort of "hyper real" effect since you're looking at something that doesn't exist in the real world. It's too obvious which one is 30 v 60fps, I don't think that would have accomplished much. I do hear you in that 24fps is a little too low. When I make my movie, I was intending on aiming for 30fps. For me the "live actor" thing never really fades, though for wide panning shots / action sequences, I agree that there a lot of situations that can benefit from a high framerate.

I haven't made a decision on Game Dungeon yet, I'll just have to see. Another 2-3 blur frames IS 300-360fps and that's there too. As for no blur required at 60, you kind of have to question what we're aiming for then. It would be smooth motion, but real life has motion blur, so it would become less real and more smooth, if that makes sense. In gaming, I would agree. In movies, it really depends. Moving to high framerates makes things seem more real, but the "cinematic effect" people talk about really isn't bullshit. For instance, for The Hobbit, at 24fps, I thought "that's Gandalf telling a story, this is interesting" at 48fps "that's Ian McKellen wearing a robe putting on a performance for the camera." You lose that "larger than life" aspect to some cinema if the framerate is very high. It stops feeling like a movie and starts feeling more like watching actors perform live. Even for my own movie, I doubt I'll make it at higher than 30fps, but who knows. That's not an issue for Game Dungeon however, for there my main concern will just be making sure things don't feel nauseating. I'll look into it later, I plan for my next game to cover to be a 3D game actually where 60fps should be an option. As for Chrome, I hear you, I actually can't run Chrome with my custom UI because it's REQUIRED to hook into explorer.exe. If you don't have that running as your shell, Chrome won't work. Kind of insane since Google tries to be platform-independent and that's strictly a Windows UI thing, all I can figure is they're using it to track how you use your own computer.

I've just recently managed to move and have internet, but I'm still getting my room set up for recording, so it may be another day or two before work resumes on Freeman's Mind, but I plan to get on it ASAP. In the meantime, I've received a bunch of messages asking whether I'll be moving Freeman's Mind and Ross's Game Dungeon to 60fps now that Youtube supports it. The short answer is no for Freeman's Mind and I don't know yet for Game Dungeon. While doubling my framerate adds more time to making the videos and things more of a hassle all-round, I'm not trying to fight progress if the end results are truly better. I did some tests with 60fps and motion blur however and you can see the results yourself: 1. 180fps downsampled to 30fps (this is how Freeman's Mind appears normally) 1280x720 MKV 30fps (7MB) 2. 360fps downsampled to 60fps (same technique as before, but with a higher framerate) 1280x720 MKV 60fps (8MB) 3. 180fps downsampled to 60fps (experimental mode using the same data as the original, but to a higher framerate) 1280x720 MKV 60fps (8MB) I recommend watching all these videos in FULL SCREEN mode. While people will have different opinions on this, my take on 60fps is that it looks very cool in some situations, and is vomit-inducing in others. I'm someone who gets carsick easily, and the part where Freeman is spinning in this short test triggered a bit of nausea for me watching it at 60fps. It doesn't help that Valve's demo recording isn't perfect and sometimes adds some twitchiness to the motion that wasn't in the original gameplay. 60fps only amplifies that effect. It's for these reasons that I don't think moving Freeman's Mind to 60fps would be a good idea, since Freeman isn't known for having calm and controlled camera angles. It would make some sections look cooler, but would also make other sections look worse. As for Game Dungeon, I haven't decided yet and will have to do more experiments later. I think racing games might show the most benefit from running at 60fps, but anything involving twitchy camera motion I think could be a bad idea. Also, it could be the motion blur amplifies the nausea effect and games without it may look fine at 60fps. I think 60fps has potential, but for passive viewing, more care is needed with the camerawork in order for it to look good. For the record, this doesn't mean I think GAMES don't benefit from having 60fps or more, don't believe any company that tells you that 30fps is better for gaming than 60fps unless it's a special-case situation (like cutscenes). I have never played a GAME that felt worse at 60fps than at 30fps; but just like how I can get carsick riding in a car, I never get sick if I'm the one driving. It's the same thing for games, you're the one in control. With video watching, it's not always a pleasing effect, and depends a lot on how the camerawork is being handled. Sorry if this disappoints anyone, but I have to go with what I think creates the best impact. - - - ADHD version: Ross is not moving Freeman's Mind to 60fps because it will make too many people barf. He did experiments and used science to determine this. COMMENTS

This gets you the yellow screen bug you saw in the video. This game seriously fights you from going full screen.

I already use pr-My scratch disk has already been pointing to the SSD, my GPU is overkill for Premiere, the previews aren't the problem, it's the streaming of the sheer amount of data. For example, the last episode was around 330GB uncompressed to open in Premiere. It loads completely fine off the SSD, but then I don't have a lot of extra room for additional capturing with that, it's a real juggling act. I don't know anything about speedgrade, I'm not sure that exists in CS5. Literally the opposite. I use RGB (as do computer monitors), Youtube uses YUV and maybe does something in ADDITION to that. Yes, this is right. I have two basic goals here: 1. Keep the filesize down as much as possible in recording / editing without losing image quality. 2. Get the end color on Youtube to look as close as possible to look like what it looks like on my screen when I play the game. This may involve artificially modifying the colors in a bizarre way to overcompensate for what Youtube is doinf. That was my favorite part in editing also. Sometimes the way I envision something isn't always how it turns out, but that's one instance where it was exactly as I wanted it. As for zombies, the "empowerment" games you're describing generally aren't my favorite, although they probably do appeal to a lot of people. I'm not the biggest fan of Left 4 Dead for example, which I feel like appeals to more the type you're describing. I plan for the next RGD to be much lighter in tone and almost no violence. I kind of like to cycle the variety in the episodes, I didn't really mean to have Revenant and The Last Stand back to back, it just turned out that way. Man, don't feel any guilt about that, I'm still sustaining myself from the previous donation money and I agree with your parents view on not having to donate to people with more money than them, it doesn't make any sense. Right now my income is hovering right around what someone would earn working full time minimum-wage, but I don't have to support 3+ people either. I never want people to send me money who are worse off than I am, I take a utilitarian view on most things.

Believe me when I say I don't mean this in a rude way whatsoever, but a lot of what you're saying either isn't applicable or else is wrong and it requires an explanation of two or more things to explain why. To give an analogy, it's like trying to get help with fixing the brake pads on a car and getting advice about anti-freeze to pour in the gas tank. The part about Vegas being iffy with Lagarith is helpful information though, thanks. That means it's on similar footing as Premiere.

To everyone: I've seen all the horrors mentioned on this page I don't know, for me The Thing just blows away everything else by him, although Big Trouble In Little China is very good in an entirely different way. I watched Escape from LA again after I left LA in 2009. My favorite line from it is "this fucking city can kill anybody!"

It doesn't look like they list obvious solutions, but in the first thread it looks like somebody may have correctly identified the problem, I could maybe experiment to see if I can do anything with this data, thanks.

I did some color comparison tests and here's my issue with doing it the way most people do it: Videogame footage is in RGB. Recording in YUV12 leads to a small amount of color loss. Uploading it to Youtube leads to an ADDITIONAL small amount of color loss. By keep it in RGB until compression and uploading, I did some tests and the color still comes out better preserving it farther in the chain. Now granted it's not an enormous difference or it could just be with how I do it. Also he mentions Dxtory, but Dxtory has a big flaw in that its framerate is absolutely horrendous for any game using true antialiasing (not FXAA, SMAA, etc.). I use Dxtory whenever I can, but games with AA it's just not a good option for.

I use Virtualdub a lot, but it's not really a fully functoning editor (although the first episode of Civil Protection was made entirely using it!) I've been doing this, but it has a couple problems: 1. This method ends up being a pain for 2D graphics that need careful line-ups 2. For uncompressed RGB video, I had about 2TB of uncompressed video this time spanned across two hard drives. It makes it worse that Premiere CS5 has this annoyance where it takes WAY longer to load a video that has sound muxed into it to generate "peak files." 3. What compression is compatible with video editors? That would solve my first problem at least of keeping the resolution the same, just with lossy compression for the proxies. Number of episodes doesn't make a huge difference so much as the total length. Two 5 minute episodes isn't much more time than 1 ten minute one. This would cause the red or yellow screen you saw in the video.

Happy Halloween! Here's another video that took WAY more time than I intended it to! I selected this game because I thought it would go faster than a normal full length game, but things kind of spiraled out of control, as you'll see in the video. Some of you may be disappointed I'm covering a flash game for Halloween, but I've been wanting to cover some (and newer ones for that matter) on the Game Dungeon, I just hadn't gotten around to it. I promise I gave it a full treatment for this episode, with some additional surprises. I hope to have a "real" game next year with hopefully more videos leading up to Halloween. Special thanks on this episode goes to Adam Shepard, who emailed me while I was working on the video, offering to assist with some additional music. He had a very fast turnaround time despite me being a fickle bastard about the music as I tried to figure it out in the middle of deadline pressure. You can hear his music for the "safe room" music and for the in-game ending. I didn't mention the music in this episode since it was long enough already and it was either absent or unremarkable for this game. I've gotten multiple offers of music help in the past, but lately I've been overwhelmed by sorting out my email, so for any other composers wishing to help, Adam had the luck of covenience. In the future I'm happy for more music offers for Ross's Game Dungeon, but it may be a while before I can sort through everything. Without spoiling much, I really mean what I say in the video when it comes to being able to relate to this game. I also want to say thanks again to everyone who donated, especially helping with the SSD. I can only imagine how much data I've written to it since I bought it, I've been giving it an absolute workout with all the video recording and processing. This episode alone I'm sure involved a few terabytes of writing at one phase or another. * * * TECHNICAL QUESTION FOR TECHNICAL PEOPLE To any experienced video editors out there, I have a couple questions: 1. Are there any video editors that support WORKING with lossless compression, like HuffyUV or Lagarith? Having everything uncompressed really leads to massive file sizes, it makes me wonder how other people handle it. I use Adobe Premiere CS5 and while it will open those codecs, it is unstable and unreliable when using them. 2. Are there are any "tricks" with the colorspace to get Youtube to preserve more of the color when moving from RGB to YUV or whatever the hell Youtube uses? I preserve the colorspace as long as I can from recording and editing, but it gets lost in compression slightly more than I'd prefer and was trying to see if there better ways of handling it. * * * This is going to be last Game Dungeon until at least December, and I'm not promising anything then. All I plan to be working on from here until the end of the year is more Freeman's Mind. It's going to be an endurance test however, as I'm also moving in less than a week. I don't know if I'll have internet right away, but I intend to get a recording room set up ASAP so I can resume work with only a couple days downtime from the move. Finally, I was going to include a joke about Candy Corn Oreo cookies, but found out at the last minute that South Park had also, so I decided to scrap it. This isn't the first time this has happened. I also had an idea for a Civil Protection episode involving Cthulhu and an offshore oil rig that they also beat me on. - - - ADHD version: Happy Halloween! More Freeman's Mind coming! LINK TO FORUM COMMENTS

Yeah I'm not a huge fan of gross out horror like that, I prefer scary situations by far. As for why, I think in my mind it's kind of the same sense you get of exploration of the unknown, except that in horror, you know that what you're "exploring" via a game or movie is more hardcore and there's something with some teeth out there, heightening the experience. Yeah I've seen that one. I remember it being rather dull overall, but the ending is very good. This is one of those movies that falls under the category of "this really only needs to be 30-45 minutes, but we're going to drag it out to a full-length movie instead" for me.

Yeah it was weird, the other guy on the podcast was sort of talking like horror began in the 80s, they didn't really discuss the earlier horror, I was just going with the direction he wanted to take the podcast. For me personally, I feel like horror didn't start to get actually scary by modern standards until the late 50s or early 60s. Psycho was definitely a landmark film in that regard. I might have missed that one actually, I can look into it. I've seen all the ones mentioned except the Asian ones, I've never really gotten into the Japanese or Korean horrors that much. It might just be a different presentation style, I don't know. My favorite of those mentioned would be Session 9 and REC. And yes, I've seen The Mist and Candyman.

Yeah I've seen Martyrs, Man Bites Dog, and The Devil's Rejects. Martyrs is more the "torture horror" which isn't really my favorite type, though the ending helps make up for it. Man Bites Dog is an intense movie since it tries to be extremely realistic to the point where it's very disturbing. I remember my favorite scene being when they run into the other film crew. The Devil's Rejects is good, but I honestly liked House of 1000 Corpses a little better, although even that was a mixed bag. In general I thought the comic moments of House of 1000 Corpses were terrific, with the horror elements just feeling random more than anything else. My favorite parts by far were anything involving Captain Spaulding. I absolutely love the opening scene to 1000 Corpses, it's too bad it didn't maintain the level the whole way through.