Art and design resource consolidation

[Vehek]

Yesterday, I emailed AD794.

こんにちわ。
Greetings. I am a member of a western Chrono-series community. We want to use your song 「エピローグ -My Dear DTMers-」 in a trailer of a Chrono Trigger fan-project.
Do you approve?

Nice to meet you. Thank you for wonderful mail.

of course i do. but could you write my name and my website's url clearly
somewhere on your site please?

And i need to see the trailer when it's finished. can i?

[Ramsus]

Yesterday, I emailed AD794.

こんにちわ。
Greetings. I am a member of a western Chrono-series community. We want to use your song 「エピローグ -My Dear DTMers-」 in a trailer of a Chrono Trigger fan-project.
Do you approve?

Nice to meet you. Thank you for wonderful mail.

of course i do. but could you write my name and my website's url clearly
somewhere on your site please?

And i need to see the trailer when it's finished. can i?

We'll make a news post mirroring the trailer and giving props for the music here on the Compendium early next month.

[FaustWolf]

As far as I'm concerned the trailer is finished. Thanks for doing that Vehek, better safe than sorry. Ram, Z, '99, and json can decide on the timing of its distribution to AD794.

Is the teaser site going to unveil next month or still...oh wait, this weekend is next month. My, how time flies.

[Ramsus]

http://www.crimsonechoes.com/

More tweaking to come in the next few weeks, but the site is now live.

EDIT: Now for the follow-up. My new idea is to make it so there's multiple trailer videos, with one being randomly selected every time you load the main page. So FaustWolf, if you're up to it, I've got everything ready and waiting to go.

[FaustWolf]

I'd prefer to wait to do the last two trailers until I've captured video from the entire game, but hopefully I can have another trailer done each week for the next two weeks. I might have to wait til spring break though, so let's settle on mid-March for the last two trailers, which I'll do back to back.

EDIT: Good lord, did the teaser turn out grainy when blown up. Damn. Well, that'll differentiate it from Square Enix I guess. I'll have to see if there's a way of remastering the videos with a greater frame size.

[Ramsus]

Let me know if you make anything higher quality. It's probably too late to recapture anything, but I think 640x480 original video is the only way to go in the future. The lossy video compression just kills everything, so we're better off capturing as big as we can and scaling down to our target size, especially since I don't have any fancy post-processing tools right now.

[Lord J Esq]

Exciting. By releasing these trailers to the world, you're committing to the final completion of the project in the very near future. With CT:DS having recently been released, Squeenix will catch wind of these trailers relatively quickly, and is unlikely to display its usual generosity. CE will get the C&D, and it'll go underground from there. Now all you have to do is actually release the game before that C&D shows up, so that the Compendium's full audience-reaching potential can be leveraged.

They're not bad trailers, either, although you may as well come out and fess up that it's King Zeal. I don't think yer fooling anyone. =P

[FaustWolf]

Had I been seeing the trailer for the first time, I would have thought the enemy was the Entity. I mean, "Earth angry!"...You've been watching us this whole time!?"..."I'll destroy Lavos at all costs," etc. The only thing that could give it away is that KZ refers to his "kingdom," but what kingdom could be greater than the very planet itself?

It would be fun to spread rumors that you fight the Entity in this game.

[Lord J Esq]

My money says the Entity doesn't dress that sharp.

[FaustWolf]

Anyone happen to know what kind of filter Youtube puts on its videos when viewed in "high quality" mode? This is much closer to the original quality:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfZaG_bf6ro&fmt=18

Unfortunately recapturing the hours of CE footage I've got on my hard drive isn't an option, and it would seem that ZSNES will dump movies in 1:1 zoom regardless of the frame size it's running in to my knowledge. I think we'd face the same limitations with SNES9x too, judging from my experience with the Prophet's Guile trailer. We may be forced to display the videos in their original size for the sake of quality -- is that an option Ramsus, much as I hate to ask? Shouldn't be any worse than making people stare into the screen of their Nintendo DS.

On the upside, maybe people will have a hard time ID'ing the bad guy. He can only dress as sharp as the image quality.

EDIT: Only other way to have done this would be to use a screen recorder a la Camstudio to record the gameplay, but I've had some awful experiences there.

[Agent 12]

I do agree with Lord J above, we do have to make sure we step up to the plate here.  Thankfully I honestly don't think we have alot more.  I'm going to make today another CE day partly cause there's a bunch of bugs from yesterday andly partly cause my legs are so sore from skiing i don't want to get up and walk around .   I may even get to add some of those endings in the other forum.

But beta testers are starting to get closer to the end of the game, and we haven't had any MAJOR show stoppers in awhile (the battle one was pretty hard to repro, same with the spikes), Zeality has a few bugs but a couple hours and he should be able to plow through them, and I imagine 99 is somewhat close finishing chapter 23, I'd still like for him to take a quick speed run through chapter 14 before we release though.

Also one more thing, I was under the impression we were going to leave the compendium out of all this hype building?  I noticed the youtube was released under the compendium's account and we advertised on the front page, I really honestly think we should do our best to leave our names out of this (to the point where i'd think we shoul dtake that video down and repost it), and we can probably take down the  front page banner.....i mean i dont think were going to get any help from it anymore?

Yes with even the most minute amount of digging they'll realize it's us from the demo releases but atleast it's some digging?
--JP

[Ramsus]

What could be killing a lot of the quality is a lot of format conversion and re-encoding. How's the stuff straight out of ZSNES look? If there's no compression artifacts, I should be able to upscale it to a larger size and filter it so it looks good, then you can re-edit the clips back into to a high-quality, hi-resolution master copy that we can use to encode the lower-quality streaming versions. That should help cut down the compression artifacts.

The problem I'm running into is re-encoding the small trailer video into a streaming FLV file with a low enough bitrate. That's what's killing the quality, not the change in visible size. Shrinking it will only hide the artifacts, but they'll still be there, and the viewer will just be squinting instead of watching.

Right now, I'm not sure what bitrate would work best, because I'm not sure what connection speeds are typical these days, but so far I've been trying to stay real conservative at around 300 kbits/s. If I find out people have faster connections than I'm assuming, I can up the quality a lot more.

Also, as I familiarize myself with flash development and rewrite the post video animations so everything's just one big flash animation, I might be able to rewrite the movie player so it varies the quality based on connection speed. We'll see if I have time.

I do agree with Lord J above, we do have to make sure we step up to the plate here.  Thankfully I honestly don't think we have alot more.  I'm going to make today another CE day partly cause there's a bunch of bugs from yesterday andly partly cause my legs are so sore from skiing i don't want to get up and walk around .   I may even get to add some of those endings in the other forum.

But beta testers are starting to get closer to the end of the game, and we haven't had any MAJOR show stoppers in awhile (the battle one was pretty hard to repro, same with the spikes), Zeality has a few bugs but a couple hours and he should be able to plow through them, and I imagine 99 is somewhat close finishing chapter 23, I'd still like for him to take a quick speed run through chapter 14 before we release though.

Also one more thing, I was under the impression we were going to leave the compendium out of all this hype building?  I noticed the youtube was released under the compendium's account and we advertised on the front page, I really honestly think we should do our best to leave our names out of this (to the point where i'd think we shoul dtake that video down and repost it), and we can probably take down the  front page banner.....i mean i dont think were going to get any help from it anymore?

Yes with even the most minute amount of digging they'll realize it's us from the demo releases but atleast it's some digging?
--JP

The Compendium news post definitely generated a stronger response than I expected. I mostly suggested it so we could credit the music authors like they asked us to, but second thought, I'm thinking it might be better of we just wait until the release site and acknowledge the music authors there. Then we'll send AD794 a link to that page when it exists.

At this point, the risk of AD794 running across the trailer site before the release site goes up and feeling upset is probably minor compared to the threat of a Square-Enix C&D aimed at the project's home base here on the Compendium.

Still, I think there's a difference between reporting on the Crimson Echoes project and reporting updates as part of the Crimson Echoes project.

EDIT: I moved the news post to Viper Manor for the time being and disabled the YouTube video until we have a chance to stop and consider the consequences of that style of reporting on the CE project.

[FaustWolf]

Hmm, would it help any if I uncompressed the preview video to raw RGB (essentially making every frame a keyframe -- and gigabytes in size) and recompressed with a better quality codec or something? There was double compression when I made the first teaser cut -- first compression round to make the AVI, second compression round to add the fadein/fadeout filters. That might have done it. If so, maybe we'll have some measure of control over the video quality.

[Ramsus]

No. The only way to improve the quality is to go back to the original sources, and run them through the entire workflow without encoding or compressing them until you export the finished video. So if you want to really improve the quality by doubling the size and filtering the video, you have to do it with the original ZSNES videos before running them through your workflow and without compressing the results too much.

Then as a last step, instead of exporting a compressed AVI to share with me, if you exported the raw video and generated several FLV files with different bitrates, it'd reduce yet another re-encoding and recompression step on my end and further improve the quality.

So ideally, it'd be this:

Convert the ZSNES videos to raw video -> upsample and filter them -> edit them into the trailer video -> export an uncompressed final version of the trailer at the upsampled size -> encode and compress the final trailer as FLV files at the target web sizes (namely, 480x360) with streaming bitrates.

That way, the only quality loss is at the final step.


EDIT: This is why 500GB scratch disks come in handy.

Also, don't forget to gradually fade in the audio more in the beginning and normalize the volume next time. If in doubt, lean slightly on the quiet side. Other than that, your trailer's turned out perfect. I'll try one more, slightly higher encoding bitrate for the streaming video, but if the quality still looks noisy by this time tomorrow, then that's as good as it's getting for now.

EDIT2: Uploading a 500kbit/s encoded version to the main site now. It should be viewable within an hour or so, but you might have to clear your cache to see it. This means if you usually have a hard time getting 70KB/s+ download speeds, the video may have to stop to buffer.

[FaustWolf]

I have all the raw video footage on hand, with one minor problem -- I dumped them through an xvid codec in the first place, so there's already some degree of compression on the files from the get-go. If I can find a way to resize the frames, I'll recut the first teaser and complete the other two back-to-back during my Spring Break.