Help Make Freeman's Mind HD!

[Ross Scott]

Well here's a video people may not have been expecting. It's part a send-me-money video, part behind-the-scenes of Freeman's Mind. Either way, I tried to make it entertaining. If you've ever been curious about some of what's involved in making an episode, you might enjoy watching this. The short version is this explains some of the obstacles to making the series HD and why more money will overcome them:

 

 

 

 

 

DONATE HERE!

 

Now the bad news is the next FM episode is NOT ready yet, however it is partially done. I'll re-record it in HD and get it out ASAP if this fundraiser goes well. In all honesty, I probably would have been done with the episode by now if I never made this video, but the "why isn't the resolution higher?" comments finally got to me, so by delaying the next episode and making this instead, it could be increasing the video quality on all future episodes.

 

On a personal note, ever since Machinima.com prevented me from releasing videos for months at the same time my pay dropped over 80%, this past year or so has been like a marathon for me trying to get my income stable again. I'm still crawling my way back towards sustainability and have been involved with a LOT of different projects to earn more income. I'm doing everything I possibly can to try and stabilize things and hope to do so sometime this year, but any extra money you donate will be GREATLY appreciated. A big part of the reason I haven't bought this part myself is I've never been able to justify it; all donation money over the past year has gone directly to food and rent. By making this video, it FORCES me to buy the part and increase the resolution to the show. Anyway, because a lot of my time is divided up these days, I can say that for now, more money likely WILL increase the release rate of both Freeman's Mind and RGD since it will free up time I would be spending working on other things.

 

As an extra "thank you", I've also updated all the downloadable copies for Freeman's Mind, and I'm going to try my best to reply to all the emails I've received over the past months, something I've been neglecting a lot (again). If you haven't gotten a reply from me, it's very likely you will over the next week. And if you don't donate, I'm still glad to have you all as fans and will keep making more videos no matter what.

 

I throw out a lot of information in this video, so I can only imagine the comments I'll get from people telling me I'm wrong about everything, but here are some questions / comments I'm anticipating:

 

Q: Why aren't you using Kickstarter or Indiegogo?

A: Those fundraisers typically require many prize levels that would take a lot of time to fulfill. It's not that I don't want to give people prizes, but I'd rather not spend weeks mailing things when I could be making more videos instead.

 

Q: Are there any prizes?

A: Maybe! I will send an email of thanks to everyone who donates. Also I'm willing to give any prizes that don't require me to act like a business and take tons of time to deliver. I am willing to record a line for anyone who's donated $10 or more, just email me about it. Also, I was considering releasing all the isolated voice files for all the Freeman's Mind episodes if people are interested in that. If you have ideas about something else you'd like to see, let me know.

 

Q: You don't need a SSD! You need a capture card or use Shadowplay then play back the demos in slow motion!

A: For adding in motion blur, that wouldn't actually help save me any time, plus it would still be susceptible to potential dropped frames if there was some sort of hard drive stutter.

 

Q: You don't need a SSD! Your CPU is too slow!

A: While a faster CPU would speed up the motion blur processing some, none of the cores ever get maxed during recording, there's plenty of overhead. The hard drive speed is the bottleneck.

 

Q: Will you be updating all the old episodes to HD?

A: Unfortunately, no. I no longer have the old demos and project files necessary to do so. I never would have gotten rid of them if I expected FM to be as popular as it became.

 

Q: What about the Game Dungeon?

A: Due to voting results, I plan to focus mostly on FM for the near future, but I have a LOT of RGD episodes planned. This part will remove all barriers for recording in RGD also, so I'll be able to cover potentially any game after this, not just older ones (though I still plan to keep doing those too).

 

Q: Do you eat only beans?

A: No, but beans + onions have a good cost-to-flavor / nutrition ratio.

 

- - -

 

ADHD version: Send money to Ross if you want to see Freeman's Mind in HD! Or send money because you can, Ross can use it! New FM coming this month, maybe in HD!

 

LINK TO FORUM COMMENTS

[ScottD.Betson]

Ross id love to donate money but I cannot because I am in a way in the same boat as you but at this moment I am unemployed looking my ass off for work, and well if I had a kickass SSD for you (if it was 6TB) I would send it to you no questions asked, but again Money is a factor over here too, and honestly I actually think 480P is the best quality to me, I dont mind HD video but it just feels sooo slow when its being watched, honestly I watch any youtube video at 360 usually unless Youtube wants to hold my laptop hostage and make me get video in 240P or 144P then I just watch it in 480P after rewind the video back the beginning, its a pain but life is a pain, and honestly I think 480P is perfect for me, if people want 720P they better get Donating, I know I am one of those fans who think if the director wants to record in a new format then let them do so......

and again Ross I am glad you make the freemans mind videos, they are hilarious as fuck!

[Lavo]

Oh damn. Now I really want to play first Deus Ex...

[Pinkie Pie]

"Sometimes bugs take more than 18 years to fix."

 

This is going in my signature.

[Alyxx Thorne]

Donated 10$. Not much but I hope it helps!

[VeryShyPerson]

I donated a few dollars but i couldn't afford anymore sorry but the videos make me happy.

 

Also watch out on the SSD for the write limit. A lot of files being written that might wear it out something fast. But I assume you already got that factored out. Though that maybe not applicable anymore. I forgot sorry.

[Metsys]

Ross, are you planning on filling up almost the entire SSD drive for each episode?

 

The wonky thing with SSDs is that as the drive is filled up their write speed is reduced substantially. The rule I've heard is "never let it go past 50% capacity if speed is critical." That wisdom is for web servers, but for consumer drivers I've heard to only fill it up to 75% if you want a balance between speed and storage. I don't know how much write speed you need, but since it wasn't brought up in the video I thought I'd brought it up here.

[Alyxx Thorne]

Ross, are you planning on filling up almost the entire SSD drive for each episode?

 

The wonky thing with SSDs is that as the drive is filled up their write speed is reduced substantially. The rule I've heard is "never let it go past 50% capacity if speed is critical." That wisdom is for web servers, but for consumer drivers I've heard to only fill it up to 75% if you want a balance between speed and storage. I don't know how much write speed you need, but since it wasn't brought up in the video I thought I'd brought it up here.

Maybe a good idea would be to move the files to a SATA drive after recording to clear up space.

[VeryShyPerson]

when i record with source recorder after the frames recorded i move them to the temporary folder on my data drive which is alot bigger but a little slower. (If you record startmovie to subfolder/whatever, it goes to a subfolder and you can whip up a batch file which is faster copy.) Its on the data drive i do all of the fun stuff like putting the video together and encoding it.

It works for me at least but i don't do all of the motion blur stuff so maybe not help?

 

Edit: sorry this is garbled up. My brain isn't too good today.

Edited March 15, 2014 by Guest (see edit history)

[Metsys]

Maybe a good idea would be to move the files to a SATA drive after recording to clear up space.

I'm sure that's his plan. My concern is that if the recording for each video takes up more than 50% of the drive capacity, then the write speed will drop during the recording session. It won't be a problem if the reduced write speed is still more than he needs to record.

[Blue_Dust]

 

It has to happen! Robot has to attack dog!! Oh and somehow finishing FM this year would be great too.

 

I'm glad Ross decided to took the initiative. With the extra money from the donations Ross could also go with other hardware upgrades if needed and buy an entire bean factory (why bother buying the cans, produce the stuff yourself).

[kjc609]

So, the final donation prize (if you want to call it that) is a promise to complete Half Life this year.

 

Not Freeman's Mind, Half Life.

 

So does that mean Freeman's Mind 2 is confirmed?

 

Also, I would donate, but I'm shit dry when it comes to money, so I can't.

[Meelis13]

and of course, just as i went broke due to my own computer problem, you ask for donation. now i feel bad D:

[milczyciel]

I've been waiting for an excuse to send You some money and here it is! Mind you it was not that HD part as I couldn't care less (like you said it's 1998 game). The amount of work You put in those videos to make them even better though?! That's something that need to be thanked in some more meaningful way than a stupid like or thumb up.

 

Glad to hear You didn't forgot or abandoned the RGD as I've honestly found them not only very entertaining but also (lolz?) educational and miss them dearly.

 

On a side note: being a recluse I never felt like I really need an acc here, but now, after I've learned You moved in to Poland I know that I do

 

Thanks Scott and... umm... hello people.

[sadowx13]

As some one who records uncompressed video I think this is a bad idea. An ssd has a limited number of times it can be written too before it starts to degrade. I tried to use a Samsung ssd and I killed it in a few months. I might have got a bad ssd but I think 4 hard drives in raid 0 would be a better idea, that's what I use anyway.

[VeryShyPerson]

SSD write limit worries me too. If im remembering correctly theyre not really that good for constant writing of a lot of small files which is what source recorder does.

[sadowx13]

SSD write limit worries me too. If im remembering correctly theyre not really that good for constant writing of a lot of small files which is what source recorder does.

I have a Intel 530 thats rated for 141tb worth of wrights. I recorded about 8 seconds of video in 720p and it was 814mb, so It looks like an even worse idea then I thought.

[Alyxx Thorne]

Personally, I don't care if FM is in HD or not. The show has rocked so far and I never even paid any mind that it wasn't in HD. It's the content that matters to me, not the resolution.

And yeah, it's a freakin' 1998 game. Amping it up to HD isn't gonna do diddly squat.

[mattmanlex]

Has Ross seen this yet?

 

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?p=25171193

 

What does it do?

SrcDemo² lets you render smoother movies, faster.

 

Smoother, how?

By using frame blending. Frame-blending is not a new technique. It involves rendering a movie at a very high framerate, then blending those frames together into a lower framerate. This gives the final video a smoother feel.

However, these frame are quite large in file size, and if you want something very smooth, you would thus require a lot of disk space in order to store all those frames. This is where SrcDemo² comes in.

 

Faster, how?

SrcDemo² creates a virtual filesystem that sits within the game's directory. When the game tries to write image files to it, those images get caught before they get written to disk. Instead, they are kept in memory. After a sufficient amount of images has been caught, they are blended together, and one single frame is written to the disk, in another directory of your choice, in the image format of your choice.

 

This not only allows you to render movies a lot faster (since frames are not written to disk, and the disk is slow), but also smoother, because you can set the framerate as crazy-high as you want and the disk storage needed will not change!

[dangerdad]

I dropped some in the tip jar as well, thanks for FM! And why Poland?

 

I wouldn't worry about SSD write limits. I once did the calculation that if you wrote each sector on an SSD once per second you'd have several thousand years of writes available. (Of course, depends on the drive quality, etc.)