Help Make Freeman's Mind HD!

[HLPrincess]

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

 

Poland is because of his Polish girlfriend, that is, me

 

OMG! The response from people is more than I expected and I know Ross is such a good man (and a great artist! ), he deserves all this support! I always think I make a fool of myself on the forums... whateva

[Eedo Baba]

I asked this as a comment on the youtube video, but I guess I'll suggest it here as well. Have you tried running a lower framerate capture through After Effects CC's pixel motion blur. It's a pretty decent option I think.

[LSD]

Completely unrelated, but what's happening with the DotA2 announcer pack you did? I remember you posted about Valve "flagging it", but not taking it down. Have they got around to giving you any information why it was flagged?

It'd be a great way to make some money (stating the obvious here), and it seemed to have come out really well from the demo video.

[Ross Scott]

Wow, today has been sensory overload for me.

 

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

I'm the last person to criticize people for NOT donating. In fact my favorite fans are ones that keep checking back after a while and will be looking forward to videos I'm making years from now, whether they pay a cent or not. I only care about money to the degree of keeping myself afloat, beyond that I just want to make more videos.

 

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

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

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

Guys, I'm happy for anything, it all counts to me.

 

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.

That's actually MORE true of hard drives as I understand it, but I will be flushing the files pretty regularly after recording. Also I read some brands are better about keeping speeds up near max capacity than others.

 

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

I plan to treat the SSD like it could fail at any time and have backup plans for anything that's CRUCIAL to keep (like demo files, voice recordings, editing projects, etc.). If I have the demo I can always re-record the video.

 

Not Freeman's Mind, Half Life. So does that mean Freeman's Mind 2 is confirmed?

I'm intentionally keeping it open as I still haven't decided. It's more like I have 50 things I want to do, but only time for a couple. I promise to get to the end of HL regardless however. I may do it this year anyway, but I PROMISE to do it if I hit 12k.

 

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.

It absolutely will degrade, but degraded, it's still likely to be faster than hard drives. It could last me a decade even with heavy use. Also writing NON-STOP to a SSD will NOT kill it in a few months. Many SSDs will just randomly die out of the blue because of the controller card. In other words, SSDs can die out of nowhere (warranties are important), but it didn't die BECAUSE you wrote to a lot in a few months, that would take years. As for 4 drives in RAID 0, jesus, I might need a specialty motherboard for that.

 

Has Ross seen this yet?

 

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/s ... p=25171193

Many people informed me of this. All I can say is if this works as advertised, this would have made the entire thing irrelevant, I never heard of it before. I'll definitely look into it.

 

Have you tried running a lower framerate capture through After Effects CC's pixel motion blur. It's a pretty decent option I think.

I don't have after effects, so no, I haven't. My experience was a framerate lower than 180 led to "soupy" results.

 

Completely unrelated, but what's happening with the DotA2 announcer pack you did?

Total fucking silence. I almost made a news post about this wondering about suggestions about what I can try next. I've sent multiple emails to Valve with no response and put posts in relevant forums with no answer either.

[Alyxx Thorne]

Hope to see more Freeman's Mind in the near future, HD or not.

[Arkady]

Poland, huh?

Come to Wrocław sometime, I'll buy you a beer (or beans, whatever)

Edited March 16, 2014 by Guest (see edit history)

[eeeaddict]

Hey ross would you accept crypto currencies? I have a bunch of doge coins and some bit coin sitting around and I think your community would gladly send you some (especially the doge guys their crazy generous with tips! /r/dogecoin

[Mecatronico]

Hello Ross, a friend from Brazil here, I love Freeman's mind and so always wanted to give you some money, I only could give $25 now, I hope it helps, good lucky!

 

ps.: Poland can into space? Brazil can't...

[HLPrincess]

 

ps.: Poland can into space? Brazil can't...

I haven't heard about any Polish space exploration program... but I don't have a TV What do you mean?

[Hippocampus]

Thanks for all of your humor and for keeping on Freeman's Mind through enormous amounts of trouble. I also couldn't care less about the HD thing, but I at least want you to eat while making these videos for us.

[J.C.]

And now, Notch tweeted about this:

 

 

Let the Benjamins roll. Oh, and hope my small donation helps.

 

EDIT: You may want to check out http://www.patreon.com/ It could provide a steady source of income, and you really don't need to set up lots and lots of tiers. I support several content creators, and the "reward" system is really not obligatory. At most, I get early access (1 or 2 days) to their content, and that's it. It's about supporting creators, not "buying" them.

Edited March 16, 2014 by Guest (see edit history)

[Mecatronico]

 

ps.: Poland can into space? Brazil can't...

I haven't heard about any Polish space exploration program... but I don't have a TV What do you mean?

 

 

LOL, it was just a joke, there is a comic in the internet called PolandBall (google it) that represents the countries as balls that talk (it is very funny) and for some reason Poland wants to go to space but can't, so, since my country Brazil does have a space program but our rockets always fail I tried to joke about it.

[SM64Guy]

I actually ran some tests with SrcDemo² once, to compare Ross's motion blur method to it's.

 

Here's a small screenshot comparison:

 

Ross:

SrcDemo²:

 

Ross:

SrcDemo²:

 

 

I find Ross's method looks better.

[scott155]

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

I have no idea what I did, but you're welcome!* And hello!

*Yes, I am aware you meant Ross Scott and not me.

 

Ross, it there any way to send you cash money? I have cash, but nothing I can really pay online stuff with. For Steam and PSN I usually just buy wallet codes from a retailer, so if there's something similar that I can do to send you money that would be super!

 

Keep up the superb work, Ross. 720p or not I always look forward to more of your content.

[ScottD.Betson]

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.)

He fell in love with a girl who lived there and moved there

[Jasrek]

I'm wondering how much money he actually expected to receive versus how much he's gotten in less than 24 hours.

[dashofweak]

I wonder if he expected it to go this well, after all it's nearly $6000 at this point. Well as of this post. I just find it kinda funny he basically went, "hey guys if you want to make this show better I'm going to need about $500 for a SSD." And we all went, "FUCK YOU ROSS HERE'S $6000"

[VeryShyPerson]

Wow that is alot of money.

[BTGBullseye]

Thanks for finally updating the download page.

 

Might want to add a little rice into your bean diet... Rice + beans = complete protein... Just a thought.

 

Actually, if you have a free PCI-E slot, you can get a decent RAID card for 4+ HDDs, and put it and the 4 HDDs in to your computer for about the same price as a decent SSD, and you'd probly have more space to work with. Just think on this, the new 2TB HDDs from Seagate do 100+MB/s write rate, (the 4TB drives get around 200MB/s last benchmark I saw) a RAID0 of 4 of those will give you around 3-4 times that rate...

 

As always, whatever happens, just keep alive, and making videos.

 

[EDIT] A link to show you what to look for if you decide to go the RAID direction: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=Property&Subcategory=410&N=100007607%20600022724%20600469956%20600122966&IsNodeId=1&IsPowerSearch=1

And the drives to use in it: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=Property&N=100007603%2050001305%20600003298%20600003311%20600003307%20600217643%20600003316%20600003300%20600376738%20600083978%20600003483&IsNodeId=1&bop=And&Order=PRICE&PageSize=100 (the hybrid drives are dropping in price, and do significantly improve transfer rates for <8GB size files)

[VeryShyPerson]

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!

 

 

Actually some time back i tried it. It may have just been because i did something wrong but i tried it with several separate games and in all of them the animations and such came out extremely stuttery. But it could've been just i done something wrong so maybe worth a try.