Help Make Freeman's Mind HD!

[blazicekj]

Hello there Ross,

 

I just wanted to chime in as well:

 

Both me and a couple of friends enjoy your videos immensely. Both Freeman's mind and lately the game dungeon as I am sort of an old school game enthusiast as well. I just wanted to say that I wouldn't mind donating regularly as well, even as a broke ass student I am. I am already paying for subscriptions to countless things I don't even like. Paying for something I enjoy as much is a no-brainer. I cannot donate much, but I sure can donate regularly. The nice thing I assume about having as many followers as you do is that you probably don't even need much from any single person, but everyone needs regular. Now I absolutely get if you enjoy doing these videos as a side thing only, but in my ideal world, you are sitting in a dungeon somewhere, consuming the highest quality imported beans you can get your hands on, commenting on various aspects of whatever you damn well please 25/7 and posting that online - therefore limiting my own productivity to a bare minimum. I would even go as far as to venture a guess that most feel that way about you, so if I may - for the love of theoretical physics, make some use of it if you feel even a little inclined!

 

As others stated, it definitely isn't about resolution for me either, it's about content. Hell, I would watch it even if you broadcasted smoke signals only. It's about the quality and quantity of the content. I do think you overthink the processing side a little, but I sure can appreciate the attention as a computer vision programmer.

 

If you ever visit Czech Republic, I owe you a beer!

 

Cheers!

[dangerdad]

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

 

Well, that is a pretty good reason. I'm thrilled to see the response for this (granted, I can't be as thrilled as you guys are, but as a fan of the videos it's nice to give back).

 

Oh and:

 

I'm still kind of in shock over it, I hate putting burden on fans like this, but it is saving me.

Ross, you are placing no burden on the fans by doing this. You asked for help and we're giving it freely. And you even produced a fun and informative video to do it. You hand out content, we're happy to hand back some cash.

[Woah_G!]

Hey, if you're a donator, just email me and I'll record it. I can at LEAST do that much

Hey Ross, I just donated $25 as a mutual agreement that if you post at least one more video by May 6th(my birthday), I will continue watching for another 7 years.

 

 

 

[BTGBullseye]

Wow... Up to $10700!

 

As for the RAID bit, here are some references...

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-benchmark,3485-13.html

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/257512-32-raid0-benchmarks-showing-random-performance

http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/394

https://tweakers.net/reviews/515/raid-0-hype-or-blessing.html

http://www.overclock.net/t/674524/intel-ssd-vs-wd-velociraptor-raid-0-benchmarks

 

There are an awful lot of RAID0 discussions and benchmarks, so this is just a random selection of ones that looked helpful.

[Philmnator]

wow I come back to this post to donate and it's just over $100 to the max goal whoo!

 

soooo $10 gets a recorded line, will 20 mean two lines?

[kingkolton9]

Hello, Ross. I have been a somewhat-long-time watcher (since Episode 10 of FM came out), and when you posted about a donation drive, I was very disappointed. Not because you made a donation drive, but because I don't have ANY money to donate. I'm in the poor boat with you; I think my room is down the hall and to the left of yours. I know you've said not to feel bad about it, but I still do.

 

I can at least say this: If I ever have enough money, expect a $500.00 donation from me. If I win the lottery, I'll give you $100,000.00 (assuming I win like a $5,000,000.00 prize or something.) If for some reason, sometime later in life I become Bill Gates rich, I'll give you a million. Or ten. It's the least I could do for you providing us all hours of laughter, after all.

 

I'm somewhat disappointed that the $12,000.00 mark will be reached. I find that part of the beauty of Freeman's Mind comes from the long wait times between episodes. I makes me want to check your website every day.

 

Or 10 times a day, but who's counting?

 

But hey, at least when Freeman's Mind is over, maybe you'll do Half Life 2. Maybe you'll do a lot of Game Dungeons. I love hearing Gordon, I mean, you talk about video games.

[BTGBullseye]

Only $1061 to go for a guarantee at finishing Half-life...

[Angel Blood]

Magda how's Ross doing? Is he dancing around like a school girl? I must know for my internet fix.

From a random fan, thank you everyone who is doing what I can't, the contents of my wallet doth belong to my parents and as such I can't donate. But you've guaranteed me, you and everyone between a fix of entertainment that Oxycodone itself couldn't rival.

[lavaheart]

wow I'm late on the donating sorry about that I usually check the site everyday but I was stuck in a train station with no wifi all yesterday and today. I'm pretty poor but I've been watching the series for gosh I don't even know how many years now, so I'll be sending some money since the only thing I've done over the years as a fan is buy a Tshirt and talk about your videos in my favorite IRC when I can get away with it.

 

I can't wait for the day that someone recognizes that it's a civil protection shirt....

also *hint hint* you should make more Tshirts that are black with white lettering...

[Ross Scott]

There are an awful lot of RAID0 discussions and benchmarks, so this is just a random selection of ones that looked helpful.

Well the first one is just SSD v. SSD, the other ones are single hard drive v. multiple drives, and the last one is only v. 40/80GB SSDs (SSDs tend to scale in performance along with size, so a 256GB will outdo almost all 128GB, and a 512GB will outperform most 256GB ones). I would like to see more apples to apples comparisons if you find any. I might not be able to find the data I'm looking for, but maybe I could do it manually if anyone's done a "worn down" SSD v. some of the raid 0 HDD benchmarks you posted. I will admit, I still have the perception of SSDs being less stable than hard drives, even in RAID 0. While one bad disk can compromise the array, your odds of grabbing data off it on the way down are much higher compared to a SSD where it's good one day, dead the next.

 

Maybe you'll do a lot of Game Dungeons.

This is more or less guaranteed under most scenarios.

 

Magda how's Ross doing? Is he dancing around like a school girl? I must know for my internet fix.

I'm mostly still in shock, I've never received this sum of money at once before, my brain doesn't have a lot of reference. That and I'm going to be scrambling to catch up with everything over the next few days, so getting an email reply might take longer than I anticipated, though I promise they're coming.

[blazicekj]

I wouldn't be afraid of SSDs. Yes, they can definitely die on you when you least need it. I managed to literally burn one of the eSATA ones compiling some stuff a day before a deadline, but the sheer amount of speed you get is simply amazing and regular drives simply die sometimes as well.

 

It can and does make a weak ass laptops fly circles around twice as powerful machines. Just buy something that will allow you to move them to your next rig when the time comes. Seeing as you will get over your 12K limit, I'd just suggest going for a new motherboard or a PCIe splitter or something and buying PCIe based SSDs. Especially for swapping, the performance gain is simply astonishing.

 

I wouldn't put an SSD into a server, RAIDs have an irreplaceable spot there, but for home rigs, there's nothing they have over an SSD. Get a second, standard, large enough drive and just back the SSD up using CrashPlan or something with incremental backups and the worst that could possibly happen is that 15 minutes of recording will get lost while recording it. Once you see the speed, there's simply no comparison.

 

I know this isn't saying that much, but just consider my laptop: 1.8 Ghz i5, integrated graphics, 8 gigs of ram and an SSD (400 - 600 MB/s I/O). It can run 4 virtual machines (2x windows and 2 linux boxes) simultaneously, while playing a full HD video and run Photoshop, Qt and some 20 - 40 chrome tabs all at once on 7 virtual desktops, with each part running smoother than running it natively (Meaning no virtualization but booting it up) on my older 2.4 Ghz Core 2 Duo, dedicated (and more powerful) graphics, 8 gigs RAM, non SSD laptop. And I usually have around 4 - 8 gigs of space on the SSD. Heck, the current machine can run Skyrim on full details where the old machine used to go 10 fps loading objects about the time you were standing on them.

 

Cheers,

Jan.

[ToastyMozart]

Wow, the internet really knows how to put its money where it's mouth is!

 

Sorry, I can't really donate cash right now (thanks, tuition) . I've got a couple thousand spare Doge floating around, if you've got a wallet for it.

 

About how long does your method of motion blur take to process? (Assuming it's not GPU accelerated.) If it's capable of compositing it into 30Hz video at the same speed/faster than the demo can render the raw frames, it might be possible to avoid having to store the absurdly gigantuan raw footage in the first place. You might be able to to add some extra memory and set up a RAMdisk,* have the demo recorder save in 1-2GB chunks to the virtual disk, and have your script process them as they come in, and save the finished files to storage.

 

 

*No worries about write speed

 

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...

 

While I'm definitely behind the idea of getting a proper RAID card for the setup, RAIDs are limited by the size of the smallest drive, so using all 4 would only give him around 1200GB total, since his boot drive is just 300GB.

Edited March 17, 2014 by Guest (see edit history)

[blazicekj]

About how long does your method of motion blur take to process? (Assuming it's not GPU accelerated.) If it's capable of compositing it into 30Hz video at the same speed/faster than the demo can render the raw frames, it might be possible to avoid having to store the absurdly gigantuan raw footage in the first place. You might be able to to add some extra memory and set up a RAMdisk,* have the demo recorder save in 1-2GB chunks to the storage, and have your script process them as they come in, and save the finished files to storage.

 

I was actually thinking about this as well. I've been working with OpenCV a lot lately. If Ross would like to try, I'd be willing to write a simple app that would process the video in real time from a socket or the ramdisk. I don't know whether I could write it to leverage the graphics card you have as I don't have access to anything CUDA capable myself, but I could try. There's a whole lot of possibilities. Something might just work even for 1080p, it's not THAT much of a resolution. I am currently doing something something similar where a camera is writing 300+ fps (lower resolution though) MOV videos onto a ramdisk mounted as an NFS drive in 1 second chunks and even a fairly slow machine is capable of some heavy processing on the fly when written just right. Of course, you're giving up the freedom of having 180 fps to work with in post processing, but it may be something to think about.

 

I don't have much time at hand, but I'd be glad to help in spare time. Let's make some open source! I have a feeling a lot of youtubers might want to see this. Everyone is always complaining about rendering times and whatnot.

[ToastyMozart]

I was actually thinking about this as well. I've been working with OpenCV a lot lately. If Ross would like to try, I'd be willing to write a simple app that would process the video in real time from a socket or the ramdisk. I don't know whether I could write it to leverage the graphics card you have as I don't have access to anything CUDA capable myself, but I could try. There's a whole lot of possibilities. Something might just work even for 1080p, it's not THAT much of a resolution. I am currently doing something something similar where a camera is writing 300+ fps (lower resolution though) MOV videos onto a ramdisk mounted as an NFS drive in 1 second chunks and even a fairly slow machine is capable of some heavy processing on the fly when written just right. Of course, you're giving up the freedom of having 180 fps to work with in post processing, but it may be something to think about.

 

Oh, I meant that I hope it doesn't use the GPU to help with it, since the GPU's busy rendering the game, while the CPU is mostly just sitting there. Unless you can use the CUDA processing independently of the rendering components (I'm not particularly well versed in the details of CUDA).

[blazicekj]

Oh, I don't think you can. When the graphics card is busy, it's busy. The thing is I don't know how busy it is. The card he has could hypothetically run Half Life 2 on 3 separate machines at once and still pick its nose out of boredom. That said, I am not sure how exactly does Source leverage it while rendering 180 fps. Only Ross can measure that.

[ToastyMozart]

Oh, I don't think you can. When the graphics card is busy, it's busy. The thing is I don't know how busy it is. The card he has could hypothetically run Half Life 2 on 3 separate machines at once and still pick its nose out of boredom. That said, I am not sure how exactly does Source leverage it while rendering 180 fps. Only Ross can measure that.

 

I figure since it renders in slowmo for him, then that the card isn't capable of rendering 180Hz at 1 second per second, meaning it's running as hard as it can. Trying to composite the frames on it would just end up slowing down the video recording process. Though if the sub-180 framerate is just a Source engine limitation, then yeah, GPU acceleration might be an option. I just figured it made more sense to farm the blending out to the component that's barely being used.

[loudaslife]

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.

 

Do you have demo files for ANY of the older episodes? I realize that if you spent time to render them in HD it would only delay work on new episodes (and nobody wants that). However, I would be willing to lock up my computer for several hours in order to do HD recording and process motion blur for whatever old episodes you do still have the files for. I'm sure many other people here would be happy to do the same thing.

[blazicekj]

The thing is, adding / averaging large matrices of data is what graphics cards are made for. The CPU he has is slow as **** in comparison. I honestly don't know which would be better, only measurements can answer that.

 

BUT, I may have an even better idea skipping the ramdisk etc. altogether, but I have no idea whether it's feasible. I will do some research on it when I get back.

 

Cheers,

Jan.

[kjc609]

Well, if the fundraiser is to be believed, Half Life is going to be done this year.

 

Hooray.

[heikki_kaperi]

70$ donates, but not for HD. To get "rent & bean" -worries off your mind, so you can maybe start "Freeman mind: City 17", in 2016.

And maybe make more "Game dungeon" -videos. Those are cool too.

[couple of minutes later]

(ou shit, you just hit 12 000 $. Congratulations man. I think it's time for you to expand your business to make "making videos" more of a breeze, than a struggle)