Help Make Freeman’s Mind HD!
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. 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:
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 0 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.
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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!
