Toys Video - Call it my Frost*ie Report for 2008! : UPDATED

[Ash]

Brilliant Ped.  Got to do something with that!

JJJ

Gotta say it would be criminal not to let that excellent and imaginative piece of work out to a wider audience. Well done Pedders.

It has got my husband putting Toys on his ipod and he has been caught whistling it too  
I asked him if he wanted a Hoodie for Christmas but I guess that was a step too far  :lol:

[The Cosmic Lawnmower]

Fantastic! Verily I doth my prog cap to you Sir!  

[Pedro]

That'll be some mutual dothing (or even doffing) betwixt thee and me then - loved your work at The Peel - took major stones to do that and not go all "rabbit-in-the headlights" about it!  

[leelustig]

Jesus Christmas that was awesome. you know I think I'm REALLY missing out by not owning this game... or a PS3 for that matter.

[Cynthia's Mallet]

Well, I've commented on your youtube and I'll say it again here, absolutely brilliant, doesn't matter how many times you watch it you always spot something new - cracking job, I'm sure it'll end up on a special edition DVD sometime (PS3 licensing permitting and all that) or better still, the telly!  It's Frost*ie all right and it's a great present - THANKS!

[Dr.Ripper]

haha, the forum is full of hot air.

It put a big smile on my face, nice job!

[Gedfaz]

Hi,

Well here it is....a video for Toys.

I finally managed (at 6am this morning) to get the thing to roughly hang together and what you can now see on YouTube is a rather resolution-crushed version of my epic! (Well, it's nearly the time for crushing resolutions, isn't it?   )

Anyway, like I say, it's rough, there are things you just can't read (writ too small ) and things I wanted to do but either couldn't get to work or had to bin cos of the time limit I forced on myself.

Don't look for any character development or sub-plot...just some groaning visual puns and ropey associations!  

Consider this my Christmas Card to you all wherever you are and I demand that you have a Merry Christmas and a ridiculously Happy New Year!  

Right, to The Peel!!  

West Bishes,
Pedro

PS Ooh, and that brings up the 400!!  

That was unbelievably.... UNBELIEVEABLY......INCREDIBLY!  Superb!

[sawtooth]

Just noticed Andy has been promoting your work on his blog Ped!
//http://andyedwardsmusic.blogspot.com
A fine example of thinking 'outside of the box' (that's the blog AND the video!)

As JJJ mentioned earlier, surely something has to be done with this vid - it's too good to stay on youtube! Do you have (or can you output) a higher res version Pedders?

[Pedro]

Do you have (or can you output) a higher res version Pedders?

Thanks, Sawtooth. I must say I am rather pleased with how it turned out.
I was deeply honoured when Andy said he was going to put it on his blog.

Producing a better resolution version is this week's source of sleep-deprivation.
It's coming along but it's slow going.

***Anyone not remotely interested in the techy stuff is excused and should help themselves to refreshments in the foyer now***
 
Don't know if anyone is interested but I'll describe the process....just so that the more knowledgeable can say "you didn't need to do all that, why didn't you just do this...."!    

Sadly, being quite new to the world of video I was a bit stuck for how to capture the video from the Playstation3....not having anything that would record from an HDMI source.
Luckily the old Playstation leads can be used but, without any video capture hardware on the PC, I had to resort to recording it via SCART onto our Philips DVD Recorder.

So, scene-by-scene, I performed the various bits (over-and-over-and-over until I got it right!) and recorded the best take onto a DVD-RW. I then lugged that to the PC and converted the VOB files from the DVD to .wmv format, which appeared to be good enough quality without being massive. I then wiped the DVD-RW and did the next scene. The BIG MISTAKE was not keeping a copy the original VOB files.  :roll:

I converted the VOB files because the best video mangling tool to hand (Serif's MoviePlus5) "gagged" when I tried to feed it VOB files directly for some reason.

Little did I know that VOB files can just be renamed as .mpg files and, with a little patch, MoviePlus will import them (albeit verrrrry slowwwwlly).

So now I'm re-recording every little bit (trying to make the unreadable bits readable) and trying to resist the urge to tweak, re-do, change, etc. etc.  

My only unanswered question is what do people mean when say "can you produce a hi-res version"? How high is "hi" and what format would they prefer?  :?

[sawtooth]

Do you have (or can you output) a higher res version Pedders?

Thanks, Sawtooth. I must say I am rather pleased with how it turned out.
I was deeply honoured when Andy said he was going to put it on his blog.

Producing a better resolution version is this week's source of sleep-deprivation.
It's coming along but it's slow going.

***Anyone not remotely interested in the techy stuff is excused and should help themselves to refreshments in the foyer now***
 
Don't know if anyone is interested but I'll describe the process....just so that the more knowledgeable can say "you didn't need to do all that, why didn't you just do this...."!    

Sadly, being quite new to the world of video I was a bit stuck for how to capture the video from the Playstation3....not having anything that would record from an HDMI source.
Luckily the old Playstation leads can be used but, without any video capture hardware on the PC, I had to resort to recording it via SCART onto our Philips DVD Recorder.

So, scene-by-scene, I performed the various bits (over-and-over-and-over until I got it right!) and recorded the best take onto a DVD-RW. I then lugged that to the PC and converted the VOB files from the DVD to .wmv format, which appeared to be good enough quality without being massive. I then wiped the DVD-RW and did the next scene. The BIG MISTAKE was not keeping a copy the original VOB files.  :roll:

I converted the VOB files because the best video mangling tool to hand (Serif's MoviePlus5) "gagged" when I tried to feed it VOB files directly for some reason.

Little did I know that VOB files can just be renamed as .mpg files and, with a little patch, MoviePlus will import them (albeit verrrrry slowwwwlly).

So now I'm re-recording every little bit (trying to make the unreadable bits readable) and trying to resist the urge to tweak, re-do, change, etc. etc.  

My only unanswered question is what do people mean when say "can you produce a hi-res version"? How high is "hi" and what format would they prefer?  :?

Looking on the 'tinternet this issue seems a lot more complicated than I thought. There's the issue of PAL and NTSC resolutions being different,  and standard (4:3)  or widescreen (16:9) tellys, not to mention framerates. So the short answer mate I would guess, is that it seems an awful lot of trouble for you to go to, when we can already watch it perfectly well on Youtube. That said, if anyone has any specialist knowledge of these things, and if there becomes  an official outlet for the video, I'd be the first in line to stump up the readies for a DVD copy!

[tomskerous]

My only unanswered question is what do people mean when say "can you produce a hi-res version"? How high is "hi" and what format would they prefer?  :?

Tellies are a little odd as their pixels aren't square but horizontal rectangles. May seem strange, but the technology was invented when the idea of a pixel wouldn't have occurred to anyone. To the TV signal a 4x3 and 16X9 pixel are the same size of data - it's just stretched more. (You can spot the reverse of this when people put widescreen video online and it goes all 'thin' when converted blindly to 4x3.)

So normally a PAL TV picture is 720x576, at 25fps*. A widescreen video file is the same size, but with the 'widescreen' flag set so it gets stretched.

If you're importing an image into an eding package though, you often need to create it with square pixels - so widescreen becomes 1024x576. Remember if viewing it on a TV tube that 10% gets cut off from all sides. The BBC photoshop templates can be useful at this point.

The problem with uncompressed video is that it's HUGE. 50Mb/s. So normally you'll add a light compression codec (the equivalent of changing a TIFF to a JPG) to get each frame's size down a bit without losing too much quality for the version you edit. MPEG will already have done this for you, and also made some time-based compression - spotting similarities between areas of frames.

When shipping it off to other people, you'll often:

• Reduce the quality of the compression further
• Lower the sound quality
• Decrease the frame size by an integer-based ratio
• Sometimes reduce the framerate to 12.5fps.

Tinker with the quicktime export settings and do test encodes on small segments to find something that works.

Ideally you'll end up with something that's about 1Mb/s for 'high quality' over the web. Maybe a little more if your audience is dedicated. If you've got good MPEG compression algorithms, 2.3Mb/s is nearly broadcast tv quality, 8Mb/s is DVD.

Um, sorry, that all rather fell out in one go.


(whistles quietly)


*Actually it's two slightly different pictures embedded in one - the screen scans alternate lines to get the image up to 50fps and just above the point where most people perceive flicker.

[Pedro]

Thanks for that, Tom. You demystified a few things there....and we all know how valuable demystifiers are at this time of year!  

[tomskerous]

Chuck us a PM or use IM if you get stuck again - i've done this lots and lots and lots. Sadly.

[Mirror]

This is bloody brilliant!  Amazing job Pedro, the little details made me crack up, and it gets better with every play

[Mikey]

This is bloody brilliant!  Amazing job Pedro, the little details made me crack up, and it gets better with every play

WORD