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What will Volume 2 bring?
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dmw
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Joined: 30 Jan 2002
Posts: 211
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PostPosted: Tue Nov 26, 2002 8:38 am    Post subject: What will Volume 2 bring? Reply with quote

Honestly we have not decided. What we have decided is we are going to let everyone else who is interested in this product decide what Volume 2 will contain. For example: more PC demos/intros, wild demos, Commodore (Amiga/C-64), or multi-platform.

If this DVD sells well there will be a second volume. This DVD cost us in the neighborhood of $15k. Cost is about equally split between production and equipment/SW.
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Monk
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PostPosted: Tue Nov 26, 2002 10:56 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Do you anticipate a second DVD costing less or taking less time to create? I can only imagine how much painful fun there was in the initial discovery of capturing techniques, learning about DVD mastering, and finding out what type of equipment must be bought or rented.

So you need to sell 1000 copies to recoup cost, basically? That doesn't seem to be an unreachable goal. Smile
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Trixter
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PostPosted: Sun Dec 01, 2002 3:11 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I definitely anticipate much less time for the second volume, as I've worked out all of the details/expectations in authoring a DVD. Encoding quality was one of the hardest and longest, because you have to encode the same 10-20 second clip using about 10 variations of quantization matrixes and other encoding parameters to determine what works and what doesn't. (This was reduced greatly by reading Video Compression Demystified by Peter Symes, for those who are curious...)

Another PC volume will have a total development time of maybe three months in terms of capture, edit, and authoring. An Amiga volume will take maybe 6-9 months as I will have to determine whether or not WinUAE rendering is sufficient, or a real Amiga is necessary. I have done some WinUAE tests and the results are simply perfect video quality, but there is always the question of "How good is the emulator?" Meaning, how exact are the graphics we are seeing? That will have to be the subject of a user poll and probably 10 sample clips to download. If rendering isn't an option, I'm going to have to ask for some hardware donations (mainly, a PAL A500 and an A1200 /040) as I can't get PAL Amigas easily here in the US.

Food for thought. If the project is successful enough, I would always love to put out more and more volumes, like Intros only, or 100% oldskool, etc. If we were to come out with an Amiga volume, it would probably be World of Commodore with Amiga on one side and C64 on the other.
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PostPosted: Sun Dec 01, 2002 7:33 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Trixter wrote:

If we were to come out with an Amiga volume, it would probably be World of Commodore with Amiga on one side and C64 on the other.


This would be a shame. Filling only one side (which is about 20 demos) with Amiga... I mean, this was the machine that basically started it all. Only 20 demos in a history spanning about 14 years. Honestly, i wouldn't buy it...

As for Winuae, i wouldn't do it. I've taken about 3000 screens from about 300 Amiga demos for my website using Winuae and i don't think i have ever seen one production running like it should, like on a real Amiga.
My opinion is: either you capture it just the way the democrew intented it or you don't capture it at all.

As for hardware donation, i would be interested in donating (if it was a complete dvd on Amiga demos)

All the best
z5/A.D.A.
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maz
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PostPosted: Sun Dec 01, 2002 8:51 am    Post subject: DVD-9 Reply with quote

I'd vote for a one-side DVD-9 and a 1:2 share between C64:Amiga, if the DVD authoring soft allows DVD-9 (Jim, maybe an update does?).
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dmw
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PostPosted: Sun Dec 01, 2002 3:00 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Monk wrote:
So you need to sell 1000 copies to recoup cost, basically? That doesn't seem to be an unreachable goal. Smile


Actually, it is a bit more complicated than that. Distributors get a different price than everyone else. Thus far 600 have been pre-sold to distributors. We have to provide DVD's to people who helped and the press so we allocated 200 DVD's for that. We've sold about 150 at the moment. I quickly estimated we need to sell about 100 more to recoup my cost for production, and mailing all those free DVD's. This is very rough mind you. Keep in mind it cost $5 to mail a DVD to Europe--where all but three of the demos came from I think it is. So, really 1050 DVD's are gone and the only thing paid for are basically Fusecon's costs.

Bottom line. If we can sell 500 more--on top of the 1050 mentioned above--we should be able to pay for Jim's expenses. Of course I'm estimating Jim's expenses around $6500-$7500. Thus, each DVD cost us between $7-$8 to make when we factor in ALL our expenses (not time).

With all that said...we still don't know how well received the DVD will be once people get it in their hands. We, of course, want to hear both the good and the bad.

-dan
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phoenix
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PostPosted: Sun Dec 01, 2002 6:50 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

It's too damned early to be talking about volume 2. Smile How about we wait a month or two, and enjoy volume 1 in the meantime?
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Trixter
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PostPosted: Sun Dec 01, 2002 9:18 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

BTW, I completely disagree about "Amiga is where it all started". The C64 is really where the scene started, the Atari ST is where it grew, the Amiga is where it matured, and the PC is where it evolved. You can disagree with all of the above except the first statement -- there was a thriving C64 scene before Amiga. Hell, many groundbreaking Amiga demos were former C64 crews.

Also, as for taking screenshots and "none of them look the way they should", I have an actual A1200 and WinUAE looks pretty damn good to me -- maybe you were capturing shots not in Amiga's native resolution or something?

The reason emus are so appealing is because they produce details that analog grabbing simply cannot capture from composite output. Composite is a horrible signal that combines both luma and chroma and spits them down the same wire -- once they combine, you can never truly separate them again. Any Amiga demo that has 640x400 screens, like 9 fingers for example, look like crap out an Amiga composite signal but look fantastic rendered in an emulator.

So far there is no device that hooks up to an Amiga RGB and converts it to high-quality S-video output... I had someone build me something that works like that, but it only handles NTSC output.

A future user poll will decide, and believe me, I'll include sample videos so people can see what we're up against.
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Trixter
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PostPosted: Sun Dec 01, 2002 9:26 pm    Post subject: Re: DVD-9 Reply with quote

maz wrote:
I'd vote for a one-side DVD-9 and a 1:2 share between C64:Amiga, if the DVD authoring soft allows DVD-9 (Jim, maybe an update does?).


New software will allow that, but if it's going to be split 50:50, you should still do a double-sided DVD (DVD-10). That is because a DVD-10 (double-sided single-layer) holds about a gigabyte more than a DVD-9 (single-sided dual-layer). Of course, it's annoying to have to flip the disc, but hey, I could use the space Smile
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PostPosted: Mon Dec 02, 2002 3:46 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Trixter wrote:
Also, as for taking screenshots and "none of them look the way they should", I have an actual A1200 and WinUAE looks pretty damn good to me -- maybe you were capturing shots not in Amiga's native resolution or something?


I will rephrase because my sentence was not good. There probably is no demo that runs 100% the same on winuae as it should on a real Amiga (like effects not working, effects shown differently,...).

z5
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PostPosted: Mon Dec 02, 2002 2:39 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I know what you meant. Smile I have watched Desert Dream, SOTA, 9 Fingers, Jesus on E's, and more on real A1200 and also WinUAE, and with few exceptions I found the emulation to be perfect. Please email me some screenshots you think are wrong from Desert Dream (I have watched it over 50 times, don't ask) because I would like to know what you think is wrong with WinUAE's emulation of it.
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Trixter
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PostPosted: Mon Dec 02, 2002 2:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I know what you meant. I have watched Desert Dream, SOTA, 9 Fingers, Jesus on E's, and more on real A1200 and also WinUAE, and with few exceptions I found the emulation to be perfect. Please email me some screenshots you think are wrong from Desert Dream (I have watched it over 50 times, don't ask) because I would like to know what you think is wrong with WinUAE's emulation of it.
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mahen
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PostPosted: Tue Dec 03, 2002 8:16 am    Post subject: Amiga & WinUAE Reply with quote

Hello everyone Smile

Personnally, I would *LOVE* to see a
100% Amiga DVD. On the other end, it
would imply to make later a 100% C64 DVD,
which would be interesting, but less view-able
by normal people... Anyway...

There is also the ST scene which is very interesting...
So it's not easy to decide. There MUST be
some Amiga in the vol 2. But what % , I don't know...

As for WinUAE, in desert dreams, I saw weird things
(such as the position of the alien craft in
the intro sequence which was incorrect...
But maybe it's fixed with new UAE version, I don't
no, I have no more PC, but a Pegasos with MorphOS
(complete rewrite of AmigaOS). And maybe AmigaOS4 too Wink

I would rather suggest :

vol 2: 100% amiga
vol 3 (!): C64 + ST

Anyway I'm SURE all of them will sell well Smile I will
talk about them on amiga news sites...
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KithKanan
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PostPosted: Tue Dec 03, 2002 9:23 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Its true, there ARE a lot of Amiga demos out there, and there's almost such a disparity between them that you could do what you did for the PC demos volume: Side 1: AGA + Accel demos, Side 2: OCS/ECS demos. Capture really would be difficult though, unless you made something to convert Amiga analog RGB into PAL s-video or component. I'm sure there are enough technical wizards in the demoscene, can someone figure out how to do this?

-Mike
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Trixter
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PostPosted: Wed Dec 04, 2002 12:27 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I know of someone who could probably help me with a device. But here's another problem: Amiga demos are all PAL... but only Euro users can play PAL. So to be compatible with the rest of the world, I should make an NTSC disc... but that will degrade the quality of the capture somewhat.

It's not an easy problem to solve, and the only proper solution is a PAL disc for euro users and an NTSC disc for everyone else. Which I'm not looking forward to. Which means that maybe the next volume will be PC as well Wink
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