*Updated* Making of Biohazard 2 TV Commercial

[Dot50Cal]

Fresh off the Capcom Friendly Club Volume 6 VHS comes the making of documentary for the television commercial for Biohazard 2. Weighing in at eleven and a half minutes, It stars George Romero in the directing position, Brad Renfro as Leon, Adrienne Frantz as Claire, and famous special fx artist Screaming Mad George. The commercials will be released later today as stand-alone downloads. This is the first test of my new capturing equipment so I'm very interested to hear your feedback on it!

This video is an updated one that was released earlier today but pulled soon after. I had messed up on some settings which made the file massive, so here is the new version which has a considerable upgrade in image quality over the previous one at half the file size. Some of the highlights of this include nearly no black bars on the sides of the video thanks to painstaking patience in editing and probably the best quality you can find off a VHS rip.

I'd also love to hear feedback as to what kind of streaming you would like here, Quicktime or a flash based player similar to youtube? The main benefit from Quicktime would be the ability to skip to anywhere and have playback pick up at that point, where flash would require you to load the file up to that point to do that. Let me know! As usual you'll need an x264 decoder, which can be found here. Simply check H264 decoding when installing, and windows media player should take care of the rest.

Jpg Preview
High Quality x264 (640x480, 202MB)

[Krispy]

VHS upscale! Oh wait...

[Carnivol]

Source is analog, which makes upscaling/pre-processing with the right hardware before encoding look much better than what it would if you scaled a digital of it from the native source size.

It's all to make sure that quality is as good as possible.

Though, I think the 400mb size is a little overkill for something that's 11min.
Archival purposes, sure, but for most users with not a high-end machine, it's not gonna be playable.

So I guess we'll soon have some more low-end user friendly encodes up soon (For those of you not happy with the streaming choice)


Here's one of those hover over to display another picture thingies!



Now, this video looks a bit noisy. Maybe your copy of the CFC tape hasn't passed the test of time as well as my copy?
Or maybe you forgot to adjust the tracking before you played it back?
(remember, you've still got lovely manual tracking control on your new hawt equipment)
And oh, ignore the cropping on mine, I used the same crop settings for the entire tape when I encoded it before the summer started.

[Dot50Cal]

Yeah, I messed up it seems. A new one is now available which is pretty comparable to yours Carn. If you had previously downloaded it, please do so again. The quality increase is quite noticeable.

[Carnivol]

Nice, will give it a look as soon as I get back from work.

Currently at the airport on the worst network in human history.

[Krispy]

I would vote quicktime since it supports h264 which would allow for very easy compression. I can help you squeeze all the detail out on the streams, but I would also suggest offering a wmv stream since approximately 90% of the users will be using windows anyways. I can show you some good guides on encoding wmv files, many of the good people whom I encode movies with encode wmv since the Xbox 360 can display 1080p that way.

[Dot50Cal]

WMV would be pointless, were on a linux server so any *real* streaming would be out for that. Might as well just use flash player instead since it works on both MAC and PC easily.

Quicktime also takes horribly long to compress into h264 for streaming. + I really dislike its lack of full screen option when playing embedded streams

[Carnivol]

Another problem with quicktime is also compatibility in general, you need to have quicktime installed and it needs to be up to date, and suddenly you switch browse and the plug-in misbehaves and all that.

Flash is pretty much standard for everyone and is just a three click installation for anyone who doesn't already have the required plug-in.
(Sure, it doesn't have the benefits of skipping and such, but if that really mattered that much to the end user, you'd be downloading the file anyway)

[Krispy]

I guess you didn't need me to help you decide then . Well I have seen gametrailers do some pretty high quality stuff with HD flash movies so if you can copy their success than more power to you.