WC Saga Unveils New Website And Trailer (October 6, 2005)

I sent you an email, but let me say again, very impressive work on the trailer! Very nice, I like it a lot. Can't understand much of what was said (didn't get any of what was said at the end in the studio) but very cool trailer. Great job!

Wow, very impressive Lars!

You've brought a bunch of different elements (live action, green screen compositing, modelling, lighting, animation, editing and sound) together into what is the most complete and professional Wing Commander animation yet outside of Origin.

I particularly liked the strong contrasts and colour pallete, as well as the little touches, such as capship shields reacting to energy weapons, energy fields and superstructure lighting. The whole sequence comprises a varied mix of shots and together with the sound effects and accompanying music presents a compelling animation.

If you have the time, I would be most interested to hear a bit more about the making of the trailer, such as how long did take, did you storyboard the trailer first, which programmes did you use for the rendering (Lightwave?) and compositing (After Effects?), what was it like integrating all the different elements, what was the most difficult part of the project, which effects did you use in the rendering (motion blur, depth of field?), what would you do differently if you could do it again, etc?

Is that the Tiger's Claw (Bengal) in the mess room as seen at about 0m:25s and 0m:40s in the trailer?

Thanks again for a great piece of work!

Cheers,


BrynS

Thanks for the detailed response!

It sounds like a highly involved and at times painstaking process, yet one that was ultimately very rewarding.

Yeah, your mom did a neat job on the costumes and they seem more appropriate (or at least more in keeping with current navy clothing) for (bridge) officers than the all-in-one, off-duty piece/flighsuit-variant seen in WC3/4. Did she make the Confed badge as well?

Regarding the DivX (70MB) version of the trailer, it appears that the audio is uncompressed PCM, so you could shave about 13MB or so off the filesize by going with say LAME MP3 at 192kbps, which is fairly transparent quality-wise. The video bitrate is also much higher than the resolution requires, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but again the filesize could be quite a bit smaller with no noticeable loss in quality at the native resolution, which would reduce your bandwidth/hosting demands for the file. I've transcoded a couple of versions from the MPEG2 version and can put them up on my FileFront hosting if you want to use them, although it sometimes takes a few days for the files to be validated by FileFront before being able to download them.

I've encoded versions at the native resolution with an area-based de-interlace filter at 2,000kbps 2-pass XviD/192kbps LAME CBR (size - 24.4MB) which is essentially transparent to the original MPEG2 version, as well as a 1,000kbps XviD/192kbps LAME which is 90%+ similar in quality at about 13MB. I could also encode a half resolution version at say 500kbps/96kbps or 128kbps, which would be in the 5-7MB range or alternatively encode version to a specific size, eg. 15MB.

No worries if you don't feel it's necessary. Just a hearty thank you again for making and sharing this with the community!

Hopefully more of these projects will be possible in the near future, as technology improves and capabilities and processes (and prices) previously only available to film studios and professionals filter down to the consumer. Who knows, with the flightsuits now available and the number of very talented artists and modellers in the community, perhaps a short fan film could be possible in the next few years!

Cheers,


BrynS

Very good.

This was perhaps the highlight of my day. I never expected to find a trailer of such quality waiting for me this morning when I woke up and checked my regular sites. Saga, from the offset, has always given my friends and I inspiration to contribute things back to the WC Community. WCSaga, for me, keeps life in the genre. It seems Saga is not afraid to break away from Blair and the old school stories to tell a darker, more realistic, and more active universe full of war that the games were never able to accomplish. It is all romantic in a way, like Forstchen's prose being transliterated to the screen-- needless to say I am very pleased. Work like this shows the hard work and dedication being put not only into WCSaga, but the entire community.

It makes me want to announce something my friends and I have been planning to unveil for some time yet, something influenced, if not inspired, by the hard work and screen renders from the saga team that has reinvigorated the genre in myself and others. Sadly, my friends and I have all agreed that our unveiling is best given when the project itself is finished, and the playtesting completed. It is our sincere hope that those who's interests match our own will use our gift to the community to create an infinite ammount of Wing Commander Stories and experiences that the entire Community can share. We are excited, but due to the busy semester, official announcement won't come until early January =)

Either way, I am humbled by the CGI, and by the dedication that yourself, and the entire Saga team has put into their work.

I for one, could understand all the English in the trailer. The last bit after the credits was in German, I think, and thus I couldn't understand it. A few iffy spots on grammar, but a solid trailer none the less.

Thanks for sharing,

Flex

that was awesome!

though mr. gloe looked a bit like a lector or teacher drafted for the project

Shuddup!

Ed
(anti-compression audio guy)

Hey Ed, are you the same Ed that worked on the audio for this trailer? If so, great job!

I'm with you on the compression issue, particularly with audio on a low threshold -- I currently re-ripping my audio cd's to FLAC for my pc and VBR LAME for portable. I'm sure that when you are mastering audio you maintain it in an uncompressed or lossless format?

For a short trailer like this, uncompressed PCM is tolerable, but not very efficient and bloats the filesize. A good lossless codec would get you in the region of 4:1 compression which cuts down on the size substantially, while a good lossy codec, such as LAME MP3 or Ogg Vorbis at a decent bitrate offers near transparent quality at efficient bitrates suited for an internet distribution of media, such as the trailer.

Did you compress the DivX version from an uncompressed source because the audio in the DivX version is 44Hz Stereo PCM Uncompressed, whereas the MPEG2 version of the trailer uses 224kbps MPEG Layer 2 48Hz Stereo audio, which is already lossy and cannot derive a lossless transoding even into uncompressed PCM, because the source has had perceptual harmonic data removed (i.e. is lossy)?

@Lars: I'll upload the encodings tonight and pass along the links when they go live.

Cheers,


BrynS

Okay this is killing me, I'm literally developing clinical depression with my inability to remember where the music in this (well done) trailer is from.

Did I hear this in another game trailer... maybe it was Haegemonia... aghgrhgreklgrmmmgg I can't remember at all.

Please aid my suffering.

Check the credits

Thanks! I only had a couple of days to do it in, and if I had the time I would have done the music too but competing with what was used would have been kind of depressing

Basically I have an option in my sequencer to "replace audio in video", so I simply select the video file and then the audio file and its done.

Lars first posted an DivX version with low quality audio, and I was like " " so he made another version but it still wasnt perfect enough for me () and it was in a format that several people dont seem to be able to play for some reason. So I just got the DivX version with the bad audio quality and replaced it with uncompressed audio. Now since it was only an extra 4 mb over the mpeg version I didnt think it mattered much.

You are right though, it should be compressed. I just hadnt much time to figure out a decent way to do it quickly. It would be cool if youve done it!

Ed

(PS: whats interesting is I was working on the sound to a compressed video format, and the bluescreen issue with the live actors wasnt really that noticable. )

Nice, very very nice! Saga 4 teh win!

Brian Tyler's music from Children of Dune pops up in a LOT of trailers. I've heard it in a trailer for Cinderella Man, and the Academy Awards snippet for Master and Commander's nomination (don't remember for which award).

Good choice!

Now, that trailer is cool.

I don't quite understand what you're saying here. Are you saying that when you were cleaning up the voices from the DV master that you didn't really notice the echo in the green screen studio?

@Lars, okay I've uploaded the two versions:

WC Saga Trailer 360x288 XviD - 6.94MB

WC Saga Trailer 720x576 XviD - 24.4MB

Feel free to change the file names and/or link directly to the FileFront addresses if you want -- I don't think there are any bandwidth limits on the hosting.

Cheers,


BrynS

VERY impressive work there. Cannot wait to see the ingame footage.
One complaint tho - the greenscreen stuff looks aweful. Or more precisely - whatever software you use for overlaying the green parts it doesn't do so very well. The outlines look extremely jagged and also look blocky - as if they were compressed too high. This greatly detracts from an otherwise very professional trailer for me.

Regarding the MPEG2 stream. Windows Media Player does play it fine IF and ONLY IF you have some sort of DVD Software player (like PowerDVD) installed.