Preview New CIC Video Archive, Feedback Needed! (October 9, 2023)

Bandit LOAF

Bandit LOAF

Long Live the Confederation!



FEEDBACK NEEDED! The reason we've been looking at Privateer 2 the past few days is that we're using the Privateer 2 intro cutscenes as the demo for a totally overhauled Holovids section at the CIC!

These new pages will collect all kinds of interesting supporting material with each cutsscene: storyboards, alternate versions, artwork, etc. You can find the first one here. Before we move on to the cinematics for rest of Privateer 2, WC3 through Prophecy and beyond we'd love to know what else you'd like to see in these spaces! What would help organize it, make it usable/less confusing, etc.

And special thanks to AD who has been taking charge of the video section of the project, aka the hard part that requires actual talent. And if you'd like to sign on and help, stop by my office anytime!




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Original update published on October 9, 2023
 
That's a fantastic amount of detail. It's probably not easy to do this given the Wiki page layout, but would there be a way to put the transcript in a separate scrolling box under the video, so we can read it while the video plays? I can barely make out 1 word in 10 in most of the Privateer 2 videos. I find The Darkening 25th Anniversary Restoration much easier to hear, so I think some of my trouble is the audio compression. I'm also convinced that all of Privateer 2 has the audio slightly out of sync with the video, making it hard to lip-read.

Also, is there anything to be said about the locations seen here? Does Crius match its in-game appearance, including having asteroids next door? Are the planets seen shown during the titles identifiable as appearing anywhere else in the game?
 
Is the Credits video going to link to this story about adding the text and blur on every individual frame? Although it flickers into focus for a frame occasionally, as seen below in the third frame below. Most likely someone missed that step, but it could be an intentional artistic choice.

Privateer 2 - Credits - Glitch 1.png

Privateer 2 - Credits - Glitch 2.png

Privateer 2 - Credits - Glitch 3.png

Privateer 2 - Credits - Glitch 4.png
 
Dondragmer said:
Is the Credits video going to link to this story about adding the text and blur on every individual frame? Although it flickers into focus for a frame occasionally, as seen below in the third frame below. Most likely someone missed that step, but it could be an intentional artistic choice.

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The blur kind of goes in waves with the focus going in and out, so clear frames are almost certainly intentional... but yeah, doing all that manually would have been a pain in the butt.
 
Dondragmer said:
That's a fantastic amount of detail. It's probably not easy to do this given the Wiki page layout, but would there be a way to put the transcript in a separate scrolling box under the video, so we can read it while the video plays? I can barely make out 1 word in 10 in most of the Privateer 2 videos. I find The Darkening 25th Anniversary Restoration much easier to hear, so I think some of my trouble is the audio compression. I'm also convinced that all of Privateer 2 has the audio slightly out of sync with the video, making it hard to lip-read.

Also, is there anything to be said about the locations seen here? Does Crius match its in-game appearance, including having asteroids next door? Are the planets seen shown during the titles identifiable as appearing anywhere else in the game?
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I mean subtitles would be ideal. The audio in Privateer 2 is my biggest complaint, some people seem to think it's the British accents; it's not, I'm British and I miss like 1/3 of the words. I don't even think it's the post mix, it's like the original audio capture was terrible.
 
- Great call on the intro story; one of my next tasks is to create a canonical list of Privateer 2 previews and development docs which I can sprinkle into relevant sections. (And of course it's a wiki so if anyone thinks of anything, have at it!)

- I'll look into captions; I don't see a way to do it immediately with the mediawiki video widget but it's also true that I'm pretty dumb. I'll see what KrisV, who set up the tech, suggests!

- Locations are another project which will follow this one! I'm excited to collect all the different views of Privateer 2's weird environment.

But the big exciting news is that there's a page for every Privateer 2 cutscene now! We have another few batches of videos to add that AD is cooking up and I'll update when they're added. But it's starting to look really cool!
 
Dondragmer said:
That's a fantastic amount of detail. It's probably not easy to do this given the Wiki page layout, but would there be a way to put the transcript in a separate scrolling box under the video, so we can read it while the video plays? I can barely make out 1 word in 10 in most of the Privateer 2 videos. I find The Darkening 25th Anniversary Restoration much easier to hear, so I think some of my trouble is the audio compression. I'm also convinced that all of Privateer 2 has the audio slightly out of sync with the video, making it hard to lip-read.

Also, is there anything to be said about the locations seen here? Does Crius match its in-game appearance, including having asteroids next door? Are the planets seen shown during the titles identifiable as appearing anywhere else in the game?
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Here: https://www.wcnews.com/wcpedia/TEMP_Privateer_2_Script - it's not perfect and I've noticed some slight mistakes, but it's a great resource. Even an Englishman such as myself has trouble with some of the dialogue. The shooting script here: https://www.wcnews.com/wcpedia/The_Darkening_Script_Draft_7 may help.

I might have a go at touching up the transcript. I don't have a WCPedia account yet though; I'll sign up shortly.
 
Awesome! The transcription is very old and it predates having access to the script.

That said, that version should be deprecated as everything has moved over to the individual video pages. So for corrections edit those (which we'll use to generate captions for the videos - in progress!). I'll do the same, a lot of it is just a matter of comparing the current transcription with the script that's available on the same page.
 
I've got a variety of exciting updates about this effort!

An index to all of the Privateer 2 video pages is now available! We've added all of our existing video content related to the game, including multiple VHSes and Betacams of higher quality video that cover a lot of the game and give a much better look at the production. Index: https://www.wcnews.com/wcpedia/Holovids_-_Privateer_2:_The_Darkening

In addition to a page for each game cutscene we've also done an audit on all of the available behind-the-scenes video from the game and created a page for each one. We've got two making of featurettes, three set visits that appeared on TV programs, interviews with cast and crew and more all readily accessible! And each one has a transcript. Trailers and other marketing material goes here as well. (I stuck a page in there with the Hilliker movie cut, too!) https://www.wcnews.com/wcpedia/Template:Navbox_Behind_the_Scenes_Videos/Privateer_2

We've also just added dubbed versions of the game videos! So each article now includes the French, German and Spanish translation of each cutscene. And each 'choice' video has Lev's "inner thoughts" as embedded sound clips in all four languages! It's pretty fun. If you know of another Privateer 2 dub please let me know and we'll endeavor to find a copy and convert the videos. Gotta shout out AD again for all the video work, he did a lot of editing and converting to make this and the BTS stuff possible. https://www.wcnews.com/wcpedia/3_S#Translations

We also have the proof-of-concept for captions down, as always thanks to KrisV. If you look at the video for 4_S you'll see you can turn on captions although the timings are a mess: https://www.wcnews.com/wcpedia/4_S Unfortunately captioning videos isn't really in my wheelhouse so it's going to take a bit while I learn how to do the timings. But my plan is to conform the script extracts and the transcripts and then use the transcripts for the captions. If you're familiar with a better process, please speak up!

The subtitles can also be edited by anyone! The videos draw their subtitles from a WEBVTT-formatted page in the wiki. For example, the ones in 4_S come from https://www.wcnews.com/wcpedia/4_S_subtitles_english We do have the option to caption the videos in multiple languages, if anyone is interested in doing that.

Also wanted to share my worksheet for this part of the project which is a good consolidated reference for all this: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mNpV-M6YoG2djzpAjXFFoGfr3MlxzFnSiVz578dfgtg/edit?usp=sharing

Now I'm going to start looking at Prophecy!
 
avengah said:
What does the Extras column mean in the spreadsheet?
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Ah that's for another interest of mine, tracking all the actors in the background. So I marked which scenes had characters beyond the speaking roles so I could go back and watch them carefully in the future :D
 
This seems like a good time to ask: do we want to keep the current Wiki format of having the Category page as the main page for items rather than simply being a container?
I know that I'm mostly (entirely) responsible for this, even if I can't remember exactly why, but I do know that the Semantics plugin addressed basically every reason I had for it.
So does it still make sense to use this format going forward for new pages? Does it even matter at all? At the moment the only issue it causes is in cases like the main Games page, where editing how the Prophecy category title is presented causes it to display awkwardly on the (Sematics-generated) table. Not really a huge issue and there's probably a workaround for it. Maybe a bigger question is what the format should be? The games are all categories, but the novels and other works are pages.
 
So this will probably seem like the stupidest possible thing you've ever heard but: I do not remember how the current format is supposed to work. Imagine I just woke up in Crius hospital and don't quite remember the last ten years or so.

But I'm happy to work in any way that's best--I have big content goals! Maybe we should have a little conference about it?
 
Don't worry, I was responsible in some way for a lot of the current layout and I can barely remember how it works :)

More immediately: I was tagging the new Prophecy Holovids page with categories (because I like to navigate wikis through categories and I believe it should be possible to navigate by any method) and I found out that the Holovids category already exists, as this: https://www.wcnews.com/wcpedia/Category:Holovids

Do we want to keep it like this?
 
Bob McDob said:
Don't worry, I was responsible in some way for a lot of the current layout and I can barely remember how it works :)

More immediately: I was tagging the new Prophecy Holovids page with categories (because I like to navigate wikis through categories and I believe it should be possible to navigate by any method) and I found out that the Holovids category already exists, as this: https://www.wcnews.com/wcpedia/Category:Holovids

Do we want to keep it like this?
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There needs to be a way to distinguish this. IIRC the original intent was to have wcpedia have essentially 2 parts where the majority of the entries were in-universe encyclopedia entries and then there would be a note at the end of the page regarding real-world things like game references and so on. The second part of our original organization were things like the game landing pages with product info and links to relevant pages like demos and downloads etc.

As things have evolved though I thing it's turned out that maybe the way we wanted to do it just isn't how people use wikis?

Regardless, we still do need to have pages that refer to what things are in-universe and the existing page is still relevant. Our video project is named after that, but we can probably find a better way to link to it without specifically having a "holovids" landing page for it. I'd probably just put a note at the top of that category page saying to 'click here for the video archive" or (whatever wording works) for now. It probably shouldn't be the other way around
 
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