What's happening, Barbara?

BrynS

BrynS

Mr Kat says...
Point your XCU-50 Optical DataZig Console here for the latest burst of info:

TNC INFOBURST 2669.251 [Click: Download Now!] 96MB 9m:52s XviD/DivX

It's now on YouTube too, but I'd advise grabbing the download above as most of the titles and references are difficult to make out on the smaller YouTube version.

Well, this started off as just an experiment to tag a couple of the TNC Infoburst segments from WC3 together, yet as things progressed it took a bit of a detour. After trying to flesh out the Infoburst with some file footage, intro titles, stock tickers, etc I thought about temping out some snippets of other 'Holovid' programming that might fit in with the typical television/holovid environment circa 2669 -- assuming it actually exists in such a form -- using a bunch of Wing Commander related stuff.

Anyway, I had a blast doing it; perhaps too much fun, so don't take any of the items or references too seriously! I definitely plan to revisit this idea at some point, but not in the 2669 time frame and have already secured one 30-second spot for the next video, luckily not from the Galactic Frungy League!

Cheers,

Bryn

P.S. A word of warning to a sneaky cat whose name begins with T: you know what they say about curiosity! :p
 

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Impressive! Very well done. It's hard to read what's scrolling on the bottom but I liked it a lot. Great Job!:D
 
Awesome ! Well done ! Funny ! :)

Hopefully we'll more of this kind of projects in the future, the WC community is really prolific these days !
 
Fantastic work.

This is really great stuff. I only wish we had more Barbara for you to mess around with. :D
 
Very well done. I like it a lot.
Maybe I would have taken out some of the little notes that are beside Barbaras head sometimes cuase I found them more disturbing then helping.
Anything else. Top quality.
 
The acoustic guitar rendition was by Scrap.

Very well put together, I like how graphic overlays make the news report section look more like the news we see in real life. The share market names were quite amusing too. And those Wingleader games! Too bad Blair had to go to the briefing room... interrupted his viewing of the morning cartoons. :)
 
Overall, I thought the video was great.

However, I did have two issues with the scrolling text:

1) it was quite faint on all of the backgrounds, making it difficult to see, and
2) it scrolled so fast you really didn't get more than a quick glance at the text, which along with the first issue made it difficult to read.
 
Yeah, sorry about the scrolling issues; I agree on all counts!

It was one of those cases where I could and should have adjusted those titles to make them readable in real-time playback, but couldn't help myself once I'd started inserting familiar names and references (it's surprising just how many corporations have been named within the WC universe -- thank you, Privateer!), as I would have needed to cut out a large amount of the scrolling content to achieve a readable scroll speed and/or make other adjustments, which were either difficult to do or had a negative impact on the effect.

The stock quotes, for example, would probably have been fine if 30-40% slower, at the expense of another 6-8 quotes. IIRC, I had already removed about 8-10 quotes before the final cut. As they are, I think it's possible to make out most of them without pausing if viewing the video fullscreen. Colour-wise, the stock ticker's semi-transparent blue background probably wasn't ideal either, but was chosen to match the large "TNC" lettering on the assumption that it was the corporate colour. I did try switching the text (white) and background (light blue) colour around, but found that more jarring on the eye without adjusting the contrast. Other combo's may have worked better, but I decided to stick with the blue/white and red/white to maintain consistent branding. The next font size up for all of the non-UPC fonts was unfortunately too large a gap for the scrolling tickers.

The red ticker is definitely too fast. Limitations with the way Movie Maker handles titles prevented extending this ticker over the whole Mailbag segment, which would have slowed the speed a bit. Only reducing the two opposing responses down to a short 'one-liner' would have likely made it viewable in realtime and again I got a bit overzealous and was loathe to cut them down.

All of the titles, in particular, were further degraded by an additional (typically unnecessary) two encoding steps that were required with Movie Maker. When compiling, I capture/convert/crop/filter all the source files to a lossless format and try to maintain it through to the final encode. When the destination format is not a Windows Media variant, Movie Maker's HQ output format is DV, but because the "complexity" (number of clips, effects, transitions, fades, etc) of this edit was above the threshold, Movie Maker was stalling during the DV encode. This required publishing to a HQ WMV file first, then publishing this single WMV file to DV, so that I could crop, de-interlace and encode to XviD in Virtualdub. The number of resizes and encodings along the way ultimately led to some distortion and clarity loss, but when editing the titles did appear much sharper.


Shaggy said:
That Duke Nukem reference was freakin hilarious!!!
Click to expand...
Heh, if Duke says he's coming next spring/summer/fall/century/etc, it's gotta be true, right!


Wedge009 said:
The acoustic guitar rendition was by Scrap.
Click to expand...
I don't know how I missed that... for some reason I thought 'scrap' was a kind of acoustic rendition like 'scratch' and glanced straight over the ID3 tags to Govett & The Fatman. Thanks for pointing that out.

Wedge009 said:
And those Wingleader games!
Click to expand...
The break-out hit from 2590! :D
 
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well done!, quality work
That was really good, full of in jokes, I enjoyed it,

I liked "Privateer: the series" if only we could get someone to make it to run at half past nine on wednesday nights
I wonder what Mr Kat would be about?

Death sentance on 12 systems hmmm? :p

Hope I am not still waiting for Duke Nukem forever in 2669
it'll probably be switching to the Unreal 8001 engine by then
 
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