I don't know about a 100MiB version. Even if you mean 100MiB per section, have you ever seen what compressing 45 minutes of video to 100 MiB looks like? Especially when the source is, at best, already compressed by one generation (many of the Instrumentality sections are, at best, second generation going into the compilation - once for the DVD, once for transmission over the internet, possibly more between pulling the video from the DVD and submission through the FTP). The first test renders were about 300 MiB per section, and I still think that was pushing it quality-wise.downwithpants wrote:are we still going to have a low quality (~100MB) version? i'm afraid that the high quality versions will scare away 56k people or people with extremely small hard drives.
I think it might be a better idea to encourage people on tight connections to have a friend with broadband download the film, and then burn it to a pair of CDs. It may seem like making people go out of their way in this age of the internet - but it's really a step up from the old mail-exchange systems for fansubs and amateur concert tapes ("bootlegs" - but many of them are actually legal, depending on the venue and band), or the pre-Napster version of "file sharing" where friends would physically record and exchange tapes of each others' CDs. I'd even be willing to mail out CDs to people who send me $3 (I think that's about what burning and mailing two CDs would cost - I'd have to check the current price of CD spindles and USPS shipping to make sure) and a return address (this would be more efficient than mailing the CDs and/or special shipping materials twice - and I wouldn't have to worry about errors caused by burning onto substandard media). I can also look into the practicality of producing (or having a print shop produce) nice disk and trey labels - but this would increase the cost of distribution and might produce a supply bottleneck, depending on demand.
I don't want, after all of the work all of you have done to make all of this look really nice, to start spreading around a version that reduces all of your fine videos to collections of blocks and ripples. If someone else does, I can't stop them, but I'm not going to do it myself.
It doesn't need to be. There really doesn't need to be an intro at all - I've seen a few films that went without one, and it's not really anything that will add to the content of the project. On the other hand, any value this project provides beyond conveniently packaging a set of videos, most of which are already individually available, is going to come from the "wrapper" stuff inserted around the actual AMV footage - the intro, the narratives, the intermission, and the credits. It's possible that I'm over-emphasising this, and that that might be part of the reason I can't come up with an intro idea I'm satisfied with, but I really want to have something to prep the audience, to get their attention, before "Tomoe" starts. You also have to keep in mind the fact that the narratives have all been written to precede the segment to which they apply, so a missing or overly short/simple intro would more or less drop the audience directly onto a scene that is, in essence, a slide show. While the "slide show" format is perfectly good for the narratives, which double as something of an break between the musical segments, giving the audience a chance to cleanse their audiovisual pallates, it would make for a sort of flat note to start or end on.downwithpants wrote:as for an intro, it doesn't need to be too fancy or too long. maybe just show the project title and a list of the creators.
Then again, it might be possible to "just show the title and a list of the creators" in such a manner as to make this, in itself, visually interesting enough to be a good intro. I'll look into that - possilbly tieing the visual theme of the intro into the one I've chosen for the credits, bringing the style of the project full circle. Using the text would be a great way to give it some structure and allow it to be something simple - but I think it really should be animated and "dressed up" at least a little bit in the process.
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