END OF AN ERA, FRACTALFORUMS.COM IS CONTINUED ON FRACTALFORUMS.ORG

My DVD contains two hours of highly anti-aliased fractal animations.  Some of the pieces are ten minutes long - and are not just quick zooms.  See for yourself - there are some video clips and still images on the website (as well as a lot more information regarding this).

www.biocursion.com

I have - but have not executed any ideas yet.  biocursion was very incomplete when my son was born, and all spare time up until now was spent creating, rendering, managing and mastering the DVD.  Outside of posting video clips on video.google.com, video.yahoo.com, youtube.com, etc - the only other "advertising" has been asking Jock and Lloyd to put links to biocursion on their sites. (which is working out better than expected - biocursion.com's monthy traffic averaged ~350 MB prior to the beforementioned.  Now I see 4 - 5 GB a month)

In the next couple of weeks, the price will be dropped quite a bit, update the site, etc.  In other words - I'm getting ready to try to sell this.

To finally get answer your question : yes, I would be interested in what you are proposing.  Send me a private message and include your physical address - I'll give you a copy for evaluation.  We can talk more about it.  The big questions are:

when are you hoping to comminicate the competition?
would it be helpful to offer alternative formats?

The second question is being asked because the PAL version is a bomb.  And, I don't mean "the PAL version is th' BOMB!" - it's not a product I can sell.  The frame rate change works out for film and "live" footage - but not fractal animation.  The NTSC is region free, if that helps at all...  One option I was considering is a DivX Pro (sorry, Lloyd. ..) or Nero encoded disk.

If you can only view a PAL DVD - I can mail it to you, with caveats.

regards,

Eric 

the issue with PAL:

I considered my two options:

1) what you were suggesting - just change the frame rate to 25 fps.  There are two CGI segments which are pretty slow in the first place - slowing them down further is almost too much.  All said, this is acceptable.  But, that is only the video.  A lot of the music was scored to the animation, some timings in the music were synched to the animation and reverse (a couple animations were syched to the music).  This is where the problem is at - at why I didn't go this route.

2) convert the frame rate to 25 fps.  This means every x frame is deleted - the run time for the NTSC and PAL are excactly the same.  For faster, more complex fractals - the missing frames are not noticable.  The slower moving animations suffer the most.  I have shown the PAL version to non-video people - and until the jumpiness was pointed out to them, nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

So - I chose option two, as it seemed the less of two evils.  I'm sure with far more expensive software (or software I am not aware of) there are ways to interpolate the frame rate change.  Removing a frame by crossfading two, tricks with field rendering (for interlaced outputs only), etc.


To obtain the highest possible quality I have the entire two hours saved as an uncompressed AVI.  The whole thing is just under 200 GB (the audio is about 2 GB).  Any modifications require a ton of time - if I go ahead with option two, I'll need about three weeks.  The issue with the audio would have to be dealt with by ignoring matches, and applying a different track of music to the ending sequence (the timing of the music is important there).

If anybody has any suggestions - or is more familiar with Premiere than I - please post.


Eric "Negative Nancy" Williams

I chose the frame dropping method over the resampling because the method you described produces a similar jittering effect by manipulating the fields.  In some cases - it looked worse than the motion jumping.  That may be me.  Producing a PAL version was not on my priority list; after a few tests I stuck with the frame dropping. 

Since then, I have replaced the old PC with a newer one - the new system has a SAS RAID 0+1 (15k) for the non-boot partition.  This works better, but not hugely - for an ideal hardware configuration three arrays would be needed.  Two for video signal outputs and one for an input - A/B to C editing.  SAS drives are too expensive still for me to throw in two more drives (the A/B can go on drives 1 and 2 - the redundancy isn't needed because everything is backed up to tape).

Over 25% of my sales have been to NW Europe.  So, I will be working on a better PAL version.  Now I have the bandwith for some serious testing.  Although, they have all opted for the NTSC version - they all have PCs or laptops connected to HD sets.

Thanks for the codec recommendation.  It cuts uncompressed AVIs by 2/3rds on average.  I looked around a few years ago for something like this - but by google search skills obviuously need some tuning. 

cheers,

Eric