Added July 28, 2018:
My YouTube channel is here. I don’t think I linked it at all in the opening post originally, but it should probably be the first thing in this thread.
Original post:
I haven't been around in... ten years, it looks like. I don't really have an explanation for this, other than that my interest in video games often waxes and wanes; most recently, I went through about a four-year period where I don't think I played a game at all. I can't recall what finally spurred me to click on the Aleph One logo for the first time in years, but I've been playing fairly consistently for about a month.
Which brings me to my purpose in making this thread. The Marathon Vidmaster's Challenge website is a wonderful resource for those of us who want to learn how to suck less. There are a ton of strategies for the levels in these videos that I definitely would never have thought up on my own. But watching these videos is... well, not always convenient. Generally, you have to go through a number of steps just to get the videos to play - and for that matter, you have to have access to a computer just to watch them.
This channel seems to have been started with the intention of putting the films on YouTube, but it didn't get anywhere close to uploading all of them, and apparently hasn't been updated in two years - and for that matter, the video quality isn't always great in the videos that are there. The oldest ones - I watched Greg K.'s play-through of "IIHARL" - are probably 240p, or maybe 360p. Some of the others are much higher resolution, but don't look like they're using all of the Aleph One add-ons.
So I've gotten it into my head that I want to digitise the entire Vidmaster's Challenge site (or at least as much of it as possible) and put it up on YouTube - and because I don't tend to want to do things half-assed, I want to add at least the Tempus Irae vid films as well (except the "Repository" ones because who cares. And if there are similar sites for Eternal, Rubicon, Phoenix, etc., I'll probably want to add the films from those, too). But before I go through all the trouble of putting them all up, I want to be certain I'm not using display settings that piss people off. It'd be better if I only had to do each of these once, since I have to watch each film at 1x speed in order to encode it into .mov format.
I did a proof of concept video with Dr John Sumner's play-through of "Ain't My Bitch" from Tempus. I made it on a MacBook Pro; QuickTime tells me it recorded in 2560x1600 resolution. I used the hi-res textures that came with the AO version of Tempus, and I added the "Shots Fired" add-on as well. (I can't recall whether I also added the hi-res landscapes, and it doesn't entirely matter; I'm going to redo this one video for reasons I'll describe shortly.) It also has liquid transparency and all the other goodies that have been added to the game. The idea is: it's 2018; even if these films were recorded some two decades ago, I might as well use the appearance the game has now.
But before I go through and do all these films, I want to know, first, if this is going to piss people off; and secondly, if I should go further. IIRC, there are hi-res monster sprites for all the Infinity monsters as well. Should I add those? I'm not sure if I like them, but I might get used to them if I see them more. Infinity has a new HUD that doesn't cover the bottom third of the screen, and this isn't currently added to Tempus by default. Should I add that? Should I go further with add-ons? What should I add?
I'm going to redo Dr Sumner's "AMB" play-through in any case, because I mostly made it as a proof-of-concept to ensure it was possible, and the game playback lagged in a few places. Next time I record one of these, I'll make sure I quit everything else on my MacBook but Marathon and QuickTime; I think it'll work fine if I do that. I'll probably start doing these in earnest in a week or two at the latest after seeing what people say.
Of course, some of the films from both the Vidmaster and Nardo sites appear to be missing, so I won't be able to digitise the complete collection. I also haven't been able to get some of them to work correctly. I haven't tried anywhere near all of them, but the "Poor Yorick" vid tip says I'm missing the map it was recorded on, and the "Aye Mak Sicur" tip just quits without playing anything. I'm not sure if this is a problem on my end; StuffIt/BinHex archives may just be finicky. I also haven't tested M1 films at all yet. The FAQ thread, if I'm understanding the later posts correctly, appears to indicate something about M1's source having been released and AO having been updated accordingly, but can AO play M1 films yet? If not, I'll presumably have to figure out PPC emulation on an Intel Mac, but this is a task I'll worry about later.
Apart from what visual settings to use, I guess my other question is which films people would want encoded first. My instinct leads me to want to encode entire sets of complete playthroughs of a given game in one batch. So I'd try to do all of Jim Mitchell's films of one game (or the entire trilogy) at once, then go onto another player's films. However, it's also possible people might want to see this done level-by-level (I can imagine a lot of people might want the "Acme Station" films to get priority, for instance), and a third possibility is that people might want some combination of the above - or something else entirely.
My proof-of-concept video will be at https://youtu.be/QjamUvqG8vE. YT says it has 2 minutes of processing left.
Anyway, feedback will be much appreciated; I'll probably start this project in earnest soon. It'll certainly take awhile, probably several months; I'd like to have it done by the end of the year, but I can't promise this. I'll have to encode each video at roughly real time, so beyond the time involved, it'll probably take some patience to complete. I'll probably also have much more on my plate starting around August.
ETA: Looks like I'll have to redo this either way, because it doesn't have sound. I'm not sure what the issue with that is; I'll troubleshoot it tomorrow. It also currently only displays in 360p, though I think that's because it's a recent upload. If it doesn't at least have 1080p by tomorrow, I'll look into that too.