Any plans on doing a story book atlas video (perhaps Deja Vu) in the near future? I personally think it would look cool.
I'd love to do Deja Vu actually... I'm just unsure of how to logically arrange the different locations. Do you know of a map which shows the different paths between screens?
It's quite a coincidence that I saw this thread for the first time today since I uploaded a lossless 1920×1080 H264 video to YouTube today and was appalled by how it handled it. The double-resolution method is a good idea for a workaround, but YouTube somehow manages to botch that slightly too. It's so close, though! If you made torrents of these, I'd totally download them all and help seed them. I'd really like to see the non-YouTube-ruined versions.
I actually had a torrent going for one of them, but took it down due to lack of traffic. For now I'm focusing on getting YouTube playback optimized, but I'll host one of the originals after work so you can download and compare the quality. Which one you want to see?
And the 2160p method IS very close and I think my problem lies elsewhere now. I'm exporting these from After Effects CS3 and unfortunately scaling the video to 2160p uses some sort of interpolation so that's why it's looking "fuzzy" now. What I want to try next is to get a plug-in which uses no interpolation during scaling... but I haven't found one or really looked just yet.
That and I just know I'm using the wrong encoding for these... sometimes try to use H264 MP4s, but it crashes if the video gets too large. If that doesn't work I just encode to Xvid AVI which introduces compression artifacts (I'm assuming) but honestly I'm really just winging it here. I just pretend to know what I'm doing ;)
Your videos look very impressive! And right now, you're still faster -- and I like the style of your intros.
as far as i know, Youtube transcodes everthing if the resolution is LESS THAN OR EQUAL to 1080p. If you encode with 1100p (for example by adding some black borders...), youtube should offer an "original" option.
(or you may take your current encode and double the solution, which would be 2160p... no current computer would be able to playback this, but youtube might create a better 1080p video)
YouTube shouldn't cause the flicker since the resolution sent is the same as the output, but I have heard about the reduce resolution problem YouTube does. I guess the only solution is your suggestion of original mode.
Edit: When I get some time, I'll check some things...
Okay, I gave the 2160p a shot with some pretty decent results... still not perfect like I'm seeing locally though. I also have an un-scaled version... which, if you have a 1080p monitor, means the video is shrunk by half (for some reason YouTube rendered this one horribly).
EDIT: Here's a comparison screenshot:
YouTube 1080p vs. YouTube 2160p vs. Local Playback
http://i.imgur.com/3ProW.png (Link now as the pic stretched the forum)
I first want to say I'm excited about what partyboy1a and Dario_ff are doing with automating atlas video production! It's only a matter of time before these will be recreated many times over.
Now here's Wing Fortress Zone:
Link to video
There's also a torrent file (1080p @ 60fps):
http://ajmjd.com/SegaAtlas-Sonic2-WingFortressZone-Xvid.avi.torrent
Here's what YouTube compresses to versus what I see locally:
But perhaps I'm encoding incorrectly *shrugs*
Okay I finally finished the Tracktors level from Battletoads In Battlemaniacs.
Link to video
A little on the boring side perhaps but I had to get one out there for SNES.
Thanks for the kind words guys... expect to watch this level sometime tonight! Will be my first SNES video.
EDIT: Nevermind... I somehow screwed up my After Effects save file last night. Gotta start over :(
I'm most likely going to be attempting a level out of DKC2... but first I need to finish Blaster Master. I am down to about 1 hour per minute of footage now which just accounts for manually tracking, but that's the majority of work anyways. Still haven't given the Lua script a go though.
Yes, turning on and off graphic layers is possible in Snes9x, and it was used for creating the video.
I'm having trouble finding this option to turn off certain layers. I'm using version "snes9x-1.43-rerecording-v17-win32" for which I wanted to do an atlas video for DKC2.
Is it even possible to turn off layers in this version?
BTW... your SMB video looks great!
Sounds very versatile! I'll poke around and see if I can get something rendered.
And on that note... here's Palmtree Panic 2:
Link to video
The game moves so fast that I didn't bother animating off-screen.
About Zelda... not sure about those item rooms in the dungeons. I think it would be pretty sweet though if you were to do a full run, if you'd map the dungeons in some way like this.
It might also be cool if the white clouds that turn into enemies when you enter a room were there the entire time.
Well that was pretty cool... never seen that before. I have no experience working with memory addresses or finding map positions in roms (or whatever you hackers call it), but is that how it is "stored" in the game?
I suppose I have no excuse now! After I finish the Sonic CD video I'm working on I will attempt my next one through this automated method. There are some apparent limits to this creation process though but they largely depend on the game I think:
Can you remove or crop out status bars? See the SMB3 video.
Can screen transitions be removed? See this video for an example leaving them in.
How would a game like Zelda be handled? What position would the basements in dungeons get placed?
These are just a few questions I can think of before jumping into this myself, but again some games just would not have any issues like this so it's a very helpful work around indeed.
Also I'm assuming you can set the output resolution to as big as you'd like in the LUA script? It would help to have the raw video be sized to fit the current level being played at the very least which would allow for any post-processing kind of work like being able to zoom in/out or scroll through the atlas map at your own pace. It would also make it a lot easier to do off-screen animating or keeping environmental changes as well.
Of course these questions assume you have video editing software as well to work with which makes these points moot if you want just a "standard" atlas video.
Either way I guess I'm not going to stop making these things :)
The Sonic CD video will be great for sure! Keep up your good work!
I made an Atlas encode for Happylee's SMB1 (Super Mario Bros) warpless run (yes, for the complete TAS, all levels). For the moment, it's just a DivX encode because x264 failed after 12 hours of encoding time, but I will try again. My 170MB encode can be found at Mediafire and Happylee's original movie can be found here at TASvideos. I think I will post a 1080p encode of it on Youtube once it's ready. I didn't try to sync any offscreen action at all, but I hope you still enjoy it.
So it seems you can create these through scripting much faster than I can manually... perhaps its time for me to retire already! Also, I really like how this video was presented with the dual views. I think I will have to borrow that idea ;)
Nice work!
Yeah, that's basically the same. It shouldn't be too difficult to build a GIF from the PNGs these scripts produce, but I think it's much better to create high-resolution videos out of them. It's an automated method for creating videos like these. I'm sure you have already seen some of them in the "NES in 1080p" topic. He made them completely by hand, inserting each video frame into the map manually... And he says it takes at least four hours per minute of video. I would never ever have the patience for such a task.
I'm really glad these are inspiring others to build upon the "Atlas Video" concept and I can't help but feel as though I've been obsolete'd already. What is most exciting to me is the possibility that this "feature" could some how be built into emulators in real-time as you play the game! Great work, partyboy1a, and keep at it!
Thanks for the kind comments :)
And just an FYI... Sonic CD is now in the works! I have successfully exported raw footage and it's syncing up to the atlas map really well. I'm working on Act II btw :D
Thinking about posting this under a new "SegaAtlas" youtube account though to keep the videos organized. Perhaps I should also get "SNESAtlas" as well...
As far as I know, there aren't decent maps of the zones of Sonic 3. Besides that, I think that an atlas using this TAS of Sonic CD would be way more interesting to watch. You could use the great maps made by TerraEsperZ to make an atlas of Palmtree Panic (zone 1, zone 2 and zone 3).
Animating rings and enemies before Sonic reaches them would be awesome. I guess that you could do that with the method mentioned here. However, I think that that would take way too much time and effort to be feasible.
Very cool looking maps... I think I might give this one a shot next! I've got enough videos under my belt where I feel confident in the general process of putting these together. Now I'm starting to focus more on the presentation aspect of it all like with Prince of Persia or Adventures of Lolo (I like to call it ADHDventures of Lolo):
Link to video
Also, I have managed to sync off-screen movements as well (see the elevators in Donkey Kong for a simple example). Looking briefly at the Sonic CD run... I could see myself at least animating the rings and other simple animations off-screen. Not sure if I'd go as far as doing enemies too. I won't know until I start putting it together I guess, but thanks for pointing this one out to me!
Randil wrote:
How about a storybook atlas, such as Deja Vu? It could look like the Lolo atlas you recently made, with all the rooms visited in one big grid. I think it could look quite cool, with the cursor jumping between the grid boxes at a high speed.
This is a great idea! I used to play this game as a young child too, but I never managed to beat it. Thanks ;)
But perhaps I'm encoding incorrectly *shrugs*
