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July 10, 2006
the importance of labeling your tapes *properly*
with the rush of submissions after the long hiatus finally winding down (or winding up, as the case may well be), i thought i would take some time to hunt through the wall of vhs in my bedroom closet for two runs apparently located on unlabeled tapes: ajbolt89's 45:42 hard 10% in metroid zero mission and pirate109's pal 22% in metroid prime in order to recapture them correctly:
the high quality of aj's run was improperly cropped and not fixed when i captured it a second time for that exact reason, while the high quality version of one of p109's segments (the one containing geothermal core) was not run through smart bob, resulting in a bobbing d2 picture, not to mention the fact that the current capture has only mono audio and is missing a few thousand frames due to a bad signal written by a bad vcr. i hope to correct the latter two more minor errors with my new stereo pal vcr (compliments of banjonator) and my full frame time base corrector, respectively.
both of these primary errors (the cropping and the failure to run smart bob) are critical, and i feel as though i do not have a choice about recapturing these runs, especially when radix's luigi's mansion run and 19duke84's 0:50:25 run in silent hill 2 were just recaptured with the new dvd recorder method for no other reason than 'being rather dark'.
back to the monster in my closet: 'unlabeled' in this context means only that the tape lacks a side label. any other kind of label is more or less useless to me, especially if the tape in question is in a box - having to actually take a tape out of its box, much less extract it from the wall in the first place, is something i should not have to do in the interest of not spending hours in my closet looking for a particular run.
all this only adds to feelings i've had recently that no one really has any clue what it's like to be me. it's clear to me that i have problems no one else on earth has ever dreamed of: if a tower of vhs tapes falls on me and no one hears me yell out, does anyone feel sorry for me?
it's important to distinguish, though, between intentional and unintentional harm. i'm sure no one who sent vhs tapes to me without side labels had any idea what a catastrophe they were contributing to. i will not embarrass them here, but some of the most popular and successful speed runners on the site are in fact guilty of labeling their tapes either insufficiently or not at all. in the case of aj, this run (his most recent submission) seems to be the only exception to an otherwise stellar labeling record ...
i started by the door and worked my way back through the closet. finding aj's run halfway through the final column was a mixed blessing - i was disappointed to find it near the end of all the tapes, but i was elated to find it with a descriptive top label, which saved me from going through each and every one of these:
(aj's tape is on the ground between the two groups.)
many in the unlabeled group also lack top labels, meaning i would have to put each tape into the uber vcr one at a time to discover what it might hold. actually, i have been considering doing this anyway, side labeling them as i go, in order to forever banish any further hour-long treks through vhsia as occurred tonight.
i remembered that p109's 22% run had been sent in on tapes enclosed in huge plastic cases, so for his run i only had to extract every tape in a large plastic enclosure. there were far fewer of these than unlabeleds, and i separated them out while searching for aj's.
i am comforted by the progress dvd recorders have made in the community over the past few months, cutting out not only the meddling, inferior nature of vhs, but in many cases, the role of snail mail in delivering the runs to me, as well. if a run is submitted only in its purest digital form - .vob files - then the role of archiving the originals falls to me, and i of course am solely responsible for the labeling methodology in that case.
hey, maybe it'll all make a crazy story to tell the grandchildren.
Posted by njahnke at 2:51 AM | Comments (9)
July 8, 2006
sda megui profiles
as promised, here they are.
Posted by njahnke at 5:14 AM | Comments (0)
July 6, 2006
final settings for h.264 encoding
i use x264 and megui. maybe can put up profiles later. for now:
lq: reduction to d4 where applicable
reduction to f2 (3d games) or f3 (sprite based games) where applicable
automated two pass 128 kbps
min quantizer 17
audio: le-aac cbr 64 kbps
mq ("normal quality"): reduction to d4 where applicable
reduction to f2 (3d games) or f3 (sprite based games) where applicable
automated two pass 512 kbps
min quantizer 17
audio: le-aac cbr 64 kbps
hq: automated two pass 2048 kbps
min quantizer 17 (d4) 19 (d1)
audio: le-aac cbr 128 kbps
iq: automated two pass 5000 kbps
min quantizer 17 (d4) 19 (d1)
audio: le-aac cbr 320 kbps
in case the average bitrates for hq and iq are the same, iq will be overwritten by hq, keeping the hq name.
Posted by njahnke at 2:46 PM | Comments (0)
July 5, 2006
new apt
i'm not quite done moving into my new apartment yet, but the sda-related parts are pretty much complete.
here's the "wall of vhs" i've created in my closet (anyone care to estimate how many speed run tapes are up there right now?):
and here's the capture assembly (minus the new pal vcr) mostly set up in its new stand:
Posted by njahnke at 9:59 PM | Comments (6)