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Hi, I'm Ross Scott, the creator of Freeman's Mind.
For a long time now, I've seen requests to increase the resolution of the show.
My attitude about this has always been: it's friggin' Half-Life!
This game is old enough, it doesn't even need a 3D card to run.
You're not missing lots of fine little details at low resolution.
But, I keep getting requests for this so I've decided to do something about it.
Now, some of my audience has a short attention span, so I'll keep this simple:
send me money and I'll increase the resolution to the show.
The link is below. Got that?
Okay! See ya later!
Don't forget the "money" part! Bye!
Okay, now that I've lost about half my audience,
the rest of you may want to know WHY I need money for a higher resolution.
Well, it comes down to two things: motion blur and the Source engine.
Let's start with motion blur. What is it?
Well, it's how our eyes perceive real life things when they move.
I love this effect; it makes everything look more fluid and real to me.
Here's the problem: Half-Life does not support motion blur.
Half-Life: Source USED to not support motion blur,
now, it supports it in a really passive-aggressive way
that only works in certain situations and the game won't export it to video natively.
In fact, as of 2014, I don't think any Valve game supports motion blur
that's always on.
Yet, I've been adding motion blur to Freeman's Mind since the beginning.
How have I done this?
Well, motion blur works kind of like antialiasing.
It smoothes out and averages your image,
except it's in the (echo) FOURTH DIMENSION-sion-sion-sion...
The way I've been adding blur to a video is to add more frames.
Freeman's Mind plays at 30 frames per second
but I record it at 180 frames per second.
Then, I run a script that averages the input and predicts motion vectors
so it looks slick as hell.
That way I don't have any frame-blended ghosting. Nobody wants that.
Now, I do NOT record this in real-time.
If I did that, I would have dropped frames. I HATE dropped frames.
If you ever see this on one of my videos, it's not me. It's probably YouTube.
But, one nice thing about the Source engine is, if I record a demo,
it will record my video at any frame rate I want and won't drop anything.
The problem is, that method is pretty damned slow.
This is what Freeman's Mind looks like when recording.
Iiiiiittttt'sssss... sssslllloooowwwwwww...
Now, where things get REALLY slow,
is not only am I recording at 180 frames per second, but it's all uncompressed,
thanks to our friend, the Source engine.
Now, the old copy of Half-Life: Source DOES support video compression
using the AVI format, but it has a BIG limitation in how large the videos can be.
So much so that I can't even use it.
Valve has not yet updated their code to fix this,
even though the fix came out in... 1996.
But, hey, the Source engine is based off the GoldSrc engine
which is modified from the Quake 1 engine.
I've heard it called the Tower of Duct Tape.
In fact, even Source Filmmaker,
which came out in 2012, STILL has this limitation with AVI files.
But, y'know, we're talking about Valvetime.
Sometimes bugs take more than 18-years to fix.
Or, I could use Valve's new nasty default compression
before it gets recompressed after editing
then uploaded to YouTube where it gets compressed again.
I'm not a fan of this option, though,
since I don't want the videos to look like the camera's been smeared with Vaseline.
So, that means to keep the quality up, recording Freeman's Mind at a low resolution
takes up more space than a normal 1080 high definition video
AND takes hours just to process it all.
Plus, the game holds my computer hostage while it's recording.
If I do anything else with it, the recording is ruined.
So, if I increase the resolution on the show, this all gets exponentially worse.
That's where you come in.
I'm normally pretty happy with my computer
but recording uncompressed video at 180 frames per second KICKS MY ***!
But, I can solve this problem with the purchase of one part:
an SSD (Solid State Drive).
Right now, I use hard drives which work kind of like a really fast DJ
doing a drums and bass mix.
But an SSD operates closer to the speed of light.
They just go, "ZIP-A-DEE-DOO-DAH!" and they're done.
Unfortunately, I need a big one.
In order to bump Freeman's Mind to 720 resolution and not lose MY mind,
I need at least a 500 gigabyte SSD.
And, honestly, I'm scared to push the 1080 resolution,
because at that size, I would need about a gigabyte of space
for every SECOND of footage.
And that's BEFORE processing.
Again, uncompressed video at 180 frames per second KICKS MY ***!
Now, before people send me deals on Newegg,
I want to say that I currently live in Poland
and computer parts are simply more expensive here and taxed heavily,
so I'm going to need more money than you might think.
But, on the flipside, I don't upgrade very often,
and I can get a can of beans here for about 60 cents!
So, that's a pretty good tradeoff.
So, that's my offer: send me enough money for an SSD
and I'll increase the resolution of Freeman's Mind.
If you send me MORE than that, I'll use it for... more beans and rent,
unless you guys have a better idea.
Surviving in reality is a little different than surviving in Half-Life.
But, hey, maybe you don't like giving to beggars
because you're afraid they'll just spend it on Mad Dog and lotto tickets.
Not a problem!
If you want to just send me parts directly, I'll take them!
I can always use more disk space.
Send me anything.
And, if I don't get the money, well, guess what? I'll keep making videos.
But you're going to watch them at 480p and YOU'RE GONNA LIKE IT!
Or, you can help me follow a time-honored tradition
of throwing computer hardware at a software problem.
[Subtitles by danielsangeo]