New Encoding Technique (large file 56k'ers be warned)

[Tsuneko]

i've been dabbling into the new realm of HD encoding and recently bought a new system which can handle 'psuedo' hd encoding on a frame by frame basis.

well the results below will show how good or bad you think it is.

comments would be welcomed

[Tsuneko]

another shot of upcoming episode 16:

[Violet]

That's big enough to make wallpaper from one screen shot without losing any details

[robinoz]

*whistles*  these pics are huge and look good too!

[Threaux]

It looks really crisp, no obvious artifacts and compression are apperent in the renders, can the new encoding method you are running be output to any format and resolution?  It would be really neat to see what SPC ep's would look like in 1080p on a high Definition TV or media center PC.
By the way I'm glad to see you're still with us; I hope you have recovered and are doing well.

[felineki]

Those shots look very nice! Very clean, lots of visible detail.

[Valkyrie]

Wow, those are some high res pictures.

And yay death to 56k'ers

[Tsuneko]

it can output anything up to 4096x3072 (4:3) or 3900x2160 (psuedo widescreen) havent tested 16:9 resolutions yet. cartoon frames are ok up to about 2048x1536

neko

[Threaux]

4096x3072!   Now that would require some serious render times and awesome processing capabilities.  I would guess as far to say that the new machine you speak of has some impressive hardware onboard. 

[SteC]

That new HD system works really well. Looks like many more people are going to switch over to high-res encoding even as we speak. We already have access to it now! 

[smoore]

Wow thats some good looking shots there,

Can't wait to see the finished product

Whats the file size your hoping for them to be around?

[Tsuneko]

lol well the system is made mainly for rendering. i can tell you the specs now;

8 opteron 8214HE processors (2.2ghzx2 per cpu), 128gb of ecc registered pc5300 ddr2 ram, 2gb of graphics(quad sli 2 7950x2s)
4Tb of sata II hard drive space, and a few other bits and pieces.

the system was bought for my business, but i had a dabble on what it can do for SPC to be honest.

As for releasing the episodes in this format, hmm. i'm not sure it'd be realistic to be honest, True HD episodes would average about 400-600mb each. i've not looked at HD compression yet.

Neko

[Tsuneko]

well i've just rendered out a 1376x1024 version of the SPC intro from the DVD and it works out at about 95mb per 90 seconds.

so thats a very big file. bear in mind thats not fully compressed however.

you will need a very fast computer to play something like this. my athlon 64 3200+ can't handle it at 30fps

neko

[Takila]

Though the thought of HD episodes that size is certainly  , I'm afraid that some people (myself included) may become alienated by the high system requirments. Might I suggest releasing both high and regular quality versions of the next episode, to see how effective the high quality episodes are?

[Tsuneko]

oh lol i'm not thinking of releasing HD episodes just yet. i think the makers might get annoyed me releasing better quality than the dvd's lol. i doubt very much whether it will materialise. it would take 103 hours per episode to render out this quality. (and yes thats using all 16 cores of my render box) but it is to the '1080p' standard.

Neko

[Daisensei]

Phew! I'm relieved now, since 400 or more megs  each episode is too large to be stored at my humble FTP/HTTP server.

170MB high quality episodes and 50MB lower quality ones are good for most users, I think.

EDIT: lot of spelling errors, sorry.

[Blackcat]

I think there should be a limit on the size and quality of the episodes, because if they are too good it will be only a matter of time before they are used to make illegal DVDs and you know the rest of the story..

It would be like uploading comics scans with a resolution big enough to be printed…

PS: Besides a 500+ mb episode will such a lot of bandwidth...that could be used to host more episodes^_-

[Supersonic]

oh lol i'm not thinking of releasing HD episodes just yet. i think the makers might get annoyed me releasing better quality than the dvd's lol. i doubt very much whether it will materialise. it would take 103 hours per episode to render out this quality. (and yes thats using all 16 cores of my render box) but it is to the '1080p' standard.

Neko

16 CORES? Holy cats!

[felineki]

Yeah, that's a lot of cores. Poor Vic Viper's gonna be shooting all day.

[Tsuneko]

well 8 dual core CPU's = 16 cores lol.

but i thought i'll let you know what is possible. as blackcat said i'd also be too worried about illegal HD dvd's. i think fans who didnt know what was happening would pay sadly a lot of money for a HD collection.

not gonna happen

Neko