Make Your Own Demoscene Blu-ray! or Stuff We Love But Couldn't Put On MC3 For Some Reason Making MindCandy 3 was a very long process that took several years, and along the way we had to reject or ditch many of our personal favorite demos because of space limitations, legal issues, technical glitches, etc. In this directory, you'll find some of the demos we wished we could have put onto volume 3, but could not for various reasons. These videos have been created using the exact same quality, editing, and compression standards that we used to make MC3. They're even in the same format, an MPEG Transport Stream (High level 4.1) consisting of H.264 and AC3 streams. These play just fine (assuming you have enough CPU power) with VLC and PowerDVD 10, and possibly others like Media Player Classic Homecinema. The only differences between these videos and the ones on MindCandy 3 are: - No title placards (feel free to make/add your own) - No audio normalization was done to these clips (ie. they do not all have the same RMS power, but rather have their original soundtrack's power) - Don't sell these (we didn't obtain permission from the authors for these specific demos; contact them if you want to use these for something) Otherwise, feel free to make your own Blu-ray, demoshow, etc. Hint: For best results with Blu-ray authoring programs, you might want to demux them into their H.264 and AC3 streams before trying to work with them. tsmuxer was used to mux them; it can demux as well. You may also find some various other files dumped in here, like the batch file we used to encode H.264 video to blu-ray standards. Happy peeking. -- Trixter =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= We will be adding files to this directory as we feel like it and as free time allows. So far, this is what's here: Etch by Candela: Sync fixed. Love the music. This never actually made it into the considered playlist, but I love Candela demos so here it is. Fair Play To the Queen by Candela: Not included in MC3 for a few reasons, but mainly because it is partially based on music we have no chance of licensing (which is sort-of the point, given the title of the demo). Sync fixed in a few places; captured at 60Hz thanks to fmod interception. Glitches a bit at 60Hz, but I'll take that over a stuttery framerate any day. (Note from Trixter: I love this demo for reasons I can't explain. If I were still making modern demos, this is what I would make.) 195/95 by Plastic: Not included in MC3 because we really wanted to have Into The Pink and didn't have room for two more Plastic demos, so we voted and chose to oust 195/95. It is a simple object show, but a very pretty one, and the music is very kind. I guess we will never know the story behind the unique models, though :-( A Significant Deformation Near The Cranium by kewlers: I don't remember exactly why this one was dropped, but it was probably bumped because it takes up so much space (there is a ton of artificial noise and the overall light level changes nearly every single frame, so the encoder has a shitfit trying to make sure nothing is lost). I encoded this at a lower quality level than MC3's average quality level, and yet it is still quite large compared to the other files. And we probably already had enough kewlers demos on the disc already. f07 by Conspiracy: I honestly don't recall why this one was dropped. Maybe because we felt one party invite in the main feature was enough? A technical reason might be that the demo internally runs at 100Hz, and there's no easy way to convert that to 60Hz for a Blu-ray. Also, it seems to capture in a 16-bit mode instead of 24-bit (there's a lot of coarse transparency). Well, here's what it would have looked like, with motion-synth wherever it didn't look bad. If anyone knows why it runs/captures in 16-bit and how to fix it, let me know and I'll re-master this one. 828 by Farbrausch: We had this one all ready to go, but then had to bump it due to wanting Rove on the disc (and, especially, wanted to END the disc with Rove), and we already had a Visualice-helmed demo as well. However, I managed to sneak it into the Navis presentation, as he talks about it, so you can see it there in 1080p@24. The file here is the 720p@60 version as if it were to have made it into MC3's main feature. Really fantastic abstract, surreal imagry that takes a few viewings to really grasp. Gamma by Outracks: Watch this demo for the first five seconds (PAST the boobs) and you'll see why we couldn't put this on MC3. Phoenix really wanted to, but it took a test encode to show him why it wasn't going to be practical. The demo's checkerboard filter effect on every single major beat makes it murder to try to encode. The version presented here is not at full quality because it would be over 1.5 gig! What is here is lower than our standard quality and it's still 700MB. If gamma were mindblowingly groundbreaking we might have made an exception, but we felt it wasn't worth burning up the space. And it would not have looked good on the DVD AT ALL, even if I had mastered it at 24fps instead of 60fps. Media Error by CNCD+Fairlight: Murder to encode and, frankly, difficult to watch due to the chromatic aberration emulation. I love the lens/perspective, and the entire subway opening sequence is great, but it wasn't enough to prioritize this demo over other Smash/CNCD masterpieces. Royal Temple Ball by Synesthetics: IIRC, it was really close between this one and Instant Zen (I invoked producer priviledge to ensure Electric Kool-aid would be on the disc) and Instant Zen won by a single point I believe. Sandbox Punks by Cocoon: We had two Cocoon demos already and didn't need a third. I would have liked to have this on the disc because it has great traditional demoscene style, but it is somewhat sloppy (the head bobbing is not in sync which really bugs me) and it's also impossible to capture the demo with any sort of anti-aliasing (even forced by the driver!) so it doesn't look its best. The Golden Path by UF+DD: I am one of the very few people who think that UF+DD are a one-trick pony, getting by on their retro-themed visuals. I'm not a fan. Still, I did a very exacting motion-synth conversion of The Golden Path for the people out there who enjoy this demo. We didn't include The Golden Path on MC3 because we were going to put Wir Sund Einstein on and didn't need more than one UF demo. This demo took about an hour of editing between the 100-to-60Hz motion synth conversion and the original 100Hz source. (I really wish people would stop using 100Hz as an internal timebase -- what's wrong with just using a float of the number of seconds that have gone by??) Second Reality HD: Done to see what a "MindCandy 3"-ish version of a classic DOS demo would have looked like. Since there was a lot of editing and processing to get it to look the way it does, the Premiere Pro project files and assets are also included. Ultimatum: We all loved this demo to death, but we didn't want to be seen as making a political statement; we wanted MC3 to be "politically neutral", so we removed it from consideration. Ceasefire: When the controversy over Agenda Circling forth's music reached a boil, we removed it from consideration. Later, Ceasefire came out, with original music and some slightly advanced visuals. We asked Smash for permission to include Ceasefire, but he was strongly in favor of Agenda instead. Our only concern was the legality of Agenda's music, so he agreed to take that responsibility and signed the form. So Agenda went on the MC3, and Ceasefire did not. Here is Ceasefire, and it is a stunningly beautiful demo (minus the fake noise/glitching, but hey, you can't have everything). Falling Down: This demo absolutely speaks to our generation, but as soon as I saw it for the first time I knew there was absolutely no way in hell we could get that music through. I counted at least 15 different copyrighted samples and that was before the demo was half over! We couldn't sell that, but hey, we can give it away for free, so here you go. fr-062: This was a simple, clean, elegant demonstration of the new werkkzeug's capabilities. A little too bland for MC3, but as a coder, I sure as hell loved it, and now you can too. Liquid Wen: Winner of Assembly 2002, Liquid Wen is a double-length demo that runs for almost 10 minutes and has two different pieces of music (the latter being a tune by Vic that is very reminiscent of Vangelis). We didn't include this because it was the only 480p demo we were considering, and despite many tricks I couldn't get it looking crisp and decent in 720p, so what is here is my best effort. It still looks good, don't get me wrong; it just would have clashed with the rest of the material on MC3. Iridescence: IFS fractals are pretty.