Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 is a role-playing game developed and published by Atlus for the PlayStation 2. It is chronologically the fifth installment in the Shin Megami Tensei: Persona series. Like its predecessor, its gameplay combines a traditional role-playing game with elements of a social simulation. Its critical and commercial success spawned a sizable media empire, including several spinoff titles.
Who brought this old idea back? Why bring such painful memories? This will never happen. Oh the days spent dreaming about it.
At this point though, I mean, its basically a finished product. All that needs to be done is manufacture and distribution. Its just a call on GB's part. Man, this would be so great for Deadly Premonition.
Who brought this old idea back? Why bring such painful memories? This will never happen. Oh the days spent dreaming about it.
At this point though, I mean, its basically a finished product. All that needs to be done is manufacture and distribution. Its just a call on GB's part. Man, this would be so great for Deadly Premonition.
Well then, turn the machines on and start production. INVESTIGATION TEAM GO!!!
(realizes that does not own the means to read blu-ray discs)
Who brought this old idea back? Why bring such painful memories? This will never happen. Oh the days spent dreaming about it.
At this point though, I mean, its basically a finished product. All that needs to be done is manufacture and distribution. Its just a call on GB's part. Man, this would be so great for Deadly Premonition.
I can only imagine the figure Atlus is going to throw out when GB calls them like, "we want to sell 50+ hours of video content from your game on a disc."
It all started in 2009 when the P4 ER was just starting. I watched about 30 episodes before I decided that I wanted to play P4 for myself and then did so. Flash forward earlier this year in 2012, I found myself wanting to revisit P4 and thought, what better way to do it then watching the P4 ER!
I got a few episodes in before I asked myself this question; wouldn’t it be awesome to have a physical copy of this? You know, for when the zombie apocalypse comes and all cloud storage as we know it is gone!? Although I don’t see how having the P4 ER on Blu-ray would help me in that situation... That’s not the point! Right, the point is I have always had a soft spot for physical media and I thought doing this would be a fun side project. Also once I start something, it must be finished… it must.
I present to you the Persona 4: Endurance Run Blu-ray set!
Now to talk more about the technical stuff, stop reading here if you’re not interested.
So I took all 155 episodes and put them on 5 Verbatim inkjet printable Blu-ray discs. The first 4 are 50 gig dual layered while the last is a standard 25 gig disc. Most of my original content was done in the first week. Accurate calendar intro's for each episode, unique outro's for each disc, Blu-ray menu, disc and case art. What took the most amount of time was downloading all the episodes (at the best quality GB offers) and having to go through each one, formatting them with new borders to retain their original aspect ratio (640x360) to be displayed in 720 x 480. I then had to batch convert them all to H.264 Blu-ray standard to burn.
For those wondering “Why didn’t you make em 1080p brah!” I did try to convert them to higher aspect ratios and tested them out on some bd-re’s, but I realized that they looked like crap, so I decided to keep the original aspect ratio. The very beginning intro and outro's to each disc are presented in 1080p, as burning with Toast allows you to have different video formats that can play continuously on a disc. I was originally going to leave the little calendar intro's for each episode in their native 1920x1080 resolution but, realized that Toast 11 only allows 99 tracks per disc. So i had to bake them in to each episode as I was giving them new borders.
I had originally intended to make the Blu-ray menus much more complex with moving graphics and such, but after much research I found out the software today to do this is either very limited, or very very expensive. Adobe Encore was the cheapest I could find that offered more complex Blu-ray menus, but it is not sold as a standalone product. Paying $800 for the entire Adobe Premiere Pro suite for one program just didn’t seem like a good idea. So good ol’ Toast 11 it was.
I am happy with how it turned out. The Blu-ray disc images are big, like almost 48 gigs each. Maybe if Giant Bomb ever got some licensing deals sorted out with Atlus they could offer them to the GB fans, but I highly doubt that would ever happen...
INVESTIGATION TEAM GO!
HOW MUCH WOULD BE WILLING TO MAKE THESE FOR ILL BUY THEM ALL
going through the endurance run for P4 for the third time now, this would be soooo much more incredible to have. I'd love to have a copy, but unfortunately I doubt my dream will ever come true.
Surely it should be ok for Giant Bomb to host the ISO? They've already got the entire game recorded and hosted on the site and you can download each episode anyway, would there be much of a difference to host the ISO with some extra bluray functions?
Or if MikeNightFight truly is our messiah he will make a tutorial to help us make our own bluray, I've already been downloading each episode anyway, and having it on a bluray would be fucking amazing.
Surely it should be ok for Giant Bomb to host the ISO? They've already got the entire game recorded and hosted on the site and you can download each episode anyway, would there be much of a difference to host the ISO with some extra bluray functions?
Or if MikeNightFight truly is our messiah he will make a tutorial to help us make our own bluray, I've already been downloading each episode anyway, and having it on a bluray would be fucking amazing.
I don't have the time or will to make a detailed tutorial with pictures and arrows since I made this whole thing months ago when my work was in a down period and I had a lot more free time. Now just writing this seems like more effort then it should be.
Programs I Used
Apple Compressor (Any program that can convert videos to a h.264 blu ray format should do)
Final Cut Pro (Any video editing program that lets you set the aspect ratio of your current project should do)
Toast 11 (Any program that lets you burn blu rays should do)
Programs for Extras
Apple Motion (After Effects is the PC equivalent)
Photoshop (I used PS elements for what I needed to do, case art, static images imported into motion, etc)
Quick and Dirty
Okay if you want to do a quick and dirty job the only two programs you need are Compressor and Toast 11. Actually, you could just use Toast and let it do the re-encoding of the files to burn on blu ray. However, this not only takes a lot more time, you can't fit nearly as many episodes on one disc as you can when using compressor for better optimization. Take the video files you downloaded from GB and drag them into Compressor. Then chose to convert them to an h.264 blu ray format. There should be a blu ray file tab. Next you need to chose the audio track. So drag and drop dolby audio onto the files. Make sure you name the h.264 video track the same as the audio track so when you go to burn them they will be burned together. Also chose the lowest bitrate setting offered when converting the videos. We want to pack as many as we can on one blu ray and even at the lowest setting you will still notice that the size of the converted video is still a bit larger then the original. (Confused by my amazingly descriptive tutorial yet? If so, Youtube how to use Compressor and you will see how the interface works, very simple)
Here is the catch. The lowest resolution compressor offers for a video to be displayed in blu ray is 720x480. The P4 ER videos you just downloaded are in 640x360, So when compressor converts them they will be stretched to fit the new dimensions. This may not be a problem for you but for me I couldn't stand the change in image quality. But lets say you have no problem with that and are not a crazy purist like myself, lets move to the next step.
Burning
Once you have all the video's converted from Compressor you will see them in the folder you chose. If you converted 50 videos you should see 100 files. 50 h.264 files and 50 audio files. Now open Toast 11 and go to the blu ray burning tab. Choose which kind of blu ray to burn, a single layered 25 gig or dual layered 50 gig. Drag and drop all the files onto Toast; keep in mind it can only handle 99 tracks per disc. You will see that Toast puts together the h.264 video files with their audio files if they have the same name. This is what we want, so when we burn the video they will have audio. Now you will see how much space the files you dropped in Toast take up on the blu ray disc from the bottom bar. Always leave about 2 gigs of free space because sometimes the resulting image file is a little bigger then what Toast says.
Once you are ready to burn the disc do not burn it by pressing that big red button! I mean, you could but it makes more sense to chose the "make disc image" option from one of the drop down menus, so you can easily burn the disc later and never wait through the long transcoding process again. One more important thing when burning with Toast, always choose the never re encode option, because we don't want Toast messing up all those files we converted with Compressor. Once the image is done, burn it with Toast and enjoy.
The Long Way.
So lets say you don't like the way Compressor stretched the video's into 720x480, then you have your work cut out for you. I used Final Cut Pro to make a project in 720x480 and then added the original 640x360 clips. Make sure the clips are set at 100% aspect ratio and they will keep their orignal 640x360 resolution in the 720x480 project. Next I didn't like the black bars on the sides so I added my own borders by importing an image I manipulated to fit it perfectyly in photoshop. Okay got it? Now do this 154 more times.
Extras
I won't get into how I made the extra video content like the calender intro's and outro's. I used Motion and PS and if you are interested in that their should be plenty of good tutorials out there showing you the basics on how to use Motion. Keep in mind I added the calender intro's to each episode when re formatting them in Final Cut to stay within that stupid 99 track limit in Toast.
Closing Thoughts
If you are actually serious about doing this and have more specific questions don't hesitate to ask me personally.
If you think this all sounds like too much work (and it is) then please write a letter to your local GB representative and ask for the P4 Endurance Run Blu Ray Set by name. I would be more than willing to send an external HDD to the GB headquaters with all the episodes already converted and ready to burn, or the full disc images if they would offer them to the community. But I would not do that unless they asked. I am still waiting for a response e-mail from Atlus on how the negotiations are going. xD
Wow... I wasn't expecting this to be so professionally produced, great job! I'm trying to think of words that convey how amazing I think this is but my brain isn't having any of it! One thing's for certain, though, if this was *ever* released I would buy a copy without a shadow of a doubt.
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