Brad actually doesn't really spoil anything. He is one of the most articulate and well-spoken distillers of game nonsense and mechanics this industry has. Like I said, the part where you get excited about something but can't say anything sucks, especially when it's your job to communicate about a product. We get it from both sides about not talking enough about specifics in service of avoiding spoilers and talking too much. I think Brad is actually very sensitive to protecting your experience. I think he gets a lot of crap for it.
Sorry for the longer post (not necessary directed at you!) but I in no way want to come across as validating some of the ridiculous stuff for which Brad gets accused. Some of it can be very mean-spirited. I only really wanted to express that talking about game mechanics and narratives is hard and I feel for the man when you just want to share it with the world and share some excitement.
Thank you Vinny for giving a friendly heads up to Brad about spoilers. You'd think Jeff telling him that certain specifics were unnecessary for the type of conversation they were having would be enough. You guys handled the Inside talk well.
Should be fixed now. Looks like wirecast also references the video card's dynamic range on the PC from which it's streaming. At least if you're rendering YUV on the GPU. That was mismatched. Here's the before and after:
For folks that are interested, the scopes read vertically showing how bright each portion of the image is. The image itself is mapped horizontally on the scope. So, each bar in the color bar image will have a value mapped onto the scope. You can even seen the diagonal line representing the gradient going from black [left] to white [right] in the scope. Without going too deep into IRE, luma, and broadcast safe you basically want a full range from 0 (pure black) to 255 (pure white). For reasons ranging from analog video to types of monitors, sometimes the full range can't be registered so a device might say something like, "hey, let's just call 16 pure black instead of 0 and we'll compress the whole range. As long as we all agree 16 is the new 0 we should be cool." This can lead to mismatches like you see above if every device isn't on the same page. Then you get blacks that look grey and whites that are dull. OR the reverse is you get crushed blacks (things that should be grey are now pinned to zero) and blown out whites. And these effects can stack. That's a very short explanation that leaves out a lot, but I thought it might be interesting for folks to see the actual math side of it... at least it has always been interesting for me.
It's pretty insane this time. While the black level is at 16, which is wrong but explainable, white is at about 218. That's for the game feed.
The footage from the camera is an (almost) perfect 0-255.
And it was even worse on the stream because there's another misalignment happening for streaming and it got squashed even more to like 32 - 200. It was insane.
Their studio monitors are doing a bad, bad job.
@vinny: It got all messed up when you switched to the new equipment. Until that point everything was great from GBEast.
So if the PC was compressing the levels to 16-235, and the stream was compressing that signal to 16-235, you have double compression and end up with a 30-218 output.
Unfortunately, the PC levels got reset with the new video card, should be fixed now. Scoping points in the chain to see where the signal is being misinterpreted again for the stream. Our monitors get a different feed than the stream so I never even knew this was an issue. In fact, I hardly get a chance to view the stream at all which is why these test streams are helpful. Thanks for the feedback.
I love you guys but oh man... I can't watch this anymore. I say this as a die hard giantbomb fan and someone who has been playing KSP for years. I'm all for trial and error and experimentation because that's a big part of the fun of KSP. However, without learning anything from those experiments or understanding why something works when it does, you're just wasting time and energy. It's just gotten too frustrating to watch anymore. I love the idea of a ongoing KSP series on GB, but it can't go on like this. I know people still love this series, but at this point I'm checking out.
Just curious, what's the bit that feels like we didn't learn anything? We get a lot of people saying we'll never be able to do something so when we actually do it feels like progress to us, even if it's so slow. Wondering if stuff is taking longer than it could and that's frustrating or if there's a particular bit of information that we're missing. We could all go read a guide on how to do this and I could just do that by myself, but that's not really the point of the series.
Wow, Vinny described his way of learning new things exactly the way I go about it as well. I'm trying to learn electronics too so it really hit home for me.
I have read or tried to read many, many books on electronics from theory (Art of Electronics) to practice (Make: Electronics). Learned something from all of them, but I came across this series recently and it seems to answer most of my "wait, but why?" questions and connect with me the most. Plus, it's free!
Loved the book recommendations. I think George Saunders would go over well with the collective group tastes. Separately, Orphan Master's Son is the best book I've read in the last five years.
Pretty big Saunders fan with Pastoralia probably being my favorite.
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