Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Two months later....

My Super Metroid 100% video walkthrough is finally done. It's been about two months since I first started working on it and far too much has happened in that time.

I started recording back in early December, before the FFIV Advance bosses project was done, and got an smv recording of the run finished. (An smv file is a Snes9x movie file that records controller input to play back a movie without having to capture any actual video.) I let that sit around for a while until I got the FFIV videos done, then I began the avi capture of the video. Which, as I ranted about in detail a couple posts back, is when it all went wrong. There went my recording.

About a weak later I had gotten back up and running and began playing Super Metroid again. After thinking about some difficulties I had during the previous recording, however, I decided to tweak my controller button mapping, swapping the dash and item select buttons. That turned out to be better but I wasn't used to it yet, which resulted in me doing an entire 100% run through the game just to warm up to the new controller setting and farther engrave the route I would take into my mind. Which sounds pretty grand but since I'm so awesome at the game it only actually took me about two hours.

The next day I started the second smv recording and got through it without much trouble. I only made one big mistake that led to me having to re-record a few minutes of game play, unlike the first time where I ended up having to re-record the entire second half of the game because of a stupid mistake I missed early on. And of course there were smaller mistakes here and there, on stuff that's a pain in the butt to pull off first try even for me, but not too many. In the end I had another smv recording and it was better than the first.

By that time I had gotten back a large majority of the files I had lost along with the first amv recording. So, taking a lesson from my previous attempt at doing an avi capture of the walkthrough, I decided to back up pretty much everything—including the new smv recording—onto DVDs. It paid off big time when the exact same thing happened upon my second attempt at an avi capture, as I mentioned in the post before this.

Feeling triumphant about saving my files and all the work I put into the smv recording, but still feeling annoyed that I couldn't get an avi capture of the walkthrough to put up on YouTube, I pondered what I could do. The 40 GB drive in my mom's desktop that I was now using wasn't large enough to store the entire avi capture. And, as I mentioned, my 250 GB hard drive was only being recognized as a 128 GB drive which made me think it was pretty much dead. But there an idea arose: Perhaps only some of the disks in the drive were bad (hard drives consist of a spindle of magnetic disks that data is stored on) and those 128 GBs that Windows could still recognize were the good ones. It was a long shot but I really had nothing to lose so I formatted the 128 GBs and began take three on the avi capture.

Miraculously, it worked. However, during my second attempt it was not in the capturing process that the hard drive failed but in the audio encoding. (Funnily enough, I had already done all the video encoding and the audio encoding was at 96% when it failed the second time. So close yet so far away.) So I began the video encoding process, transferring the compressed files onto the 40 GB drive where they would then be small enough to fit, and hoped. That, too, worked fine and then the audio encoding was done without problem on the 40 GB drive. The hardware gods had finally taken pity on me.

All of that has culminated in two hours, three minutes, and forty seconds of Super Metroid goodness:

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