This will probably be my next-to-last update. The DVD data sets are being mailed (all but one of them is in the post, the last one will go out on my next trip to the post office).
What’s on the Disks:
There are two disks in a double-disk thin-pack (I know I didn’t actually promise a case originally, but I had these already, and I thought they’d look nicer than just sending you a paper sleeve).
Disk 1
Disk 1 is a hybrid video/data DVD. That is to say, you can put it into a DVD-player and play it like you would any DVD movie, and there is also “DVD-ROM” content on the disk which you can get to by putting the disk into your computer (look in the “Extras” directory).
The DVD features include:
- The storyboard animatic itself (51:30 long, by the way)
- “Virtual Table Reads” for both “No Children in Space” and “Earth”
- Cast & Crew Profiles
- Character Profiles
- Production Art Slideshow
- What is Free Film?
- Series Proposal (very brief)
- And two “Easter Eggs”
The DVD-ROM content includes everything that was on the download website, including:
- Digital sources for the posters
- Various sized desktop wallpapers
- The printable fingerpuppets we used in some of our presentations
- The entire “Artbook & Writer’s Guide” in PDF format (which includes model sheets, set designs, a prospectus, the first two scripts, and some other stuff).
- SVG drawings of sets, vehicles, and character modelsheets.
- Video of the animatic in 720p HD video (MKV with VP8 video and Vorbis audio).
It’s possible that some DVD players may have some issues with the DVD image I created for this disk — I had some issues with the automatic compression rate-control for MPEG2 encoding which may cause some lost frames on some DVD players. And something weird happens which made a lot of the menus inaccessible on one Blu-Ray player I tested it on — I’m hoping that’s just a bug with that player. If you have problems, send me an e-mail to let me know — at the very least, we can hope to improve the mastering for the actual series (and if it’s a big enough problem, I might replace the animatic disks later).
This disk is an archival “M-Disc” DVD from Millenniata. It should basically last forever — or as long as a regular pressed DVD, anyway. That’s because M-Discs have actual “pits and lands” on their surface, like a pressed DVD instead of just dye-marks like a DVD-R.
Disk 2
Disk 2 contains a somewhat pared-down “good parts” version of the Lunatics “source tree”. This double-layer DVD-R holds twice as much data as an M-Disc (which is only available as a single-layer disk, unfortunately). To get it to fit, I had to delete some intermediate-stage files (renderings) and get rid of stuff that wasn’t used in the production of the “No Children in Space” animatic (the original source tree is too big to fit on a DVD at all).
Since this is dye-based media, all of the usual caveats apply — so keep it cool and dry. It is a high-quality Verbatim DVD+R, though, so it should be about as good as dye-based DVDs get.
What’s Left
With these shipped (there’s just one more left to go in the mail), the only things left are the three USB/SD-card media versions. These will be nearly identical to the DVD versions, except that all of the data is on one flash-media volume, and I plan to add a complete, prototype “Lib-Ray” image of the animatic and extras, based on the same menu design as I created for the DVD. The feature video file for this release will be the same as the HD video contained on the DVD disks.
I’m officially working full-time on Lib-Ray now, so these will be finished up as part of that project. I’m also ordering the media to send them out on, which will take a few days to arrive.
