Obstacles

When it came time to rework the series for DVD and potential broadcast, we had quite the daunting challenge ahead of us—in addition to frame rate conversion and television resolution issues, we also had to consider the additions of professional voice narration and required upgrades from 16k audio to lossless tracks for the 5.1 Dolby mixing process, which seemed Herculean given the time frame.

The problems stem from how our series is built in Flash. First, individual Broken Saints acts (or parts of the 24-chapter saga) range in length from 7 minutes to nearly 25 minutes. Due to the well-documented frame-number restrictions in Flash—with the need to stay well below 16,000 frames or risk corruption of the Timeline—Ian was forced to be inventive and place segments of the animation on sub-timelines to overcome the frame cap. While ultimately effective for the online version, this meant that we couldn't export our established timelines as standard AVI movies or QuickTime movies from Flash—they simply wouldn't export properly and follow any of the ActionScript, or trigger embedded movie clips in the SWF file.

Second, we had the unique issue of having to deal with unwanted bitmap movement in Flash. You see, the lion's share of Flash animations—such as Homestar Runner or anything you'd find on the Newgrounds site—are a series of cell-shaded images with flat colors. Broken Saints, on the other hand, is comprised of thousands of fully painted and layered images that are imported into Flash as PNG files often with transparency. The problem arises during any "camera" movement—most specifically "pans" and "zooms" (or lateral shifts and scaling)—bitmap images move pixel-by-pixel in Flash without any subpixel anti-aliasing. This leads to shakiness and jumps when you have multilayered images of this type with movement on the timelines. We tried everything within reason to solve this problem in tests before undertaking the DVD conversion and upgrade process: limited vectorizing (possible, but resulting in either huge image-quality reduction or file-size increases), attempting output on different players, importing SWF files into Adobe After Effects to re-render. Alas, nothing worked.

This was just a limit of the Flash rendering engine. And the real bummer was that we were going from the small screen to home theatre screens—and the larger the Flash Stage, the more pixels there are to move. This could really distract from our intended hypnotic experience.

Finally, the audio and video transfers themselves were of major concern. We had 12 hours of mid-res audio content that needed to be entered into ProTools rigs for mixing, new voice narration integration, and series-wide upgrading so we didn't make fools of ourselves in Dolby Surround. Sadly, the only way to reach our audio ambitions was with copious amounts of elbow grease—each audio file would need to be lovingly transferred from Flash Timelines into the mixing studio and tweaked the old-fashioned way. If we ever did this again, we'd be sure to have high-res versions on hand with proper filename extensions!

Then there's the video broadcast hurdle. NTSC is 720 x 486 at 30 fps (60 fields). Not only did we have to convert the overall image size of every single bit of Flash video output but we also needed to rework the frame rate so it was compatible with broadcast and DVD standards and gorgeous to look at. I won't even go into details about the issue of NTSC pixels being .9 ratio as opposed to square…

So even as new art and effects and voice recordings were being completed for the set—and even as a team of dedicated engineers and students soldiered through oceans of Broken Saints audio clips to keep us on schedule—time was already starting to run out on this crucial video-rendering issue. We somehow needed to find ways to address the frame rate/pixel-aspect-ratio/resolution issues affordably and effectively, and preferably do so with much haste.

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