Smega-Drive Updates

[Jonathan Capps]

Hello!
The Smega-Drive has had some updates, so I thought I’d list them here and solicit any feedback.

• You can combine gifs now! I’m interested how easy this is to use so I won’t explain in detail how to use it here, but basically you can put things you’ve made in a timeline, arrange it how you want and generate it into a new combined gif.
• You can change the text stroke width now! Insert wanking joke here.
• Gallery loads faster now? You tell me.
• Other things now! Find them all immediately.

Topic

[GlenTokyo]

Definitely seems a lot quicker to load for me, and the gif stitching works nicely.
Made this rubbish combo as a test. 

But I can’t see the Episode Index button anywhere, don’t know if that’s on purpose (or a me problem – Chrome on Android) but I used that a fair bit.

[RunawayTrain]

Oooooh.  The scene timeline thingie looks great!  Much fun to look forward to.

GlenTokyo the Episode browser can be found in the About.  I used that button a lot too, but it was always hit and miss whether I got to the button in time before the page loaded more screenshots and gifs.

[GlenTokyo]

Yeah I found it in the about, thanks.

It’s a lot, lot faster. I’ve got the gallery populating in about 5-10 seconds, you could’ve easily doubled that before I imagine.

Looking forward to seeing what people with more meme game than I can come up with.

[Flap Jack]

Oh my god this update is incredible. The Scene Timeline in particular is the kind of feature I would have directly asked for, if I thought it was in any way reasonable to do so. Thank you, Cappsy.

It took some jiggery pokery with multiple concurrent tabs and clearing the timeline in each tab every time I needed to make adjustments, but the Scene Timeline works brilliantly for old fashioned multi-line quote gifs.

I realised that having no gaps between subtitles looks a bit weird, so inserting 1 or 2 frame no-caption gifs between each line worked nicely.

[Jenuall]

Great work, love that you are continuing to refine the Drive!

Can I throw in a feature request? Can we have the input to extend/reduce the frames included in a GIF be controlled by statically located buttons, or possibly by keyboard input? The button to reduce/extend the frame selection moving every time you use it can be a bit annoying when you just want to quickly spin through things

[Dave]

[Dave]

I realised that having no gaps between subtitles looks a bit weird, so inserting 1 or 2 frame no-caption gifs between each line worked nicely.

This is an excellent pro tip.

[Dave]

I’m interested how easy this is to use

On mobile I found it totally intuitive, and found it easy to pop in and out of the timeline while selecting scenes. A great tool that I reckon will increase the gif-to-jpg ratio in the meme thread by about a million percent.

[Dave]

One quick potential quirk that I noticed – stringing together scenes from two different aspect ratios seems to make the composite GIF glitch a bit. This is the finished version of a test GIF that I was making:

And this is how smooth it looks when I just delete the XII section:

[Unrumble]

I’m clearly thicker than a whole army of ticket-touts wads, but I’m not getting this. 

I try adding what appear to be consecutive frames into the timeline, but when I try to generate a GIF, there are lengthy gaps between frames, and apparently missing frames, meaning it essentially plays as a series of slow-moving still images…

[Future Producer of Series IX – aaaaany day now]

That’s a point, the button on the end keeps moving about whenever you add or remove frames.

[Dave]

I’m clearly thicker than a whole army of ticket-touts wads, but I’m not getting this. 
I try adding what appear to be consecutive frames into the timeline, but when I try to generate a GIF, there are lengthy gaps between frames, and apparently missing frames, meaning it essentially plays as a series of slow-moving still images…

You have to generate the gifs individually in the usual display – and then, once generated, press the new button to add that gif to the timeline (which is used to stitch multiple pre-generated gifs together, rather than being used to generate a gif from still images).

[Jonathan Capps]

Yeah the frame loader is something that I’m wanting to improve. This will probably end up being a bit like how Frinkiac does it, but I’m still working that one out.

The flickering is a result of my less than ideal method of dealing with mixed aspect ratios. A frame of black is inserted to force the whole thing to be 4:3 and to black out the bottom of the previous 4:3 frame. It’s one of the big concessions I made for just getting to released now and it’s top of my list to fix.

Really glad people are liking it, though!

[GlenTokyo]

Could it detect stitches made from 4:3 and 16:9 scenes have the 4:3 ones pillarboxed instead? Then the subtitles would be in the same place at the bottom and everything would be nice and centred.

[clem]

Excellent work. 

[clem]

Just noticed that under Useful Links on the About page, ‘random’ and ‘very random’ do the same thing. I take it ‘very random’ is meant to be the dice button? 

[Unrumble]

You have to generate the gifs individually in the usual display – and then, once generated, press the new button to add that gif to the timeline (which is used to stitch multiple pre-generated gifs together, rather than being used to generate a gif from still images).

Ok, but when I generate a GIF the usual way, and then add that to the timeline, then that entire GIF is just sat in the timeline as is, and I don’t understand how one can trim it down, like people are apparently saying they can?

I’m sure once this has been explained to me, I’ll feel very foolish.

[Flap Jack]

Could it detect stitches made from 4:3 and 16:9 scenes have the 4:3 ones pillarboxed instead?

I think letterboxing would work too, because in my view the strangeness from aspect ratio blending isn’t that the captions aren’t aligned, it’s that the 16:9 image isn’t centered just in general.

But how to decide between pillarboxing and letterboxing? Maybe it could let you choose on a per scene basis, or it could choose the one which makes the first gif/frame in the timeline full-frame?

If the Smega-Drive has to be committed to one or the other in these cases, then I propose we have a referendum. Those always go well.

Ok, but when I generate a GIF the usual way, and then add that to the
timeline, then that entire GIF is just sat in the timeline as is, and I
don’t understand how one can trim it down, like people are apparently
saying they can?

I’m sure once this has been explained to me, I’ll feel very foolish.

You can’t trim from within the timeline. You have to remove the gif from the timeline, remake it with fewer frames selected, then re-add it to the timeline.

[Dave]

My understanding is that you tailor the gif in the normal way, as you make it – by selecting the frames in the display underneath to trim/extend it to length – and then once you’ve made it and added it to the timeline, that finished gif gets saved in there as one piece of whatever longer compilation you eventually stitch together. 

[Unrumble]

…. good lord, have we always been able to do this? I’ve been trimming my too-long GIF’s by downloading to my phone and using an app…

I thought the arrows allowed you to scroll back and forth, to decide what frame you wanted to begin/end on, not alter the length of the GIF…

For. Fuck’s. Sake.

[GlenTokyo]

Could it detect stitches made from 4:3 and 16:9 scenes have the 4:3 ones pillarboxed instead?

I think letterboxing would work too, because in my view the strangeness from aspect ratio blending isn’t that the captions aren’t aligned, it’s that the 16:9 image isn’t centered just in general.
But how to decide between pillarboxing and letterboxing? 

I don’t quite understand. What are you letterboxing? Cropping into the 4:3?

If you pillarboxed then both the 4:3 and 16:9 would be untouched, the 4:3 bits would just obviously have the black bars on the side but nothing is lost.

I do agree though that just making it so the 16:9 bits fit the gif vertically would improve things a lot without any pillarboxing faff, because I’m sure that’s a lot of work to add in.

[Flap Jack]

…. good lord, have we always been able to do this? I’ve been trimming my
too-long GIF’s by downloading to my phone and using an app…

Heartbreaking… I guess that explains why the first gif you tried was just a normal one.

I don’t quite understand. What are you letterboxing? Cropping into the 4:3?

If you pillarboxed then both the 4:3 and 16:9 would be untouched, the
4:3 bits would just obviously have the black bars on the side but
nothing is lost.

Pillarboxing would be putting black bars on the left and right for the 4:3 sections. Letterboxing would be putting black bars on the top and bottom for the 16:9 sections. Neither involves cropping the image.

[Dave]

…. good lord, have we always been able to do this? I’ve been trimming my too-long GIF’s by downloading to my phone and using an app…

I thought the arrows allowed you to scroll back and forth, to decide what frame you wanted to begin/end on, not alter the length of the GIF…

For. Fuck’s. Sake.

[International Debris]

This is perfect for the Series VIII Holly meme.

[Unrumble]

[Jonathan Capps]

…. good lord, have we always been able to do this? I’ve been trimming my too-long GIF’s by downloading to my phone and using an app…

I thought the arrows allowed you to scroll back and forth, to decide what frame you wanted to begin/end on, not alter the length of the GIF…

For. Fuck’s. Sake.

I think this demonstrates nicely that the current gif builder leaves a lot to be desired. It’s next on the list!

I think letting the user choose between 4:3 or 16:9 for their combined GIFs would work but I have various other technical issues around the fact that the existing gods would need to be regenerated with the new aspect ratio which is something my currently implementation can’t do very easily, so I’ll need to refactor how it all works a bit.

 

[Flap Jack]

the existing gods would need to be regenerated

Damn, that’s hardcore.

[Dave]

the existing gods would need to be regenerated

[Jonathan Capps]

Never let it be said that web development isn’t difficult.

[GlenTokyo]

Pillarboxing would be putting black bars on the left and right for the 4:3 sections. Letterboxing would be putting black bars on the top and bottom for the 16:9 sections. Neither involves cropping the image.

Now I get you. For some reason my brain was like “square fits in rectangle” and completely missed “letterboxing makes the rectangles square”.

[Jenuall]

[Future Producer of Series IX – aaaaany day now]

Good old P. P. Pillarboxing, the inventor of tillarboxing.

[Ian Symes]

[Jenuall]

[Dave]

[clem]

[Jenuall]

[Unrumble]

[Flap Jack]

—

I’m very impressed by how big these gifs can go. In the past I’m sure I’ve had the gif generator fail well below the 20MB point (and maybe it still would when making simple gifs only?).

Making this gif also made me fully realise something I have noticed in the past, but never properly put together – the frames you see in the standard gif timeline are different frames depending on what frame you loaded first. The gifs seem to work out regardless (as long as you choose the right approximate frames), but it can make selecting the right frames to start and end each segment on a lot more difficult, if you’re using the episode page to get starting points for where each new caption begins.

For example, this is the “first frame after” one of the segments:

And this is the first frame of the next segment, yet it’s actually 22 frames later:

So if there’s a way to make the frames which appear in the timeline consistent, or otherwise a way to more easily keep track of the stopping and resuming points for these consecutive gifs, then it would be awesome if that could be added to the list of potential future improvements.

[Future Producer of Series IX – aaaaany day now]

Yeah I’d noticed the frames can be variable but I thought everybody knew that.

[Jonathan Capps]

Yeah, I’m cheating a bit there. It shows every third frame to stop the view being flooded with similar frames, so this will shift depending on which is the ‘primary’ frame you have loaded. I’m changing that soon so you’ll see all frames.

[Flap Jack]

Ah, cool.

I’m not sure if we need to see all frames, as I agree that seeing 3 (or 25?) times as many of them for any given section would be a bit overwhelming! But I trust that you’ll have it all worked out.

[Jonathan Capps]

I’m thinking reducing the size of the thumbnails might help – but then that all depends on implementing a good system for loading in new frames and building the gif, which I’m not even close to figuring out yet…

[Flap Jack]

Could it be that the same frames get generally shown in the timeline as now, but you have the option to ‘expand’ the first and last major frames to show all of the individual frames that are represented by them, so you can select the specific frames to load/include in the gif?

As I type it out, I realise that might be a bit convoluted as UX goes, but it does seem like the beginning and the end are the only points where you’d actually want that level of granularity.

[Jenuall]

I definitely think that a “default view” does not need to include all frames, but an option to expand and manage GIF content to a per frame level would be very helpful!

The < and > buttons to extend the selection to include earlier and later frames having different behaviour currently can be a bit challenging – < seems to remove individual frames but > looks like it feeds 5(?) new frames on to the front of where you were? This makes it kind of tricky to get a new GIF to start on the exact frame you wanted at present.

Whilst playing with this I also encountered a bug where if you use the buttons to reduce the current frame selection to nothing then it was impossible to bring any frames back in – both < and > buttons appeared to do nothing at that point!

[Jonathan Capps]

This is excellent insight, thank you. The more I know about how you all use it the better, because you’re clearly the freaks power-users.

[Flap Jack]

First time viewing the New & Improved Smega-Drive™ on mobile, and noticing the About and Scene Timeline buttons. Get a room, you two.

And that Lister/Kryten gallery frame… perfect.

[Flap Jack]

Now that we’ve had it for a few days, I feel more confident in saying that I do miss the episode index being one click away from the homepage, a bit. Considering how relatively often I want to reference multiple lines or whole scenes – and how I generally do remember which lines are from which episodes (not to brag or anything) – I probably use the episode index more than the search.

Plus, on mobile, even once you’re on the About page, you need to scroll down a bit before the first link to the episode index is visible and clickable.

I could just bookmark the episode index, because that’s still 1 click away from the search, so it’s an overall quicker starting page.

[Jenuall]

Yeah Episode Index tended to be my starting point when using the Drive so it would be handy to have it readily available.

Something else that might be handy if possible: I like that the episode pages are sectioned up by dialog chunks but once you have gone into a specific section you’re kind of stuck there unless you scrub through using the GIF timeline, or dive back out to the episode page. Would it be possible to have an option to skip to the next/previous bit of dialog? Basically like how GIFGlobe (for Peep Show, IAP etc.) has “Next Scene” & “Previous Scene” buttons, which despite being labelled as ‘scene’ actually just let you go forwards or backwards through each bit of dialog in the episode.

[Jonathan Capps]

Yeah, duly noted. I’ll add in something one click, probably next to the ‘About’ link.

I wanted to bin off the footer to save space as I knew I needed to add the Timeline button on the bottom, but maybe it’s just better to put back for now.

[Author]

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