As if you’re going to watch a 26 minute video featuring a hoard of young game developers making one of the best all time game series for the Macintosh. Many of these same folks went on to make Halo, which even takes place in the Marathon universe.

It appears that this tiny bit of gaming history has been widely forgotten, or it was never seen much in the first place. As of this writing, there is one searchable mention of it here, which is probably where I found out about it back in the day.

Highlights include:

1. The bug list was written on a Dominos pizza box lid
2. “The Shaft”
3. Jason Jones miraculous hair, better than the average developer
4. Comments on Quake by Jason Jones
5. Crazy Mac OS 9 (aka Classic) crash dialogs we all forgot
6. Fat CRT monitors (shot with a video camera unable to sync to the slow refresh rates)

Bungie made many games beyond Marathon, was bought by Microsoft, then released to be independent again after the success of the Halo series. Many of the core individuals in this clip no longer work there. If nothing else this is a great reminder of the hard work and challenges that a small company endured to ship what has become one the more beloved games on the Macintosh platform.

Download the clip here: Marathon Home Movies

Notes: the original clip was 240×180 pixels and encoded in the now nearly forgotten Cinepak video codec. For modern playback I converted it to an iPod/iPhone/iPad/Playstation 3/etc. compatible H.264 clip.

*Yes, I still have the original Marathon Trilogy box. I never used the stickers either.

Update: Bits of footage from this appears in an hour-long 20th anniversary video.

I’m sure I’ll want to refine and update it later, but right now I felt the need to jot this down. I won’t get into ripping, transcoding or conversion, this is all about playback.

Based on the news that the VLC team has had roadblocks from Apple I have only one thing to say: Apple is a corporation that has to abide by contracts and that means DRM (Digital Rights Management). VLC can ignore or remove some DRM restrictions, especially with DVDs, hence it’s usefulness. To expect Apple to openly support a product that might violate any of the undisclosed contractual obligations they must have with big media corporations is silly. Love it or hate it, that is our system. Plus, the market is still reeling from the boom in digital content delivery and it’s a mess.

Next, Apple’s long-in-the-tooth Quicktime API is finally getting a rebuild starting with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. If you asked me I would tell you that it’s going to be transitional for a while, but this is probably a good thing given the long life that Quicktime has had with an older “Classic” Mac OS code base. That means Quicktime APIs are a moving target. That is possibly one reason Apple hasn’t published a lot of info or willingly assisted an open source project like VLC. There has to be a lot more work to do before that can happen.

I like and use VLC from time-to-time. If anything I’d congratulate the team for getting this far while dealing with so many confusing formats and APIs. It’s a little engine that could, GUI for Mac OS X aside. I hope the news of their current predicament helps rustle up more support.

In the meantime what can an OS X user who aquires a MKV (Matroska Multimedia Container), M2TS or any other video container do? As of this writing it comes down to these tools:

VLC – Well duh. Been a standby for a long time. Worth having around for more than one reason. Much buggier than the other players I’m about to mention, but still a worthy app.

Perian – the only one of it’s kind, a Quicktime Plug-in that adds support for MKV, DivX and a slew of other confusing and convoluted formats. Load it and Quicktime Player 7.x is your bitch for the most part. Note: I don’t have an Intel Mac, so I can’t comment on the Snow Leopard compatibility with Quicktime X and Perian, if any. This is the easiest way to start playing a whole boatload of non-Apple native codecs. Includes 5.1 surround sound or DTS passthrough if you have the hardware for that.

Movist – nice slick player that is in a league of it’s own. Runs great and plays everything I’ve thrown at it.

MPlayer OSX Extended – a cleaned up MPlayer derivative that works better than VLC (for me). Some 1080p clips might need some tweaking of the “frameskip” pref, but otherwise this is a easy to use way to play most everything. Also includes 5.1 surround sound or DTS passthrough.

Plex – A media center/player that is Intel and OS X 10.5 Leopard only. It’s designed for keyboard or Apple Remote control and is essentially Front Row on steroids. Slick.

Miro – A media center/player for PPC and Intel Macs that ties into torrent networks. More features and complexity than some might want. Offers lots of subscriptions that foreshadow what TV is going to look like in a few more years.

If you’re struggling with playback on OS X these are the better tools to try.

While I was at work today I noticed a tweet that ever so casually mentioned that Apple announced, nay, was shipping both Final Cut Studio and Logic Studio upgrades. So I’m like “woot” and spent part of my lunch scanning what’s new.

There are a lot of joyous tweets and surprised blog posts, all fo which amounts to very little information that isn’t readily available on Apple’s product page. As is often the case some reading between the lines is needed and then there is the fine print:

Required: Mac computer with an Intel processor

The big one. The last nail in the PPC coffin.

Logic Studio is no different. It’s all Intel from now on.

Final Cut Studio also is $299 for the upgrade. A nice price. I bet that’s partially because it has omitted the twenty or so pounds of printed manuals – check out the smaller box in the photo above. Yup, time to save some trees.

This will probably not surprise anyone too much – I personally was shocked that my Final Cut Studio 2 box was the same behemoth that previous versions were (albeit no extensive Color manual). No doubt UPS and Fed Ex drivers everywhere burned some extra calories after Apple shipped new Pro Apps.

The biggest new awesome improvement for me is the beefed up ProRes codec, now supporting the ubiquitous alpha channel, a staple in my workflow.

Curse you Animation codec! You were grand back in the day, but now I want my lossless compression and my full frame playback too!

And as I tweeted, it’s the little things that are the core of this upgrade, some of which are long-standing Avid features that Final Cut Pro hasn’t had all these years.

It should be fun to take for a spin – after we’re done with my current project which is tied up in ProRes and Red Raw workflows that would have loved the new features had they come before post production.

The other problem for me is that times are tough and I still can’t afford a suitable Intel replacement for my PPC G5 Quad core Mac. The writing is now on the wall and it started with After Effects CS4 so hopefully that day will come.

It’s important to note that not having the latest and greatest right when it comes out is also a great thing – the bugs won’t be a problem and in the end I can still make great things. These days the tools aren’t as much of an obstacle as the creative process anyway.

Cheers to Apple for what looks like a fantastic upgrade (Logic too!).

This little piece of work is built around a track that will appear on my upcoming HooKHeaD Project album, The Gleenix.

Many of these long dusty tracks have videos to accompany them. I’ve held off on releasing most of these publicly for too many reasons to mention – but as always I just don’t have a lot of time to get these out the door properly.

Admittedly the videos slowed down the album significantly as The Gleenix was originally going to be a DVD release with 5.1 surround sound versions of all the tracks. This could still happen, but I’ll be releasing the stereo mixes and album proper before the rest of it sees the light of day.

So consider yourself warned – there is more to come…

This was found on a public temp directory on a UNIX server waaaay back before the world wide web in 1993 (was it the Hyperarchive? I can’t remember…). I was an undergraduate at the time and spent all night downloading what was then a really huge 18 megabyte Quicktime movie using telnet over my 28.8 modem – just to see what it was. The clip wasn’t really as good as myself and my friends had hoped, we had a few laughs and WTFs and that was that.

Now years later my being a digital pack-rat has caught up with me – I still had this clip on a dusty CD-R backup. I’m not sure how I was able to hang on to an 18 meg file at the time – before burnable CD-Rs and other cheap storage was available, but I did.

I figured by now a nicer quality version would have turned up somewhere on the internet – I found a ton of parodies and satires of STNG on services like YouTube, but not this one.

It could still be out there somewhere but it’s not easy to locate, so this appears to be something rare. So now, regardless of the content, I have to share. I even emailed this to Wil Wheaton (definitely the most wired veteran of the show). I thought he’d get something out of it, but I’m not sure if he ever saw my email.

Turns out the author of this little parody, an “Artemus Barnoz” (also known as Richard Brandow according to Google) was apparently behind one of the few old-skool Mac OS computer viruses as well as an actual writer for Star Trek the Next Generation (eyebrows rise). It’s hard to be sure what the true story is, but his name is all over the clip and the read-me that came with it.

This is provided as-is, the quality is low and the size of the clip is miniscule by today’s standards. It is provided in Quicktime format (even for the iPhone) via some conversion that doesn’t seem to have degraded the image quality any more than it already was.

Dumb as it is, hopefully some Star Trek fans will get a kick out of this. And having been made in the early nineties it’s probably going to hold up less today as well.

And again, due to the use of foul language and cheesy composited nudity this is not-safe-for-work.

Click the link to view Quicktime movie:
Treky.mov

Click the link to view an MPEG version (if you just can’t deal with Quicktime or H.264):
Treky.mpg

Here’s the read-me that was found with this movie clip:

This QuickTime Movie was entirely produced over a period of 3 days on the following equipment:

Computer: Mac IIci
Software: Adobe Premiere
Hardware: RasterOps 24STV
Adobe Photoshop
MacRecorder
SoundEdit

The film was compressed using the CINEPAK codec and looks best when the monitor is set to “Millions”.

Note
This little film showcases what’s possible with a Mac and QuickTime: You can make your own film without shooting a frame of video, you can edit footage so it no longer resembles the original source material and you can edit the sound track to make your actors say anything you want. The possibilities are endless.

enjoy.

Artemus Barnoz
A member of The Computer Graphic Conspiracy

Update, more info on the author

As you’ll see in the comments on this post, the original creator got in touch. I asked some questions via email and with his permission I am reposting the full back story here:

Subject: Re: [Semi-Blog] Comment: "Star Trek The Next Generation - Rare Parody from 1993"
Date: Mon, 5 Jan 2009 13:47:16 -0800

Eric Peacock: Thanks for dropping a line. It has seriously made my day.

Learning about your site made mine as well, I didn’t think anyone had seen my little parody after the 90′s. Imagine my surprised to know it was referenced on a blog in 2008!

EP: Even though my post gets critical about the clip, I’d love it if you could provide any more background info or history.

Sure.

Originally I made a 2 page color comic strip for a British magazine called “Black Ice” (sort of a british version of Mondo 2000). The story involved me and a friend watching star trek TNG. It starts with the enterprise orbiting a planet and as the camera pulls back it turns out to be Picard’s bald head. Picard announces that Spock seems to have defected.

Troy is completely naked. My friend and I comment that TNG is such an intellectual show (har har) and with babes like Troy on the ship, why would anyone want to defect.

We then get absorbed into the television set and end up in the episode where we have fun with the different characters. Data goes nuts (Worf suggest fixing him with Radio Shack parts) and Picard has found a trace of Spock’s beacon on a planet.

We join the landing party and end up in a series of caves. We eventually find Spock and ask him why he defected… Turns out he didn’t defect and was there to join James T. Kirk (who appears with the same naked sexy female body as Troy on page 1). and then Spock exclaims: “with babes like him in the federation, I’d be crazy to defect!”

Anyway… so all of this was made in Photoshop in 2D in what looked like a sort of Photo-Novel. The response was great (the publisher even sent me a take from a morning chat show where they talked about the magazine and they only talked about my parody).

For me it was just a gag that I did with a friend and I did it quickly as a sort of throwaway joke. But because of the response it got in the UK, I thought that I should remake it and pay more attention to color correction, make better frames etc…

I started thinking about it and then realized, it would be great if I made it into a moving video instead of a flat 2-page comic. Thinking more about it, I came to the conclusion that I should make a -different- story altogether and make something new.

That’s how it started.

At that time, most people weren’t on the net most people had 300 baud modems etc… so I compressed the final film into 15 fps and made the picture small enough to play at a reasonable rate for computers at that time. By today’s standards it’s choppy and low res, but back then that was the top of what technology could deliver video wise.

At the time, I received a lot of feedback from people who literally cracked up at the jokes etc… Today it’s pretty juvenile and might bring a smile, but back then a lot of people told me there were on the floor with laughter. (not to mention that TNG was more in the pop culture, today it’s old and boring).

After doing that, I embarked on a new parody project: I was going to make a live action version of Pinky & The Brain with footage of Orson Welles & Joseph Cotton. I began making hand drawn storyboards, watching episodes of pinky on vhs tape and going through my collection of Welles films.

Unfortunately my “real life” TV career took off at that time and so that project was never completed and remains unfinished (ironically, like many Welles films).

EP: Were you ever actually a writer for STNG?

Not a staff writer, no never. But I wrote a script which my agent sold to Paramount. Our contact there was a guy named Eric Stillwell. I guess my stuff tends to be jam packed with concepts and so my stuff ended up being scattered in 4-5 episodes.

My basic story was this: The Klingons have found that the Romulans have invented a sort of Doomsday weapon. Fearing an invasion, the Klingons want to strike first against the Romulans to ensure their survival. Since the federation is between the two factions, they will be caught in the crossfire.

So the federation convinces the Klingons to go on a secret mission to Romulus, using Klingon cloaking technology. The best of the Empire and the federation (aka Picard & the crew of the Enterprise) will go to Romulus to destroy the device (the Klingons go along because they secretly wish to steal it and use it to expand their territory).

Long story short (Long story short, isn’t wish to bore you), when they arrive they are captured and tortured. Turns out the Romulans -never- had such a device and it was all a ruse to capture the best of the Klingon Empire & The Federation!

Our heroes eventually escape with the help of Riker who was altered to look like a Romulan and who infiltrated Romulus days earlier.

Anyway, I saw bits of my story in the 2 parter where Spock goes to Romulus and the 2 parter where Picard is captured by the Cardassian and eventually tortured, looking for a device that didn’t exist.

They of course added extra stuff in those episodes (like the new enterprise captain etc…) which I never had in my original script. But imagine those 4 shows into 1 episode

EP: Sure, the clip is dated now, but as the original read me stated this was a great example of how video production was no longer limited to the big leagues. I think I held on to it partially for that reason.

Thank you very much. I was always a believer that technology allowed individual to produce materials that could compete with things made by companies or large teams of people. And in video in particular, if I had tools back then like Final Cut, Maya, Boujou, Money or Pixel Dust (stuff we use in our production pipeline today), can you imagine the impact.

But Premiere & Photoshop was pretty much all we had and even in compression from Cinepak to H264 the mind boggles at the progress/leaps & bounds we’ve made in short years.

EP: I still hope Wil Wheaton caught it even though my email to him probably went straight to his junk filter.

Personally I don’t know if any of the actors saw it back then. I certainly make a lot of efforts to never reveal it or send it to anyone at paramount (nor even show it to my agent at the time). I didn’t want to ‘jinx’ my chances of selling a script and never told my agent of my neoist/artist name.

After my TNG script submission (which they obviously liked), I received from them a package (it was a bible for their new show) to see if I would submit another script. It turned out to be Deep Space Nine (deep spaz nine) and after reading that stuff, nothing appealed to me. And I wasn’t interested in writing anything for that show.

I was however going to send a second script for which I had begun working on a treatment called “The Words of Mercury” which was a pretty cool idea (which I may eventually use somewhere else) but by then TNG was winding down and they were moving away from TV and into films and an outsider like me wasn’t going to be the one writing the movie when they had plenty of regular producers & staff writers to do that.

And so instead, I continued to work in TV but in my country (I live in Canada) and since then I’ve been a radio commentator for 10 years on technology at the CBC and a TV hot on Radio-Canada (french arm of the CBC, I am in Quebec and a francophone). and for the last 12 years I’ve also worked as a television director in the news department, doing commercials and television shows (mostly in french).

THANK YOU VERY MUCH!!!

And take care!

Barnoz

The easiest solution is to keep your dependent links up-to-date by opening clips in Quicktime Player and saving them after the lengthy search.

This reminds me that the code within QT for dealing with referenced media still seems very dated when you think of OS X technologies like Spotlight, etc. Referenced file names are truncated to the Mac OS 9 31 character limit for one thing, so you can’t even be sure what the full name of the missing link is in some cases.

Perhaps it’s best to shy away from using reference clips at all if you think they will move a lot and require re-linking. If Compressor warned you or asked to find the link as Quicktime Player would this would be moot. Hanging Compressor is misleading since it might lead one to think that they have a corrupt installation to fix instead of simply relinking their source clips.

An Open Letter From Your Sound Department

The Fifteen Comandments For Sound and Picture Part 1

The Fifteen Comandments For Sound and Picture Part 2

Other than the newer format-specific quibbles most of the annoyances are problems that have existed with standard DVDs. When DVDs first came out they were pretty much bare-bones, then discs starting getting excessive with the menus and transitions. After that it seemed that a lot of folks learned to simplify their menu design while others just kept making gratuitous fluff. All this time I’ve mostly heard the same complaints over and over – users don’t like the extra crap.

The biggest offender is placing no-skip advertising before a film. Previews and trailers are OK but having an ad for not pirating the disc I just bought or even worse, and ad for the same movie on the disc is just stupid. If you do this allow skipping – don’t disable the Menu or Title buttons. Seriously, if I bought the disc I will watch it more than once, so I will hate that outdated ad next time around all the more (DVD profit is mostly from sales, not rentals).

Interactive formats do require thinking. UI considerations and user flow are still significant. I’ve always try to put a lot of thought into the menus I put on any shipped DVD, be it a one-off demo or a replicated disc. Even when pressed with doing “cheap” menus I avoid making use of excessive effects and features that authoring software makes easy. Nobody is going to pat me on the back and say “thanks” after experiencing the disc, but if I hadn’t done that they would have had a far worse user experience, which will color whatever content you have on your discs. The experience is important.

DVDs will still sell no matter how much crap is tacked on but now with the pressure to buy the new HD formats every good customer experience will help. If I was producing your disc I’d take this very seriously. You want your format to look and feel good after all. Plus, it’s often cheaper to avoid generating all the extra art or scripting that don’t add to the project.