I've seen the writing on the wall.

And it says HDTV. I knew it would happen eventually, and I've been seeing more and more of it lately, so I figured I might as well take care of it now. Today I adjusted all the existing PL short shots to be HDTV-safe, which is to say I expanded the TV safety margins a bit to the sides. Since I'm working in vector the resolution issue is no problem -- I'm now using the HDTV resolution that's 150% of the resolution of regular NTSC: 1280x720. There is in fact a higher resolution available that's 200% the resolution of NTSC, but for a transitional work such as this, I don't think that'll be necessary, even though it supports as high as 30FPS progressive at that resolution. It's the same frame rate as NTSC unless you want to go interlaced, in which case you can go twice the frame rate as well -- 60 fields per second, just like NTSC. The difference is that at the 1280x720 rez, you can actually have 60 full progressive frames per second. For anyone who doesn't understand what all this means, it just means HDTV is up to twice as detailed and twice as smooth as analogue NTSC.

The fact that HDTV is also 16:9 aspect ratio (widescreen, that is), means that I had to make sure there was nothing on the sides of the existing animation that I didn't want to show up on TV, and that the backgrounds didn't just end before the edges of the screen.

Spent some of today devising an interface for playing Flash movies on the web site, with the option of resizing the play window to match your computer's ability to play it smoothly. Such a thing would be very welcome on, say, Homestarrunner.com. I'll be converting the Pink Lemonade section into its own Flash-based site, and I plan to have the web stuff fullscreen, but the movies themselves will have to be smaller for most people's computers at this point in time. With this interface, people with fast enough computers will be able to view the movies fullscreen as well.

And s04-c07 continues. It's close to being done now.

Averted disaster

After some major power spikes caused by the neighbours trying to clear away some damaged tree branches from the hurricane (which fell on the power line), I started having some problems with Windows freezing on me sometimes when a confirmation dialog box would try to appear. Really, the power spikes shouldn't have anything to do with it, since I'm on a UPS, but perhaps it was because of the rapid shutdowns I had to do because of it. At any rate, I tried to correct this new error by installing some Windows updates. When those didn't work, I tried reinstalling Windows. That's where the trouble began.

The shortest explanation is that the pre-service-pack Windows was no longer able to handle the full capacity of my 160GB drive, so Scandisk tried to "correct" it. This resulted in a bunch of corruption, but after I reinstalled the service packs and ran Scandisk again, it repaired the damage. Nothing was lost. But just like the last time this sort of thing happened, I'm in the process of backing up a bunch of stuff. Anyone who has recordable CD or DVD capability, I highly recommend saving your work!

Anyway, despite the lack of notes saying so, work continues on s04-c07.