Highway 57
 

Here you go, guys....



Movie file: Highway 57 (14mb)

Re-released as part of the 3DMM Preservation Project. Halloween week is halfway (ok 3/5ths, you pedant) done!

I used to watch this a lot back when I was making Gnomes. As there really weren't many 3dmm horrors to choose from.

Nothing too impressive, but I suppose for the year it has to be given a certain amount of credit. Still, I think it has a quality of being really raw and lo-fi 3dmm that gives it a sort of charm. Also the quick pacing really makes it much easier to stomach, unlike a lot of other 3dmm movies from that time. I think it's pretty fun.

I was really confused at first what the cheese the old dude was wading through was supposed to represent, but then once it showed his feet below I thought it was a pretty interesting way to portray wheat, so uniquely 3dmm.

I definitely got a Gnomes vibe from the wheat field, made me wonder if Mike saw it and took notes. ;)

For 1999, this is really impressive, there's a lot of cool moments in it. The shot where the car drives along the road in the background and then passes in front of the foreground was a nice touch, at age 13 or whatever not many of us thought to do stuff like that. The text cracks in the windshield really took me back, good old nostalgia. The ambulance peelout and the POV shot inside the field toward the end stood out as well. And the dead guy's face was actually kinda creepy!

The plot makes no sense at any point, how do you flip on a straight patch of road while you're paying attention? Why would they crawl back into the car? He's not on the roof you dummy, the car's upside down. Why crawl into the wrecked ambulance, run the fuck away! Jesus, old man, let the guy inside. No don't leave your house, what the fff

It's not too bad though, a short, entertaining watch.

i do like how each individual seat has a different texture on it.

"Yes, I'd like the scarlet red exterior and zebra/cheetah/leopard interior please."

Haha yeah this movie makes no sense but I agree with Aaron that it looks really good for 1999.

This is pretty out of sync, are you doing these Aaron?
I've got a pentium that'll run older movies at the right speed if you've got a decent method or capturing them.
Camtasia's done nothing but given me the shits and there's some stuff of my own that'll only run on 98 that I'd really like to cap.

This is how it plays in 3dmm, actually. I know there's a lot of bits that seem like they're out of sync (~2:35 for instance), but I just watched it again in the program, no camtasia, and it's exactly the same.

We're using 3dmmfps to slow down the program to 98's framerate for these movies. If you want to capture your own stuff, though, that's cool.

I've run through the movie myself at 98 speed, and the timing's the same as the final capture. It's the weird pacing and sound editing of the movie itself more than anything else.

Uh yeah, but what is the new method of capturing? 3dmmfps varies too much from movie to movie and machine to machine to use one setting for everything.
I mightn't be able to speak for Rhys's old pc, but I know that for me this ran way slower.

3dmmfps doesn't vary from movie to movie on the same machine, though. Once a multiplier is set to 98 speed it'll run everything at that. The movies themselves might vary due to being made on different machines with small variances in framerate, but there's no way to know the precise cues for every individual movie unless something is obviously off. But we confirmed 98 speed and then adjust up or down per individual movies. I promise we are being careful about this! :)

Whatever your experience with Camtasia in the past, it's not screwing with the timing for us on anything. We've captured 60-something movies, the video files play exactly like they do in 3DMM. If Highway 57 is supposed to be vastly slower, that's just a fps adjustment issue, not a Camtasia problem.

Feel free to try capturing it on your Pentium, if it's noticably slower I'll put that one up instead. It's possible the movie originally ran slower because of slowdown from too many objects onscreen, I had that problem on movies I was making as late as 2002 (and this was made in 99). There's no way to accurately account for that except to capture on the original machine.

I'm working at capturing By the Waters of Babylon and it turns out my 98 settings were running noticeably too fast for it (even though they've been fine for some other 98 movies). I'll recapture Highway 57 at this slower speed and upload it later today, let me know if it's better.

(give it a bit to finish encoding if it's not available yet)

This is cranked way down using 3dmmfps. It actually looks less than 6fps to me, but maybe 3dmm really was this bad back then. I timed it so the line "I need to call the police" wouldn't get overlapped. The midi gets slowed down a bit as a result; just something 3dmmfps does, nothing I can do about that.

I actually installed Windows 98 on a virtual machine and tried watching it there, and it runs at the speed in the first vimeo link, so I dunno what to tell you. If this one is more accurate to what you remember, that's fine.

y'know I kinda actually have memories of it being that slow...feels more "authentic" to me. But might just be bullshit.

Yeah that's definately closer. Probably as close as you'll wanna bother though.
The 1st person scene was a lagger for me back in it's day.

I'd love to use Camtasia and edit my old movies in FCP, but running it at the same time as 3dmm slows them down to a frame every few seconds.
I'm not masochistic enough to deal with it.

Cool. I appreciate the heads-up, we're not as familiar with a lot of these older movies as some people are, so let me know if you notice any others.