Sunday, August 1, 2010

By the Numbers

So, I finished cutting the series this past week, which was a big mile stone in the project.  All that's left to do now is to encode, upload, and post each episode.  The encoding is the longest part of the process since it takes several hours to encode each episode.  But, since I have the whole series cut, I thought you all might like to know that there are going to 101 total episodes.  I think originally I was hoping that I could turn it into 108 episodes, but I guess it didn't quite end up working out that way.  Each episode worked out to be an average of just under 50 minutes, so a few minutes longer than your typical LOST episode, but not by too much.

The flash sideways story, or 'epilogue' to the series, takes place in the final five episodes of the series, so if you're one of those people that hated that story, feel free to stop watching after Episode 096.  On a related note, I know that there will be a mini-episode featuring Hurley and Ben on the island after Jack dies on the upcoming DVD/Blu-Ray release at the end of August.  I don't really plan on integrating it into the series in any way, because it really just sits there on its own.  It's after Jack dies, it's before the afterlife, it doesn't really belong going after or before either of those parts of the show if I were to integrate it into an episode, so it should really stand alone as its own part of the show.

Now, on an unrelated note, but just because I didn't have anywhere else to put this bit of information, I do plan on making higher quality versions of this series once I've finished posting everything from the current run.  My primary goal was always to get these episodes out to everyone as soon as possible, and to do that I made these episodes at a lower bitrate to cut down the amount of time it would take to encode, as well as the amount of time it would take to upload.  However, since the source of (most of) the series is from the DVDs, I would like to have this series exist in a format and quality that is comparable to those DVDs.  Now, I won't be uploading these episodes to MultiUpload.com or anything like that, they will only be available as a torrent.  And it won't be a small torrent either.  I can't speculate on the size, but considering the low quality version of this series is probably going to end up around 40GB or so, know that it will be considerably more than that.  I also will not speculate on how long it will take to finish creating these high quality episodes.  I do know that it will take a while, and just leave it at that.  But for those of you that really are interested in having a higher quality series, be patient, and I will get to release it eventually.

Episode 068: December 11-12, 2004 (Days 81 to 82)


Episode 067: December 10-11, 2004 (Days 80 to 81)