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UseYourIllusionII - My Fan-Edit DVD Portfolio

UseYourIllusionII

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My first Fan-Edit cover is the one that won me the Cover Art Contest II on this very site! It's for nOmArch's Starship Troopers Extended Edition Edit:
StarshipTroopersExtendedEditionCase.png


This is the second cover I've made for a Fan Edit. This is for the Blade: Pureblood Edition edit.
BladeThePurebloodEdition.png


These are for the Hal9000 Star Wars Prequel Trilogy Edits known as the "9000 Saga."
IC_StarWars9000Saga-EpisodeI.png

IC_StarWars9000Saga-EpisodeII.png

IC_StarWars9000Saga-EpisodeIIIVersi.png


These are two versions of the Space Truckers: The Legend of John Canyon fanedit by Dislexsick. The first was my attempt at making one with NO resources, as I couldn't find any pictures larger than 200px by 150px about this movie. The image of Dennis Hopper has nothing to do with this movie.
IC_SpaceTruckers-TheLegendofJohnCan.png

This second one was after I found this goldmine of sources...pictures of the ships, not actors. As you can see, the picture of Dennis Hopper is the same and the picture of Stephen Dorff is, again, a picture that has nothing to do with the movie.
IC_SpaceTruckers-TheLegendofJohn-1.png


This is for ADigitalMan's Extended Edition of Pulp Fiction:
PulpFiction-ExtendedEditionPreview.png


This was made for Gekko's Miami Vice: Go Fast Edition. I made it during the 4th cover art contest.
IC_MiamiViceEditcopy.png


This was also made during the 4th cover art contest. It's for Doctor M's fanedit of The Big Sleep.
IC_TheBigSleepDVDcopy.png
 

AvP

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thanks they look great
 

Boomstick

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Your coverart gallery in the other art forum says to PM you for covers, I hope this extends to fan edits art as well as official release art, I didn't see a mention of it in this forum, so I hope you don't mind that I've PM'd you a fan edit art request.

Thanks.
 

UseYourIllusionII

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yeah, PMs for FanEdit's are fine as well. I'll be working on yours soon. (I've got a lot on my plate graphics-wise! lol)
 

Daniel

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I don't mean to piss on your fire - but please use JPG and not PNG for preview pics. Quality isn't that important on preview pics!
 

UseYourIllusionII

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That doesn't really piss on my fire...it has nothing to do with the quality of the work themselves. Why does it matter all that much? unless you have a shitty computer the load time isn't that bad at all.
 

AvP

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use irfanview its a freeware tool and use it at 85%...
 

Dislexsick

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Thanks alot for the truckers covers they look amazing! ive been away for most of the month due to having no comp and theese where a real nice suprise to come back to thanks alot
 

UseYourIllusionII

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you're welcome. It was extremely hard to make with the limited resources, but I got it done.

Thanks to all for the compliments...more will be coming eventually.
 

ThrowgnCpr

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i like that pulp fiction cover. :)

and UYI2, the cover contest is underway, join the fun :D
 

ThrowgnCpr

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cool, looking forward to what you come up with ;) keep up the good cover work
 

Daniel

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UseYourIllusionII said:
That doesn't really piss on my fire...it has nothing to do with the quality of the work themselves. Why does it matter all that much? unless you have a shitty computer the load time isn't that bad at all.
Yes it is. I do use a "shitty computer", but that has nothing to do with it.

The general images on this forum page total 2.53MB, and your PNG's total 4.75MB - in total that's 7.28MB. Imagine I open 7 gallery pages filled with cover previews like yours, that's 4.75MB each + the common 2.53MB - 35.78MB. That takes an awful while to load. It also takes a long time to load if I've got bittorrent open. And I'm not really happy with the loading time just as it is - and I am on Broadband (at an ordinary speed considered average in Australia) and it takes much longer than 10 or 20 seconds to load, I can only imagine how frustrating it must be for people with dial-up.

Here let me show you a page I wrote a while back this year absolutely filled with graphic after graphic:

http://plamdi.com/wotc/console.htm

Here's a screenshot of my folder with all the final images used on the page (and I'll note that in some of the other folders you see I put the original images):



I had a nightmare working it out originally - I had an initial goal of the image size, but then I went and added a whole bunch more images, and so I set my final goal at 400kb - for over 40 individual images! Quality was also important to me (after all none of them are preview pics, they're presentation images), so in the end I pulled every trick in the book to reduce the file size - I made some images smaller in size, I used the best format (PNG or JPEG) - I optimized images for compression before compression - I optimized all PNG's with pngout, I saved JPEG files which held 2, 3, 4 and even 5 images inside it, I saved the three logos in a single PNG - I even split the PS3 grill image into PNG and JPEG to achieve far better compression then using JPEG alone!

If I convert all your PNG images to JPEG quality 85, I get a total file size of 916kb - which is about 19% of their current size, that's a HUGE difference. PNG is a great format, but it's not the best format for all circumstances. Out of curiosity I converted your 4.75MB worth of PNGs to uncompressed BMP - they total 10.0MB, which means your compression reduced the file size by 52.5% - that's not enough for web graphics. You should be looking for a ratio between 10-15% or smaller to the original uncompressed BMP file size. It's like the Moneky's Audio format for music. It's fine for me to use to store my music tracks on my HDD, but they're far too large to be used for something like online sample files.

Out of curiosity I converted all the images used on my console wars page to uncompressed BMP (excluding the paletted PNG/GIF files which were RLE compressed BMP's), they totalled 10.5MB - meaning my images are only 3.7% of the size they'd be as uncompressed BMP's (or more importantly - I reduced the uncompressed file size by 96.3% overall).

But it makes me wonder how much your file size could be reduced without letting quality get too low.

How about 63.5kb?

StarshipTroopersExtendedEditionCase_.jpg


Compared to your 443kb original:

StarshipTroopersExtendedEditionCase.png


And here's the one I made earlier at 85 quality, it's size is 93.2kb:

 

messenjah14

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Daniel, both of the re-saved images you posted do contain some pixelation, primarily around the titles. Now if UYI2 is absolutely precise about quality, I personally did manage to fit that Starship Troopers with no pixelation into roughly 160~ kb. You can see it here: http://i14.tinypic.com/54mxik3.jpg
Not to bust your balls, Danny-boy, but I just figured that I could show that there is a way to get the jpg way smaller than the png and still maintain the original quality 100%.
 

UseYourIllusionII

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I honestly don't know why you posted this large instructional post on how to convert and/or save images with lesser size but better quality.

I am a graphic artist, am on the computer all day some days working with images and graphics, and save images every day to suit different limits (whether it be size or file size).

I'm not trying to insult you, but I'm not an idiot. I just have it set to save as PNG and I leave it that way because it's not THAT big of a deal. No one has said anything about bad load time until you, and really even if it takes a while to load, the quality does matter to me even in preview form, and I like saving it at PNG file standards. I'm sorry, but it's just the way I work.

I would appreciate it if you didn't assume I knew nothing next time. If you ask if I know how to, and I say no, then you can post something like that (because it seems as if it would be semi-helpful to someone who doesn't know) but when I do know, it feels as if you're insulting my intelligence.
 

Daniel

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UseYourIllusionII said:
I am a graphic artist, am on the computer all day some days working with images and graphics, and save images every day to suit different limits (whether it be size or file size).
Good for you, then assuming you've worked on web-based projects you'll understand the importance of load times.
I'm not trying to insult you, but I'm not an idiot.
I'm not trying to insult you, but I did feel your original reply was an insult more then anything.
I would appreciate it if you didn't assume I knew nothing next time.
What do you expect if you reply with "Why does it matter all that much? unless you have a shitty computer the load time isn't that bad at all."? It sounds both insulting and like an invitation to explain my feelings.
the quality does matter to me even in preview form, and I like saving it at PNG file standards.
I was talking to an employer recently and he told me the biggest problem with graphic artists is that they don't understand they work in a commercial field - and they want to do their own things rather than fulfil the client's wishes. In fact, if I remember correctly, I got a similar response from a number of employers in the field of graphic design. One of my very good close friends is a full-time graphic artist, and he really does understand the need to work with the client's wishes, to produce their vision rather than his own.

I design covers too, don't forget - and sure I design the covers for myself just like you would design for yourself, but when it comes to preview pics the most important thing to me isn't that they're the highest possible quality - the important thing is that as many people as possible will see the preview images, and appreciate them before choosing whether to download or not, I simply feel your approach probably drives many people away from considering downloading your covers - I mean for me I'd much rather not open your forum threads because I usually don't want to spend so much time on a forum, and would rather get to doing other things.

Your page here: http://www.faneditforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=2041 took just over two and a half minutes to load on my system, and as I mentioned I have average broadband speed in Australia - not slower and not faster.
If you ask if I know how to, and I say no, then you can post something like that (because it seems as if it would be semi-helpful to someone who doesn't know) but when I do know, it feels as if you're insulting my intelligence.
I'm not trying to insult you, just discuss this point. I know that you're not trying to insult me - even though your replies read like insults to me. All I can do is reiterate is that I'm responding to this point:
Why does it matter all that much? unless you have a shitty computer the load time isn't that bad at all.
The load time is 55 seconds for me - and I feel that is a very bad load time.

PS: messenjah14, that's not "100% quality", try separating into HSV. I was simply choosing a size that was acceptable quality to me, not a size that preserves as much quality as possible (which is why all my cover JPEG's are saved in 90-quality, because I know from the experience of printing covers in 300dpi at this quality that the JPEG artifacts are not visible on the printed cover). With that said, if I print my own covers I always print from the PNG source, but the actual difference it would make to the print is so small that I don't think anyone would be able to tell the difference if I showed them the printed results.
 

UseYourIllusionII

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Ok, well the initial comment was not to insult your computer. I wasn't trying to say your comp was shitty, I was just saying I've viewed this page on several computers and the load time, although not instant, is not bad for me and I don't mind it taking that long. Sorry for making it seem as though I was trying to insult you.

Now about your "graphic designer" comment. Although interesting to hear, it really has no relevance here. I'm not going against a clients design-wishes by making it a longer load time. I've made the DVD covers themselves the way the clients requested (if they requested specifics). This is merely a presentation of all of my work. In all actuality, it doesn't really effect me if any one person is not fully satisfied with my presentation, as it is not their requests and even if it were, the presentation of them here has nothing to do with my official posts of the covers elsewhere. Again, not trying to insult you, as I would like you to enjoy looking at my portfolio, but I'm just saying that this situation doesn't really fit with your story.

Let us end this here, because there's nothing more pointless than ranting back and forth on an internet forum. I appologize for any inconveniences caused or insults given, and hope we can move on from this.
 

JMB

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You've got some really well done stuff here Illusion, the Star Wars covers are especially bitchin'
 

ThrowgnCpr

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agreed. again, the star wars covers are great. looking forward to seeing more of your work around here. :)

and lets keep this topic strictly about your great cover work UYI2. you guys can start a topic on image compression if you want in another topic
 
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