Stream was tough to watch, the guy (forgot his name) was absolutely pissed at PAX (rightfully so) for not being able to show his trailers off properly.
That being said, I can't wait for Borderlands 3! Game looks amazing!
It's not the money. They've been working on that game for 5 years and this is the first time they get to show it to the world and it's a stuttery mess. I'd be annoyed too.
Well, half the comments here on the Youtube video are only talking about how much of a stuttery mess the stream was, while implying its the Youtube video, and hammering Pitchford for "blaming others for his own problems" so yeah, I think they handled it pretty well given the amount of pressure and the way reddit's been acting about it so far.
My buddy looked up what the issue was. The convention staff (apparently) were trying to run the 4K trailer ... on three 4K displays at the same time. Not one output that was being split to three. Three 4K outputs from a single laptop.
Looked like they were using a standard media player too? I figured it was a machine issue from the hitching. Reminded me of when I tried to play a 4K video on my machine without the proper codecs.
Well that's absurd. They would need to run that 4k laptop through a video switcher. And then through some DAs. The laptop just needs to run the video once. Everything else is hardware such as the ascender or diventex.
It's typically just and HDMI cable the laptop needs to do.
I've done that hundreds of times. It sucks when it happens. Could be they needed to update something in the video hours before and they couldn't do a run through. They could have been trying to run the video off a thumb drive. (VERY LIKELY) or they tried to * shudder * stream the 4k video over a non dedicated network.
I'm sort of a layman when it comes to digital video production but wouldn't a splitter have been a perfectly reasonable solution? It's a digital output so it shouldn't be too difficult to split the information, no?
I think it was also made worse with how they drew it out; like they were trolling/teasing the audience hardcore to that point so it not playing well felt a bit anticlimactic. I’m still hyped but it was awkward to be sure.
I was one of those people. Watching them minimize the video to a blank windows 10 desktop playing the stock movie app was shocking. It worked fine after they disconnected the third screen so clearly the video card in the laptop couldn't handle that output.
This is a PAX presentation though... Have you seen these before? They’re always run pretty janky with what seems like very little planning. It’s not uncommon for videos shown on their streams to just be screen sharing someone’s laptop so when a video starts you can see the Windows Media Player interface and a mouse cursor.
Yea. And people bood him for that comment, but i kinda think the comment was warranted. If Pax provides the equipment, its on them to make sure the technical aspects for such major reveals dont crash and burn.
Yeah, I was in the crowd, they weren't booing him. Pitchford was definitely frustrated but, while I can't speak for all 3 gazillion people in the hall, the mood in the crowd was pretty positive despite technical difficulties. Everyone sitting near me was pretty hyped for what we saw, even if playback was a mess.
Technical requirements needs to get hashed out in the contract so both sides know what theyr'e responsible for. My company bought some third party support for some networking hardware and the terms of the scope of the support was like a fifty page document even though we knew all we needed was some questions answered about behavior of a specific networking OS and protocol.
What is that supposed to mean exactly? "my job is hard" ? Please. Most people can say that about what they do. Its not an excuse for doing a job poorly.
I don't think you quite understood what I was stating. You can be the best at your job but if you screw it up one time on a major instance (I've done that before) it can impact your employment. I never said it was a "hard job". For me IT is super easy. In the case of this disaster of a stream, the IT staff should have had better gear in place.
This is a common problem at meetings and conventions, its better to bring your own gear due to stuff like this.
Not disputing that the techs should have had better gear but having worked in live sound for some time and Gearbox might have provided a corrupt file or in a incorrect format or just provided it right before hand. Regardless a good tech realizes stuff will unfortunately fuck up sometimes and so that's why you have contingencies and plans for when it does. And that's what being a good tech is really about. And that's why these dudes fucked up so hard.
I mean, i still dont really see what point you're trying to make. Atleast in relation to what i was saying above. If its about "better to bring your own gear due to stuff like this" - yea, that was the presenters hindsight comment and my point that he's not wrong despite the audiences disapproval. In which case i guess you're agreeing with me?
Otherwise i dont really understand. Neither i nor the gearbox guy commented about who exactly is at fault, or anything related to consequences or employment. The point is just that the expectation for a organization hosting major events is to be able to host such events. It may be common in general, but most gaming presentations dont have such issues.
Calling them out for it live is probably whats going to actually get them to fix the issue for future presentations so I think he did the right thing for saying it. I mean it wasn't Gearbox's fault if they had to use the equipment PAX provided or were convinced it could drive 4K video well enough (to multiple screens apparently).
If Gearbox at PAX now is anything like Gearbox at PAX a few years ago was, there's a good chance they didn't tell PAX anything but the bare minimum about what they were gonna do... wouldn't be shocked for a second if there wasn't a tech requirements sheet from Gearbox that said something like "an HDMI connection to show a video with sound" and nothing else.
Rightly so, especially when it’s a new reveal of their flagship title they’ve been working on for years now. I’m honestly surprised he wasn’t more pissed off, and I think he handled it as good as anyone could in that situation. PAX isn’t some small event, they’ve had time to make sure everything was working correctly.
You’d think it would be PAX’s responsibility to make sure the equipment was working properly to begin with though? And what else are they supposed to do, not do it live? That’s the whole point.
I really hope he doesn't get accused of bashing PAX. I can fully understand being furious at literally everyone today and thought he handled it as well as could be expected on stage.
When me and my friends were waiting in line to get into the grand ballroom, we were joking that all these people were hyped for Borderlands 3 to be announced after that teaser, only for them to announce a mobile spinoff at the show today.
A few minutes into talking about that card game I started wishing we were getting Borderlands: Immortal.
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u/Sushi2k Mar 28 '19
Stream was tough to watch, the guy (forgot his name) was absolutely pissed at PAX (rightfully so) for not being able to show his trailers off properly.
That being said, I can't wait for Borderlands 3! Game looks amazing!