MagicMountainMan

...And there's always Caltrans for the win! If anyone takes longer than Caltrans does, God help us all! I honestly haven't been following construction of the ride very closely, but has there been any hint as to the effects that may or may not occur in the tunnel? I'm looking forward to whatever they have in store there.

I'm sorry for all of you guys that have been waiting... That sucks. I finally got my email, granted it was a little over the two allotted weeks, and I got in! I'm actually going to be at the Disneyland Resort, not WDW, but I'm really looking forward to it!

^Same thing happened with me! Did the Internet interview and then got an email to setup a phone interview. I'm scheduled for tomorrow! Anybody have any quick tips? And good luck to everybody who is going through the interview process right now!

I just applied as well, but for the Disneyland Resort. One question though, did I have to attend a presentation or something? I was able to complete the application, but people have posted Youtube videos about the application and all of them talk about attending a presentation...

Man I'm really excited. THIS will definitely make a big splash and I can't wait to see how everybody else responds! This could potentially overshadow Carsland, which was built to be the "Potter killer". Well, more competition means a better end product for the consumer.

Oh you. I knew it. I should have clarified. I'm talking about when Goliath first opened for the park in 2000. It was a major success for the park in that it drove up attendance over the 3 million mark, the last time that has happened. X didn't have quite an impact because it opened as a mechanical nightmare and then Sept. 11th passed and the whole industry suffered. Fact is, Magic Mountain's attendance hasn't been up over 3 million since Goliath. That's all I'm saying, it was a great home run for the park because it didn't cost them a fortune (X) and it increased attendance. Since then though X(2) has been the more popular ride by far, but due to park negligence and everything else that Premier did for the Six Flags brand, Magic Mountain's attendance has completely stagnated. And I completely agree with SoCalCoasters, I would be completely shocked if they add a hydraulic launch to their lineup. I would be completely okay with it, I just don't think it would be a move the park would make. But since when has Magic Mountain ever been predictable? It's all part of the fun!

I'm wondering if 2013 will be the year that Magic Mountain receives a new 'killer app' of a coaster. With all this land clearing that may be the case. Personally I think it would be great for the park, because in my opinion Magic Mountain really hasn't had a great success with a new ride since they built Goliath back in 2000. When Goliath was built, I was quite young, but I remember how everybody was talking about it and it was (and still is) a major draw for the park. X(2) was also successful, but would have been more so if Arrow had designed the first batch of trains correctly.... And please, don't flame me, I understand that Apocinator and Green Lantern as well as their other additions this last decade like Tatsu were successful, but I don't think any of those were really successful like Goliath was. Goliath was an out of the park homerun for Magic Mountain; I just really hope that whatever is in store will be along the same lines. It's been a while since Magic Mountain was the talk of the town (for a good reason) and I hope that this new direction that the park is going will restore some of that former glory. Here's to hoping! Edit: I said here's to hoping twice. I'm disgusted with myself.

While it is sad to see Log Jammer go, I am looking forward to what they have in store for us. The only thing I ask of them: Please, please don't destroy the hillside and make it bare like you did with Tatsu. Trees are a good thing!

I'm debating on whether or not to get a front of the line pass on Halloween night, does anybody have any experience with the crowds on that night from previous years?

I went to Fright Fest on Sunday. Having been to past Fright Fest events I came in with certain expectations. Sadly I was let down. Not to say it wasn't good, it just IMO wasn't on the same level as years past. ------------ First, the decorations. Where did they all go? I don't think I've ever seen the park with less. ------------ Second, the scare zones. The one in Gotham Universe was actually pretty good and the actors were hilarious. One of them ran up to a food counter while a guest was ordering and just yelled at the top of his voice "PIZZA!!!!!" as if to order for the guest. I almost died laughing. The other scare zones were o.k., the other notable one being the Revolution scare zone as the actors had a good atmosphere to play with and it was actually scary. If only it was a bit longer... The other scare zones were less than memorable for me. When I went through the Samurai Summit one there might have been 2 or 3 actors total. ------------ The mazes went from good to really bad. I'll rate them on a "Magic Mountain" scale, comparing them to the best mazes to ever strike the Mountain. 10 being the best or one of the best mazes they've ever had, 5 being a middle of the line maze, and 1 being one of or the worst maze they've ever had. The Aftermath: Easily the best maze of the year. It was really cool being in a big open space with a lot of visuals surrounding you. A nice break from the "endless corridors" that most mazes are. The fire effect was great and startling as well. Definitely unexpected. MM scale: 10/10 Cursed: Simply "The Bog" or whatever other maze used to be through Tidal Wave's queue. Never been great and really needs a change-up. Hardly any scares to be had either as it has lost it's 'creepy' quality from being so stale. If you've never been through it before then it could be alright, otherwise just skip it if you don't have the time. MM scale: 4/10 Chupacabra: It's all enclosed in Revolution's extended queue. Really wasn't much to look at and there were hardly any actors in the maze. MM scale: 3/10 Bite II: Last time I went through this one it was sharing the same building as Lecter's Slaughterhouse so technically it's a "new" maze for me. A bit better than what it used to be, but again, it was short. Good props though and a few good scares. MM scale: 6/10 Willoughby's Haunted Mansion: The classic. Seemed a bit shorter or maybe it was my imagination. I went through right when it opened so maybe that's why there weren't as many actors as it usually had. Still a great maze though. MM scale: 8/10 Lecter's Slaughterhouse: It started out pretty strong and it's a cle(a)ver maze in the beginning. However just over half way through it... died. All we did in the end was walk through a bunch of hallways that had painter's tarps as barriers with blood splatter on them. And there were these strobe lights that kept flashing throughout and we didn't even see one actor. This maze was a disappointment because it had so much potential at the beginning... MM scale: 5/10 Warehouse 13 Awful. Seriously I don't even know why they keep bringing this one back. All of the actors can't really even hide as it's just you walking through Log Jammer's queue. I feel bad for them, they could have had a much better time in another maze. MM scale: 1/10 Jokester's Hideout: It's not truly scary, just corny and clever. The clowns honking their horns and chasing after you at the end are always hilarious, but the maze is starting to age in a bad way. Just slap on a new coat of paint and maybe add a scare or two and it could be a really good and fun maze. MM scale: 7/10 ------------ For the rides, Batman in the Dark/Fog was pretty disappointing. On top of 1 train op with a horribly slow crew, the fog seemed broken in all but one trench. Wish I could experience it like it was at WCB. X2 Area 19 was some random props thrown together and since the audio doesn't work it makes no sense. Didn't ride any of the other changed rides besides the ones "in the dark". ------------ It was my first time at the park in over a year so I got a ride on Green Lantern and it was pretty crazy. I'll never ever ever think of taking my phone on that ride again... We didn't flip in the one ride that I had but man it was still crazy. Overall though I haven't been impressed with the park for the last few years and sadly I'm still not impressed. It's like they took strides to "clean it up" but never went the full mile and I have no desire to go back more than once next year to ride the drop ride. Fright Fest wasn't as good as it used to be either, to me it seemed like they either got budget cuts or tried to extend the budget too far in order to make it the "Biggest Fright Fest ever". Maybe a bit of both. ------------ I really want to love Magic Mountain, but it's like growing up with somebody who's too stubborn to admit their flaws. At first you're cool with it and are always looking past the bad and looking forward to the promise that the future holds and give them a pass for the present. Then you get to the point where you realize that they're never going to change and it's just frustrating and you can't be around it. I really would wish I could say Magic Mountain has gotten better, but it really hasn't. I want to love it, after all my name is MagicMountainMan! I almost wish the place was sold to another company... Thanks for reading my wall-o-text. -Brandon

I went last year for the first time and absolutely loved it! I can't wait for this year! One question though, this year are they going to sell the 'front of the line' pass in the sense that the longer you wait to buy it the higher the price goes up? If so I'm getting my tickets as soon as they go on sale! And I'm really excited that the Rob Zombie maze is back, that was a seriously sick maze.

Exactly what I've been thinking... Plus the graveyard that is the unused space behind Terminator. Who knows, the reason they moved Mr. Six's Dance Coaster to it's new location could be due to some new plans. It will be sad to see Deja Vu go, but if a nice ride takes it's place I'll be excited. That is, as long as it's not a GCI wooden coaster that's taller than Apocinator by 50 feet.

Sorry, I had no idea that you had tested so thoroughly and you had already predetermined what you wanted. Please don't think I'm trying to question your professionalism, I was just trying to suggest ideas but I now see that you already got all your bases covered. Video is a huge part of my life and I always try to help out others in video related matters, it's in my nature. I also think that sometimes I'm more knowledgeable than anybody else... I guess sometimes my nature goes too far and jumps the gun in helping, so sorry about that. No offense taken what-so-ever, I'll be looking forward to the final result.

Oh well in that case you could definitely render out in .h264 and you'd get a lot smaller file sizes with minimal quality loss. AVI tends to be really big, especially uncompressed. I just rendered a 10 second clip at 720x480 uncompressed and my file size came out to 240mb and then I rendered the same 10 second file using a .MP4 container at 720X480 and it came out to 8.46mb.

Oh alright just thought I'd ask to be safe. But actually I just remembered about some an open source codec that's actually the best of the .h264 codecs and it's called x264. It can render right from Premier I believe and it compresses the crap out of files but it still holds the same quality. I'm actually editing a video right now so I'll do a few renders and compare just because I'm interested now! And are you using AVI files and putting them on the Blu-Rays?

^Sure, it upscales. But that actually doesn't matter because all it's doing is making the picture bigger to fit within the 1920x1080 pixels instead of the 720x480 that an SD display is. There's no real "upscaling" going on that I'm aware of other than the fact it's just making the picture fit. What Robb is doing is giving us a higher bitrate which in turn gives out a higher quality picture. The absolute MAX bitrate you can squeeze out of a DVD is 9.8 Mb/s and that's without any audio. Basically Robb making the bitrate almost 3x higher (because the Blu-Ray format allows it) which in turn makes the picture a heck of a lot cleaner (as seen by some of the pictures Robb has shown). So to sum it all up, upscaling doesn't matter if the source isn't too great, it just makes the flaws more noticeable. However if you feed the upscaling player a really nice source then it will naturally look a lot better. Random side note: I find it really funny when people make a huge deal over the frame size of video. People think that if it's not in "HD" it's garbage, but in reality I've seen SD videos look better than HD ones because the HD ones had an absolutely terrible bitrates. The instant streaming video off of Netflix comes to mind...

Hey Robb, are you rendering out in MPEG-2 and bumping up the bitrate? If you are, could it be a possibility to render out in .h264 in an .MP4 container? Because you're burning to Blu-Ray, it supports .MP4 files as well as the .h264 codec and it tends to have smaller file sizes then regular MPEG-2. The reason I'm saying this is because theoretically it would be possible to take your SD footage and render it out in .h264 instead of MPEG-2 and you should see a pretty good decrease in file size without seeing any decrease in quality. Then you could possibly fit more files on a single Blu-Ray and reduce the cost of production. This is all purely hypothetical but when I get home I'll test rendering out some footage to a high bitrate MPEG-2 and then compare that file size and quality to a high bitrate .MP4 and see how it stacks up. Hopefully this helps. Then again you might already be doing this...

^I agree that it's too early to make a final condemning judgment o about the park, but a lot of us that have been to the park lately have experienced the same thing, so our lack of positivity isn't truly unfounded. Perhaps this is just the "break in" period for the new management; hopefully it is. However I personally believe that this summer will be a telling sign about how the park is going to look/perform for the next few years (until this management gets replaced ) so I do hope that for the benefit of the park, this summer season is successful and they get their act together. From that video posted it almost looked like Superman almost hit the magnetic brakes up at the top! There was a Superman ride op that used to post on a site and he once got to ride it when it was cranked up to 110 or so and it hit the brakes. That would be a fun experience.

That is indeed the question, but as of now it's so far off I wouldn't even begin to guess what it might be. I'm too anxious to see the final product at DCA that I don't even have time to worry about a 3rd gate. To add a little fuel to the fire, supposedly the resort's "master plan" has been recently revised (I really don't know if that's common or not) so there's definitely something in the works. But for all we know, their might just be cloning Pooh and demoing Tomorrowland, who knows.

^It's definitely going to be an improved park once all is said and done with phase 1, but not sure if it will really be a masterpiece. That's why I'm hoping that there will be a phase 2. Put it this way, if Disney finally gets it right with California Adventure, they can then focus their time and effort into expanding the resort as a whole and maybe even a 3rd gate. Let's just hope that's sooner than later.

If any of the Six Flags parks could run a stand up with 3 trains efficiently, it's SFGAdv. The employees there are opposite of most (not all) of the employees at Magic Mountain, they do their job well. I'm saddened to hear these negative reports about Magic Mountain. I actually visited the park 2 months ago and I got the same vibe that others are describing. It's like they just took a giant step backwards after they had taken so many smaller steps forwards. I'm in Robb's boat though, I'm not writing the park off yet, I might have just had a bad day (it was cold and windy). I'm definitely going back sometime this year to go and ride the new coasters, but I think I'm going to hold off on a season pass. More and more, it seems the less I go to the park, the less I hate it. Hopefully this is just some kind of dry spell at the park since they just had a ton of corporate and park level management changes. It would be nice to see the park I knew in 2009 back again. I'm rooting for you Six Flags.

Somewhere in this thread I believe somebody mentioned that HH is on a "5 year plan" in the sense that they only really get major stuff every 5 years. Hopefully that's not the case moving forward... But I don't think a spinner would really suit Magic Mountain well, it's another low capacity ride in a park that has way too many low capacity rides. Hopefully they'll crank on Green Lantern though because it's going to be really popular. Speaking of which, have any survey markers popped up yet?

I believe that it usually opens around late February to early March, but since it's been down for so long who knows...

Personally I'm most looking forward to the wristband idea. I think it would be really cool and also useful to have an all-inclusive system like the one I think they're talking about. Imagine being able to get a fastpass, buy a meal, and enter/exit the park pretty much hassle free. I always thought the wristband system that the water parks use has been wonderful, now apply that to Disney, but on a grander scale. Glad to see Disney embracing technology.

^You're one of the few.