SS5_Majin_Bebi wrote:Yeh, its bad. Downloaded source is never a good thing. Primarily because no matter how good it looks at first, it always winds up lookin like shit. Plus, people seem to love good ol' DivX 3.11 MPEG-4 don't they, and this evil little bitch of a codec makes Adobe Premiere forget it exists, or it crashes it, or it fucks up your system.
Good way to go is capturing with a high quality capture card, and an even better way to go is getting a DVD-ROM (going for less than AU$60 these days) ripping the footage (from DVD, obviously), seeing if you can get AVIsynth to work for you (incessant failure for me; i dont know why, I think my copy of DVD2AVI is fuggered [that was not a typo. "fuggered"="fuckin buggered"]) and editing the VOB's like a bitch on speed. If AVIsynth dont work, just compress the VOB's with like, XviD set to 100% or something. Its not really lossless, but if you don't know what to spot, it will seem that way.
Hope that helps.
Even better than that, try compressing your files into MJPEG. They'll be big files, but it's a fast little codec that makes editing a lot more comfortable. Then when you're ready to export, shove the MJPEGs into a hidden folder, load up your project file, and when Premiere asks you where your source is, point it to your nice shiny AVISynth scripts. Use AVISynth to reference the DivX files, and Premiere shouldn't give you grief ^_^
Note about downloaded footage: Yeah, it's never the best idea, but if the anime you're using is in very limited distribution, DVDs may not be available and fansub-VHS will look even worse. In my third AMV, I had no choice but to use downloaded source because
One Piece's licensing status is still up in the air (Damn you, Funimation, DAMN YOU TO HELL!!! >.<). Using the available filters in VirtualDub, I actually got it to look just shy of DVD quality for the most part.
See for yourself. I figured there wasn't much point in buying bootleg HK DVDs when I can just download the episodes. Sure, it's still questionable ethics, but at least my money isn't supporting the bootlegging ring
