Noobie AMV pitfalls - advice from the veterans?

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Postby LenWidleheyt » Sat May 14, 2005 4:16 pm

OmniStrata wrote:Standard music works around beats of 8. Sometimes they're fast, sometimes they're slow... But if you can work with multiples of 8 [cut on every 1st, 2nd, 4th, beat] then you've got yourself a working amv with good synchro that won't bore the audience. If you ever want a scene to be 8 beats long, let's hope it's a scene worth having at 8 beats long...


This is sort of how I think as well. I usually try to make a storyboard divided into groups of 8 lines, like this:

-___04 (<- bar #)
- Wind me [1st beat in bar]
- Up,
- put me
- down [4th beat in bar]
- start me
- up and
- watch
-___05 me go [8th beat in bar]
-

And add the lyrics. Some might think this is overdone. It's a hassle to make, but it means you have to listen through the song very carefully to map it out and count all the beats, which means you learn the song very well. And you'd be surprised how much this kind of storyboard helps! It's great for putting down ideas for particular scenes in advance, before you start editing a video (maybe even before you have the source for it).

It also gives you a great overview over a video. You might have a great idea for one of the choruses, and at first you don't think it will matter which chorus you use that idea for. However, planning out the video like this makes you see how the whole song fits together, and you find that using a certain idea for a certain chorus has an impact on the parts of the song just before and just after it. This could mean you want to rearrange or rethink some scenes to make them fit better together, or it could even give you completely new ideas about interesting transitions between scenes that you wouldn't have thought of otherwise. On the whole, it makes you think of your video as a whole that needs to fit together tastefully.

Of course, this will not work for everyone. But even if you think it sounds like too much work, I really recommend doing it at least once; you won't notice the advantages until you try it out.
/ Len Anarchimedes Widleheyt
:arrow: <i>"Why is it called tourist season if we can't shoot at them?"</i>
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Postby MomochiZabuza » Sat May 14, 2005 4:56 pm

Scintilla wrote:Make sure to compress your audio.


Someone should've told me that :P
Yes I am God

http://www.animemusicvideos.org/members ... hp?v=67903
... apparently it's awesome
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Postby khyron » Mon Jun 27, 2005 7:08 am

Okay, please don't think me impudent for adding 2 cents to this thread as a n00bie editor myself and not a "vetran" (or feel free to delete my post if this qualifies as off topic) but I've read all four pages of this informative post and so far nobody has mentioned my own personal pet peeve about AMV's so here it is...

Be aware of the Original Aspect Ratio (OAR) of your sources and process your video accordingly!

This incorporates several "pitfalls" that seemingly both "vets" and n00bies seem to fall into - please nobody get mad but the reason I say this is that I have seen some AMAZING videos that obviously involved serious talent which were ruined (for me) by:

- "chopping heads" from full screen content
- clipping half of a face to face scene from "wide" content
- sporadically mixing 2.35:1, 1.85:1, and 1.33:1 content
- displaying content from an anamorphic DVD incorrectly

The last seems to be the most prevalent. Please folks, look at the characters in your final output. Before you put your excellent work online or show it at a content, make sure people don't look thin and distorted, or that circular objects like the moon are not oblong. This isn't difficult to fix, it's certainly not as complex an issue as interlacing or lip-flapping, yet this so frequently seems to go unnoticed by editors.

Also admittedly the mixing of OAR's in AMV content is probably agruably a subjective thing, but I will throw in that speaking just for myself and a couple dozen friends who are AMV fanatics (if not creators) it really bothers some people, unless the video is actually supposed to be totally "silly" or something. Definately a mood killer and a distraction from serious work.
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Postby jasper-isis » Mon Jun 27, 2005 9:20 am

khyron wrote:Be aware of the Original Aspect Ratio (OAR) of your sources and process your video accordingly!


Zoom player can fix aspect ratio on the fly. :D
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Postby khyron » Mon Jun 27, 2005 9:44 am

Jasper-Isis wrote:
khyron wrote:Be aware of the Original Aspect Ratio (OAR) of your sources and process your video accordingly!


Zoom player can fix aspect ratio on the fly. :D


That's cool, and many playback devices and software (and even some hardware, like my Sony WEGA television) can do various things to "correct" aspect ratio during playback...

...however as an editor, do you really want to demand of your viewer to "figure out" how to watch your content?

Also, this doesn't help when a video has mixed footage some of which is fine and some of which is incorrectly imported from an anamorphic source. I commonly see this happen when someone wants to mix a related TV show and movie and the movie is anamorphic while the TV show is not.
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Postby jasper-isis » Mon Jun 27, 2005 10:17 am

khyron wrote:...however as an editor, do you really want to demand of your viewer to "figure out" how to watch your content?

No. That's why I always use the correct AR. :)
[However, I can't speak for the editors here who purposely use obscure codecs to prove goodness knows what point. >__>]

Seriously, advice or no advice, this problem is hardly as "taboo" as, say, left-in subtitles. Unless three or four people make an outcry whenever a video with incorrect AR is released, most of the culprits aren't going to change their ways anytime soon.
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