Kevin Caldwell Set The Standard...Now I'm Gonna Break It...

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Postby The_Mad_Hatter » Tue Dec 03, 2002 9:04 pm

Dannywilson wrote:I can give quotes from the amount of opinions I have on my videos all day long, that doesn't make them true. I had one reviewer that fucking compared me with KC, :roll: and honest to god, I think that person was smoking crack when they reviewed the video. There's a point when good flattery ends, and asskissing begins.


I usually judge opinions by what the opinion giver is capable of themselves...which is why SSJVegita0609's opinion doesn't mean much to me...not after I watched his Berserk/Needles video...that was just...beyond garbage, I couldn't even sum up the effort to finish watching the video and I was trying REALLY hard to be impartial about it.

Although I will stop short of saying it's the worst video I've seen. There was this one guy who made a DBZ music video (with Linkin Park), he used like downloaded off of KaZaA Real Media footage and basically didn't do any editing at all, just took the whole segment of video where Goku goes SSJ4 and slapped the music in. o_O
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Postby klinky » Tue Dec 03, 2002 9:07 pm

Mad Hater, I think your time is better spent working on your video then replying to the masses. Spend your time making it and then prove the l33tness of the video. All you have here is word, we need video.. Once the video is made, then these people will hush up. You can't prove anything with nothing ^_^


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Postby The_Mad_Hatter » Tue Dec 03, 2002 9:10 pm

Dannywilson wrote:Ok, just for that, you're getting an opinion. An HONEST opinion. I reviewed your video impartially, and also read the Author's comments section through twice just to make sure I hadn't missed any more of your wonderful little secret comments. I reviewed your video impartially, but if you keep making enemys on this board dude, I can't say that for all of them.


Thanks for the opinion, now you won't go to the special hell. ^_^

And personally I don't care if I make "enemies" on this board or any other. Cause when it comes right down to it, only one side is gonna care...and it's not gonna be me.

As I've said in another post, I'm 8 shades of ass blistering reality coupled with a few sharp bitch slaps of hard biting sarcasm. I also frequently misuse and abuse my knowledge and skill in the art of social engineering and psychology. That's just me though, and I'm not about to try and change who I am cause I might upset some lil spastically hormonal seventh grader strung out on pixie stixs.

In fact I actually prefer more negative critiques on my work, it helps to create the illusion that I'm always capable of doing better, that there's always a new plateau to be reached.
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Postby The_Mad_Hatter » Tue Dec 03, 2002 9:11 pm

klinky wrote:Mad Hater, I think your time is better spent working on your video then replying to the masses. Spend your time making it and then prove the l33tness of the video. All you have here is word, we need video.. Once the video is made, then these people will hush up. You can't prove anything with nothing ^_^


~klinky


Um...I am working on the video. The hardest and most boring part too, clip harvesting. I'm up to episode 16 already! Couple more days straight of this and I should get through most of em. ^_^

Every time I get a clip segment though it takes a good 5 minutes to encode on my machine, so I spend that time making replies.
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Postby Dannywilson » Tue Dec 03, 2002 9:13 pm

[quote="The_Mad_Hatter] But then, more than anyone else, I made the video for me...not you or anyone else.[/quote]

Then why even have the video up for download? Why post the videos up on this site? Why even start this thread if you are making these videos for yourself? You seem to like the criticism you're getting, be it constructive or not, so why say such an obvious lie? Either say something you don't contradict in 3 pages, or just admit that you're an attention whore.
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Postby The Non-Professional » Tue Dec 03, 2002 9:17 pm

Dannywilson wrote:[quote="The_Mad_Hatter] But then, more than anyone else, I made the video for me...not you or anyone else.


Then why even have the video up for download? Why post the videos up on this site? Why even start this thread if you are making these videos for yourself? You seem to like the criticism you're getting, be it constructive or not, so why say such an obvious lie? Either say something you don't contradict in 3 pages, or just admit that you're an attention whore.[/quote]

OH FUCKING SNAP!!!!! :D :D :D :D :D
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Postby The_Mad_Hatter » Tue Dec 03, 2002 9:22 pm

Dannywilson wrote:Then why even have the video up for download?


Because I believe that somewhere there is someone, who might think just a lil bit like me, and they'll really enjoy the video in the way that I enjoy the video.

Why even start this thread if you are making these videos for yourself?


I believe I already answered that in another post. I make videos not just for my own personal entertainment, but also to increase my skill in video editing, using you to crituque my work allows me to get better.

As for "getting attention", LOL, trust me, that's not something that's very hard to do when I'm being myself. Unlike most people I have more than one reason for the things I do. Usually there's one or two primary goals but there are also a lot of smaller reasons along the way, entertainment is certainly always a highlight.

I mean aren't you enjoying this? It's like our own lil episode of 90210! ^_^
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Postby Ashyukun » Tue Dec 03, 2002 11:02 pm

The_Mad_Hatter wrote:It's a nice lil clip, I'm mainly interested in what people think of the lil spot of lip synch. Does it look too perfect? Should I do what that other guy suggested and make it less than perfect? The rest of the clip doesn't matter since I've already changed it around. Like I didn't like how Sakura's outfit didn't match what she was wearing in the other clips...so I changed it.


OK, I've had a chance to go through and pick through the clip. I converted it over into a MJPEG .avi so I could look at it in premiere (since Premiere won't do mpegs frame-accurate). I also blew it up to twice its original size to get a better look at the mouth flaps. Hopefully that didn't cause any of the problems I see.

First off, without getting nitpicky, and possible attitude problems :roll: aside, the clip does look quite good. It has potential, and I'd probably say if you had presented it in a less abrasive manner people just might be complimenting you on it. I realize this was not what you wanted- but I do have to say that I think if you asked people (politely) to rip something to shreds and tell you exactly what is wrong with or that they don't like about something, they'll probably oblige you. But, to each their own.

Getting down to picking nits. I have to agree with 'Z (I believe it was him) in that I think the blink in the section of sitting on the grass didn't look right. It just doesn't look like it belongs- very much like it was added in.

I like the 'spinning background crossfade', for lack of a better term. I assume (hopefully correctly) that the change in background was something you put it in (not the face to, I'm assuming, having not seen the series, her mother). If I'm right- it does look quite nice. If that's straight out of the series, it's a neat scene. Anyway- the edge around Sakura when the other character in the background seems, well, too well defined. (of course, if this was all straight, unedited footage, I'm obviously being -way- too critical :oops:)

The lip-syncing. I'm not an expert at it, by any stretch- I've been pacing myself, and my first (real) attempt at lipsync will be after I'm done with the NES and MI project vids- but it looks (and sounds) just a little bit off to me. The mouth movements looked just a little bit behind the audio. So I played around a bit, and at least to my ears and eyes, it looks and sounds better with the audio shifted to be 1/15 of a second later. I remember reading somewhere around here that our eyes and ears don't sync up perfectly, and a cut or motion that falls exactly on the sound will appear to be late by a split second, and you need to 'lead' the video by a very slight bit to make it be perceived as being in sync. That would appear to be the problem here. As for the lip-flaps being perfect, they look good enough to me (timing aside). As best as I can figure looking at my own lips (reflected in a CD-RW, my wife doesn't feel like finding her hand-mirror for me), it's pretty good.

As for the thumb-sucking (all puns and innuendo aside), it is neat- but again, does look just a bit off. First off, her shoulder should be moving as well- assuming there isn't a 'telescoping arm' Clow card :wink:. Also, the thumb and area around it and the line on the sleeve where it looks like you extended the arm frame-by-frame are noticeably fuzzier and less defined than the rest of the outlines on her.


I'd say unintentional ones too. Like I didn't even notice it up until a couple hours ago but the in the first clip, with the birds flying, the change in music right as the last bird stops gliding and starts flapping it's wings. I didn't even mean to do that. ^_^


I'm not seeing that, sorry :/ My current best example of what I'm talking about is in More Than Toast's "A Thousand Miles" (this time I checked, you should be able to download it. In addition to the very obvious (and IMO, very cool) piano effect, there is a very very cool but totally un-noticeable effect at almost the very end of the video that anyone who's not seen WotH probably won't even realize is an effect.

I'm sorry I didn't realize AD didn't have the ArimaShinjikun video up for download anymore- though I can't say I'm totally surprised- I'd bet his bandwidth bills for that video alone are staggering. Search around the P2Ps for it- it's worth the disc space. I'd offer to send it to you, but I know my upsteam transfer rate sucks hard.

o_O

No that wasn't CCS, that was CC. I feel sorry for you...I mean you actually sat through a whole episode of Cardcaptors? *shudder* If it was possible to rip a soul out of somebody...what Nelvana did to the Cardcaptor Sakura anime would be a good comparison.


I was curious, and I've not watched any more of it. I figured it was better to give it a chance than to dismiss it completely off the bat.

Still needs a bit of tweaking. *SNIP* Using that information it'd be able to do a near perfect job of covering it without making any mistakes....haven't quite got it that far yet. Programming isn't exactly my forte.


By the sound of it, you're better at it than I am. It sounds like (the font reverse-matching aside) it works much like the logo-removal filter for VirtualDub.

Actually upon closer inspection they're actually 544x400. Anime-Galaxy DVD to MPEG4 rips.


Weird. I thought that all DVDs were encoded to 720x480. Given the clip you put up is 352x240, I would think that it did start out that way. But, you would know what you're working in better than I...

Nah, I've found the format doesn't matter, if it's bigger than 352x240 it'll start frame skipping...


Actually, I was thinking more in terms of how fast you could convert/encode the video- what you said was taking lots and lots of time. If the MJPEG compression took less time, it might be better for you...
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Re: Kevin Caldwell Set The Standard...Now I'm Gonna Break It

Postby XStylus » Wed Dec 04, 2002 12:20 am

Kevin Caldwell Set The Standard...


Ye gods. That sounds hauntingly like my very first post to the AMV mailing list back in August of 2000. I subsequently got my ass handed to me on a rusty platter for that post too.

That post and the subsequent posts afterward have been the embarassment of my existance.
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Postby Professional 666 » Wed Dec 04, 2002 2:22 pm

Man who stand on toilet, high on pot.
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Postby The_Mad_Hatter » Wed Dec 04, 2002 2:53 pm

Professional 666 wrote:Man who stand on toilet, high on pot.


Man who stick head in toilet, pot head. ^_^

OY...well I finished most of the clip harvesting yesterday (well up to 25 ep anyway). So then I started work on one of the lip synch segments. Only at some point I got this crazy idea to do something near impossible, nearly scrapped it, but then kept trudging away for 6 hours straight and found that I can actually do it and it looks really cool. Then I slept for 4 hours and now I'm up and ready to have at it again. Wheew...labor intensive and hard, but it is a lot of fun, I think I'll order pizza later on as a treat. ^_^

In case anyone wants to see the work in progress.
http://webpages.charter.net/mad_hatter/test.mpg

Far from finished with it though, there's still like 4 more frame segments that need to be added, plus I'm going to have her mother blink at some point, and I wanna do a sorta ghost like fade in, maybe throw in some kind of sparkle effect to it. Then once that's done I have to go through the finished clip sequence and add lip synching for the line, "I wanna mom to tuck me in at night and chase the monsters away".

The other thing I'll probably do is run a soften filter or .5 gause filter over the arm movement to make it blend better, cause it looks a lil too aliased as it is.

Any new suggestions or ideas?
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Postby Vlad G Pohnert » Wed Dec 04, 2002 3:38 pm

watched your sequence, couple of suggestions comments. What program are you using to overlay the characters? It looks like your using photoshop and cutting each frame seperatly.

This kind of effect is best done in After Effects which would make it go much faster as well. But assuming you dont have the program, Photoshop can work as well but will take much more time to look convincing. (I've done it both ways in my videos).

Some of the edges still needs work since they are a big too rough and still contain a few pixels of the background being cut out. best is not to blur the whole image since it will not match the other one even more, but to manually blur just the edges a bit so the the character blends in.

The other big giveway is the different lighting of both characters. This is bar fat the hardest part to make it look convincing but it required otherewise the whole thing still looks like an overlap rather than a natural scene. Try to darken the "Mother" Character to match the more darker bed scene. You'll have to play around with brightness/contrast/saturation and color balance settings to make it work.

The gost ideas will work and would help in making the overlay more convincing. (I used the same concept and it turned out great).

I can simpathize with the amount of time this takes, I did a whole video with 2/3 of the footage being overlays of three characters and that took well over 300+ hours to do. I've now developed faster methods to work with masks that would cut the time down and do something like this sequence in about 2-3 hours.... Keep experimenting and see what you come up with!

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Postby Chef » Wed Dec 04, 2002 4:24 pm

um...if its generally agreed that kevin caldwell was the best, then wouldnt he not be the standerd but more like the holy grail or something? or am i just stupid?
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Postby The_Mad_Hatter » Wed Dec 04, 2002 4:35 pm

Chef wrote:um...if its generally agreed that kevin caldwell was the best, then wouldnt he not be the standerd but more like the holy grail or something? or am i just stupid?


LOL, don't take the subject line so seriously, it was sorta meant as a joke and sorta meant to attract harsher critiques.

And I don't really think there is a single defined AMV which is truly the best, because really an AMV is only as good as the meaning it has to an individual. One persons gold is another persons garbage.

I believe that an AMV can be judged as far as quality of capture, sound, editing, originality, and the effort put into it, but emotion isn't math, so precision and accuracy aren't always the most important things.

That's just my opinion. *shrugs*
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Postby Koopiskeva » Wed Dec 04, 2002 4:38 pm

yep.. I'm forever stuck in the 'looks cool to me' phase :roll:
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