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Information

• Member: Cyrix
• Title: Prayer of the Undead King
• Premiered: 2006-09-07
• Categories:
  • Action
  • Drama
  • Serious
• Song:
  • E Nomine Vater Unser
• Anime:
  • Hellsing
• Comments: Update: I just realized the aspect ratio is slightly off in this video... I'm not sure how I didn't notice before. There's a few other changes I need to make, I'll upload a fixed version with those changes sometime in the future. If you have VLC Player, change the aspect ratio to 4:3 and it will display correctly.
  
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  This is my first AMV, but I have quite a bit of editing experience and it shouldn't feel like a first. I did this together with my friend Tyson Rapp. I did all the actual editing but he provided a lot of input and ideas and contributed a lot to the final product. The song is probably overused, but I like it, and I haven't done anything with it yet. I hope it doesn't bother viewers.
  
  Technical Details
  All right, technical details first. This was edited in Adobe Premiere 2.0 with raw footage I got directly off of the DVDs myself with VLC Player. The first full cut took about three days (20 hours?) to finish (including ripping and converting the raws) but additional tinkering took up so much more time that the total is probably close to 40 hours.
  
  This uses basically all of the first episode and half of the third episode. There's a few clips from other episodes but the video is sequential rather than "random" clips.
  
  Experience
  The first half of the video went very quickly and I was happy with how it turned out, but it took me a lot longer to figure out where to go after I finshed off the first episode. After we did decide, we got stuck again on the slow part a little more than halfway through. I love how that turned out though.
  
  One of the hardest parts was choosing where to go after Alucard initially defeats Alexander. The episode doesn't really go anywhere after that, so I was trying to go to another scene, but Tyson and I agreed it just felt random. Eventually I decided to just cut a short chunk out of the end of the song and that solved the problem nicely. The missing piece isn't noticable at all unless you're familiar with the song.
  
  After we were essentially finished, Tyson and I kept watching it and finding little details that we didn't like and wanted to change. Thus, we kept improving it little by little, far past the point where I originally thought it couldn't get any better than it was. I'm very glad we did this as I feel it greatly improved the final product.
  
  Lip Sync
  This video contains a lot of lip sync. Ironically, I originally hadn't intended to include any synching at all. I don't generally like lip synching, or perhaps a better way to say it is that I feel it is generally done poorly and inappropriately. I've also seen female characters synched to male voices, which is sort of disturbing.
  
  Anyway, when I got to the first part of the song where lip-synching occurs, I wasn't sure what kind of footage to use for that slower part of the song. Since I was at about the point I ended up at (where Alucard has just finished killing the zombies and is talking to the priest) I figured I might as well try making it look like he's saying the lyrics to the priest. In some places, I didn't really have to do much work to get the footage to look synched, but in other parts I had to manually sync each syllable. It was a lot of work but it was worth it, in my opinion. It worked far better than I'd hoped and I'm quite happy with it. I was happy enough with it to do it again later in the song.
  
  Lyrics
  A side note, as far as I've been able to discern from translation websites, the lyrics are the Lord's Prayer in German (hence the title of the video). The title of the song means "Our Father", which is also the beginning of the Lord's Prayer.
  
  Closing
  A last technical note, Premiere would render the raw files differently every single time I rendered them (they skip and stutter in different places). This is the most annoying thing I've ever experienced while editing. I ended up having to convert most of the clips, which took up a lot of additional hard drive space. This is my first time using Premiere (I'm used to Final Cut Pro) and personally I think Premiere sucks in comparison to FCP, but then it's probably my best option for my Windows laptop.
  
  Anway, working on this AMV was a lot of fun and very rewarding, and I've glad to be able to share it with others.
  
  -Kevin Foley