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Information

• Member: RutKiskasca
• Studio: Kiskasca Productions
• Title: dothack - Out of Control
• Premiered: 2004-05-08
• Categories:
  • Action
  • Character Profile
• Song:
  • Hoobastank Out of Control
• Anime:
  • .hack//SIGN
• Comments: I hesitate to say this, because you may choose not to view the AMV, but this is my first attempt at an AMV. I have all sorts of creative ideas for AMV's I would like to do, but it was important to me to choose an anime and a song that hadn't already been done to death...so I forced myself to put down the Neon Genesis Evangelion box set and moved over to .Hack//Sign.
  
  Technical Details -
  
  I used the song as the predominant guidance for the creative effort. I listened to the song umpteen million times, and transcribed out the rhythm and lyrics in musical score form, and wrote down time references for each bar, at 1.537 seconds per bar. I used Smartripper to pull VOB files off the DVDs, and went through each episode in DVD2AVI, pulling out clips varying in length from 1-15 seconds, and saving them in folders organized by episode, thereby creating a "palette" of .avi clips to "paint" the story of my video from. (possible mistake #1 - I wanted to get uncompressed clips, but I couldn't figure out how to do that with the software, so I used DivX 5.0.5 to compress the clips. I think that caused me headaches later)
  
  I used Adobe AfterEffects 5.5 (production bundle) to edit the AMV. I had never even seen this editor, so it was a learn on the fly experience. I also learned on the fly that my motherboard is starting to suffer from alzheimers, and has forgotten how to recognize 2/3 of its available DRAM slots, so I have 2 Gb of DDR taking up space in a drawer in my closet, and 512 Mb slowly smoldering in the box. rrrggg. After much tweaking and prodding, and watching everything Ian Roberts has ever done to inspire me to not be poopy and lazy, I gradually discovered the absolute basics of the software, and came out with a video that I was very happy with (albeit only viewable 45 seconds at a time in RAM preview. Now, to render.
  
  Rendering was where I had all my headaches. As I attempted to maintain video quality while keeping the file size manageable, I rendered the video about 20 times, with results varying between a 12 Mb video the size of a postage stamp that looked like Rorsarch after a fifth of tequila, to a 5.1 Gb stuttering monster that caused my CPU to climb out of the box , walk over to the window, and start licking it furiously. Also, it seemed that no matter what I did, I had buffer problems. When viewed with windows media player, it seemed that no variation on rendering approaches could prevent occasional stuttering lag of playback, like the player was clearing out the cache four times or so during playback. I tried reducing framerate, audio sample rate and quality, changing codecs, pre-rendering compositions uncompressed, and compressing the final movie, and vice versa. It seemed that there was some sort of compression error that may have stemmed from my choice of compression methods when selecting clips in DVD2AVI. I was, however, able to burn the video onto a VCD to show a friend on his DVD player, and it worked beautifully. I am hoping that the video playback issues on my computer are the result of my glitchy motherboard, and that you will not have any problems viewing it. I will attempt to revisit this problem, and would appreciate any feedback more experienced AMV artists may provide.
  
  Thank yous -
  
  A million thanks to Absolute Destiny and Ermac for their comprehensive guides. My future projects should be much cleaner, as I continue to study your information, as well as your videos. Just on the basis of your guidance and expertise, I have learned what I know today from near zero knowledge two weeks ago.
  
  Enigmagic Studios, NHMK, Big Big Truck, Doki Doki, K-Type, and Jon Schellenger for loads of beautiful, emotionally moving, inspiring work. I love this new interest in my life because I want to creat projects that are as amazing as yours.
  
  Enjoy, and wish me luck.