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Information

• Member: Deathscythe_Animated
• Studio: Deathscythe Animated
• Title: Heaven's Coming Down
• Premiered: 2006-03-19
• Categories:
  • Action
  • Character Profile
  • Horror
• Song:
  • Iced Earth The Hunter
• Anime:
  • Genocyber
• Comments: The Direct Link is up now, please use it whenever possible. This will save the ORG some bandwidth...which is money!
  
  General: Aaaah...and so it begins. This video will mark two different occasions. The first being the fact that I haven't entered a video in quite a few months. Almost a year I believe. The second, this will be the last video I will create in Movie Maker 2. With several years of editing under my belt with Movie Maker, I think it's time to retire it. Therefore, I've made my best efforts push Movie Maker to its absolute limits. Relying heavily on Rehans pan and zoom effects, Movie Maker was choking on them towards the end, nevertheless I kept shoving more and more effects down it's throat. But I'm proud of it, it only froze up four times, and then only when it was autosaving, so I never ended up losing more than a few minutes worth of work. One last praise about Movie Maker...it rendered beautifully.
  
  Plot and Story: I'm not going to go to much into this. I would just like to note the I went to great pain to match not only the action to the song, but the lyrics to the video. In my opinion, I did an awesome job, but right now I'm exhausted(been working the past 12 hours straight editing), and I could be wrong. I also could be missing some things, but I don't think so.
  
  Here are the lyrics for The Hunter:
  
  Iced Earth - The Hunter Lyrics
  
  A force of light an angel
  Sent through time to destroy
  Avenging the dark ones
  Descending angelic force
  
  Heaven sent the hunter
  Her mission to crucify
  Slay the hellborn
  His offspring demonic force
  
  Chorus
  
  Descending from heaven
  The angel sworn to bring him down
  The hunter the thunder
  The wrath of heavens comin' down
  
  She swore an oath, an allegiance
  Armageddon is in sight
  To be the thorn in the devils back
  To make him weak, the final fight
  
  Repeat Chorus
  
  
  Technical: Wow, let me tell ya, there is nothing more difficult than editing clips in Movie Maker with a trackball mouse and a half a case of Mt. Dew in you. Especially when Movie Maker decides to get choppy. But all in all it was fun creating this video. As I stated earlier, I used Rehan's pan/zoom effects rather heavily throughout the video. I figured rather than just having dull flat straight old scenes, I'd shake 'em up a bit. It creates quite a satisfying effect.
  
  The amount of time I spent on this project is enormous. It's been about 7weeks since I got the idea to make this video. The idea started with wanting to use Genocyber, an anime a lot people don't seem to know about...to make an AMV. That was all I had originally to go on, I had no ideas on what song I would use or how I would accomplish the colossal task. Eventually I decided to start with some research. I bet I've spent about 50-60 hours alone scouring the forums for any type of insight into just about any aspect of creating AMV's. I started with video quality. I found a particularly useful guide after a while on deinterlacing and encoding using AviSynth and Vdub. What cool about it is you end up using Divx and Huffyuv to encode your video. But I just had one problem, Genocyber is old, and it didn't look like the did a very good job creating the DVD's, the source footage was good but it wasn't excellent. It's a bit grainy. But still it isn't too bad deinterlaced. What impresses me is that Movie Maker was able to encode the project with no perceptible loss in quality! In fact, the quality in the final version at some points was actually smoother! At any rate, video quality took up about 15-hours of that forum browsing time. Another twenty hours was used for getting a handle for what people seemed to want for music. I didn't ask straight out or even hint at it, I just observed. I found that a lot of people enjoyed music that was catchy, something they could pick up on after a few seconds. Another trait is of course how often is the song used in AMV's and on the radio. Do people appreciate plot? Should it make sense? Wait...I did ask for song suggestions, forgot about that, but it didn't really help. So with this info in hand, I started perusing my music collection. Certainly I could find something unique in 4000 song library? Famous last words...I ended up spending about 40 hours listening to a bunch of music. Sometimes I would listen to a song over and over again trying to imagine the AMV in my mind. I had finally narrowed it down to two songs, System of a Down's - Hypnotise and A Perfect Circle's Beatles cover - Imagine. Hypnotise I listened to over and over again, I love the song, but I ended up tossing it out because it was a bit overused. Imagine got canned because it wasn't heavy enough and I couldn't think of a way to make it fit with Genocyber. Again I listened to hundreds of songs but nothing jumped out at me. In the middle of this, I had found out that my grandfather had passed away, which was difficult for me to say the least. When I got back home from the memorial, I started listening to one of my favorite band...Iced Earth. I threw all the songs in a playlist, popped my headphones on and jammed. A little while later, while sorting through my sad meandering mind, The Hunter came on, a song I had never listend to before. It wasn't a bolt of lightening, but a slow travelling realisation accompanied by a resounding spinal chill as I listend intently to the lyrics. It was funny, because I closed my eyes and while I listened to the song, a weird form of relief settled over me. I couldn't imagine AMV itself, but I could imagine the potential. So I took the idea and ran with it. The rest of the time in the forum was used for gathering opinions. I would like to thank these people for helping me out, the members that opinioned my videos gave me invaluable information on how I could improve my AMV's. Hopefully I've learned from my past mistakes. We shall see.
  
  Pre-production: This of course, I had been doing off and on for several weeks, mostly this was just taking the raw DVD footage of Genocyber and encoding the scenes I selected into Huffyuv via Vdub. A time consuming process to say the least, but worth it due to the fact that it saved me from even more time on weeding out the unwanted footage in Movie Maker, it's interface just isn't precise enough for that. I think this is the main reason why some of my other videos didn't turn out to well, too much footage to work with. With Vdub I could makes sure that there was no ghosting in the beginning and end frames of a scene. This had caused me some serious trouble with one video in partucular...Castles in the Sky. Movie Maker just doesn't cut them right. (10-15 Hours.)
  
  Production: The production (Editing) of the video itself took around 20 hours. It was a painstaking process through and through. I'll bet there are over 2000 scene change edits. All done by hand with a trackball mouse...lol. I only had one big problem with editing this video...I got stuck at 2:27 where a difficult part of the song popped up. I didn't think it would be that difficult. So while sat and thought about the problem. I went back and made some serious changes to the beginning of the video (thank god!). Unfortunately as I was making changes, I had made my way through the whole vid up to 2:27 again. Finally, I figured out that I just didn't have enough footage. So I went back into Vdub and pulled some more scenes that I had missed my first time through. Finally armed with enough footage, I went back and started chipping away and my nearly minute long nemesis. This part actually turned out to be one of my favorites. Eventually, I was nearing the end of the song, After I had gotten over that last hump, everything settled into its place...ideas were coming in almost faster than I could manage them. But then, as it always does, I ran out of song. I ended us spending an hour backing up the footage so that I could fit in my original idea of what the ending should be. All this while trying to maintain the delicate clip/sync balance. Tada, I found a few scenes that were erroneous, I quickly deleted them and made a beautiful ending...err, well, depending on the type of person you are...
  
  Post-production: Slapped on some dramatic text came up with a cool title and let Movie Maker work its magic. (1 hour)
  
  Video Description: (2 hours)
  
  Total time spent on this project: (123-138 hours)
  
  Programs and Codecs used:
  
  Windows XP Profession with SP2
  Windows Movie Maker 2
  Rehan's Pan/Zoom Effects
  AviSynth
  Virtual Dub
  Acoustica Audio Mixer (for .mp3 to .wav convert)
  DVD2AVI
  DVD Decrypter
  Huffyuv
  Divx 4.12
  .WMV
  
  Special Thanks to:
  
  VicBond007 (for making the most useful video preperation guide I've ever seen!)
  Phade
  Everyone who had given me and op over the past few weeks.
  Iced Earth
  Pwolf (for inspiring me with maple syrup and good videos)
  Iced Earth (Awesome Music!)
  Rehan
  LightPriestess (Nozomi Shuurai) (for the most informative op I've gotten to date...thank you!)
  Mountain Dew (for keeping me awake all this time!)
  ...and last but not least...Solarus (for paying me the money for my toys!)