AMV Best of DVD Collection - possible sales and fundraiser?

[Scintilla]

And to further add to the confusion, I'd like to point out that the AMVs themselves are copyrighted by their authors

[Bote]

I don't care if you collected all seven Draogn Balls and had Shenlon synch up the audio. There's no way you're going to do it correctly on 100% of the videos.

ROFL

But Shenlon would have done it . Plus, I'd ask for 1 000 000 000$ on the org's donation account thus insuring it's exsistence for 1000 years .

[angelx03]

And to further add to the confusion, I'd like to point out that the AMVs themselves are copyrighted by their authors

[koronoru]

I've said it before and I'll say it again:

Copyright infringement is still copyright infringement whether it's for profit or not.

If you make a profit, then the companies are more likely to get annoyed, and you can be sued for more damages, but if you think it's all perfectly legal until you start making money, then you're just kidding yourself.

Note that the "private copying regime" in Canada, which applies to music only, makes things a bit more complicated, and so does the concept of "fair use" in the US - but video is not covered by "private copying" and copying of entire works is not covered by "fair use". So-called "legal fansubs" are just as illegal as so-called "illegal fansubs"; there's an arguable moral difference, but no legal difference. Copyright infringement is still copyright infringement even when it's non-profit. Similarly, Phade's operation of this very server is illegal as heck. I wish him all the best and hope and expect that he won't get in trouble for it, but he's got bigger balls than I have, to do it openly under his real name.

Now, on the actual topic of this thread: You can't create information out of nothing. If you have a 4:3 video you can't convert it into 16:9 and get something that looks better, unless it actually was 16:9 letterboxed into 4:3 in the first place, in which case you can crop out the black bars. Similarly, if the audio is in WMV format you can't re-encode it at a higher bit rate and expect it to magically sound better - the information has been destroyed by the compression process, that's why it's called "lossy" compression. At best you could remove the bad-sounding audio entirely and replace it with a fresh-ripped copy off the CD, but that's error-prone because you have to get exactly the same version the original creator used, which may be difficult on videos like my Butterflies Never Laugh or Mothyre, both of which have edits in the audio, or Perfect Red where there are at least two different versions of the song (same band) in commercial release on different albums and everything will break if you get the wrong one - and, by the way, a lot of the music I use is fairly obscure.

You can't improve the video quality by re-encoding; if that were possible, software would do it automatically all the time. At best you can change the tradeoffs of one kind of artifact for another, without introducing too much additional suckage - but every re-encode costs you something somewhere. You can't get "remastered quality" without actually remastering the video, and that pretty much means getting the original video director to re-make the video with better source and more attention to quality. Changing aspect ratio is an artistic change and requires artistic participation; it's not just a minor format tweak.

The bit about re-mixing 2.0 audio to 5.1 was a joke, right?

[iserlohn]

The bit about re-mixing 2.0 audio to 5.1 was a joke, right?

I would sure as hell hope so.

Arguably, it's not THAT hard to make a fake surround version of a 2.0 song (use soundforge to strip the center channel/overlap, stripped left, stripped right, full left, and full right and then recompile it in ACID), but it's going to sound like shit (to put it mildly). If I didn't have my upstream capped to nonexistant and something better than notebook speakers to work on, I'd throw a quick example together. Then again, for the sake of all our ears, it's probably WAY, WAY, WAY better that I don't.

The only time where this would work properly is if someone was using a track off Marillion's "Anoraknophobia" album (or something you recorded yourself) where the original studio tracks were released to the public and you could do a clean remix from scratch. Then it would actually sound GOOD (provided that you had half an ear for mixing...I'd hate to see what some of the OMG1337VIDEOFXNEEDMORESTARWIPES people would do to perfectly good music if given the opportunity).

I think everyone else has explained all the reasons why this is a very bad idea (besides the "you fucker, where's MY video on that?" one IIRC) by now...

[dark_myuutwo]

Again, like I SAID, this was just an idea. It wasn't a "for sure" thing.

And I suppose that you guys would be right about the original aspect ratio thing (OAR), but there are a few videos that are 16:9 too, it's not limited to just 4:3

And as for the synching of audio, like I said, although some of you doubt it, it IS possible.

The only things that could go wrong, if I were to use a new CD source (or DVD source) to remaster the audio track with before mixing to 5.1, depends solely on the CD and the mastertapes used on the CD.

I'll highlight a problem I am having with one of my videos right now as an example:

For the video "Hinata Rendezvous", which uses Queen's "Seaside Rendezvous", I wanted to use the remastered 5.1 DTS remix from the A Night At The Opera DVD-Audio disc (released in 2002) as the 5.1 mix. However, seeing as it was recorded on an analog multitrack tape, the remastered mix on the DVD-A was transferred at a playback rate (slightly) too fast compared to the CD version from 1991 - reason being is that not all analog tape machines play at the same speed, regardless if they claim to play at 15 IPS (inches per second). If it was recorded digitally it would be no problem. But this is not digital, so it is a problem. I have no problem when using the 1991 CD remaster, but I have a problem with the 2002 DVD-A remaster because it is too fast!


But otherwise, that aside, I have not had any other major problems with any of the other videos except for that one that was a QuickTime MOV file (I mentioned earlier)


And I did not want to make money off of this idea of mine, setting aside that I would need to cover media costs and shipping costs - I wanted to be able to provide people with DVDs of AMVs that they could actually PLAY on their DVD players in high quality.


But again, like I said, it was an idea.

I'm sure it would be a better idea too if I scrapped the 16:9 video option and left the audio as 2.0 or 2.1 instead of 5.1, thus saving data space


What more should I say! LOL

[dark_myuutwo]

Similarly, if the audio is in WMV format you can't re-encode it at a higher bit rate and expect it to magically sound better - the information has been destroyed by the compression process, that's why it's called "lossy" compression. At best you could remove the bad-sounding audio entirely and replace it with a fresh-ripped copy off the CD, but that's error-prone because you have to get exactly the same version the original creator used, which may be difficult on videos like my Butterflies Never Laugh or Mothyre, both of which have edits in the audio, or Perfect Red where there are at least two different versions of the song (same band) in commercial release on different albums and everything will break if you get the wrong one - and, by the way, a lot of the music I use is fairly obscure

See, that's why I said I am using CD's as sources of audio to use as a remastered track.

The only thing I have to worry about is, if I WERE to make this DVD, I'd either have to do it as Dolby Digital or LPCM

The bit about re-mixing 2.0 audio to 5.1 was a joke, right?

Nope

[trythil]

See, that's why I said I am using CD's as sources of audio to use as a remastered track.

The only thing I have to worry about is, if I WERE to make this DVD, I'd either have to do it as Dolby Digital or LPCM

No, the other problem is with edited soundtracks. I guarantee you that you will not be able to duplicate edits exactly.

You could just leave those alone and use the audio track from the AMV. However, if you do that, you run into the same problem that koronoru mentioned.

You could just say "meh, ok, I won't use AMVs with edited audio." That would be fine, except for the fact that many of the top AMVs use edited audio.

I guess you could just try to contact creators for their original tracks, but given the cold reception your idea has received I don't know if you'll get much of a positive response

And I suppose that you guys would be right about the original aspect ratio thing (OAR), but there are a few videos that are 16:9 too, it's not limited to just 4:3

That's no excuse to go converting every video to 16:9.

[DemonSpawn]

And to further add to the confusion, I'd like to point out that the AMVs themselves are copyrighted by their authors

Yeah, I see how that could get that response. Essentially, the audio and video may be copyrighted by someone else, but the work, ideas, etc. are the creator's intellectual property. Of course, it may not hold up in court, but... *shrugs*

I know I may say some whacked-out things sometimes, but I'm seriously not as messed up as I seem.

[dokool]

What more should I say! LOL

How about "I'm sorry I offended so many of you with my bad idea and I'll never do it again?"

The fact that you've managed to get very negative reactions from many of the editors you'd probably go to for videos is an indication that you should leave this idea on the drawing board stage. If a creator's videos are meant to be put on DVD, they'll go on DVD - I have AD's DVD, William Milberry's DVD, and I plan on getting VicBond's DVD sooner or later. If creators want to do a 'best of', let *them* do it, because to take the mastering process out of someone else's AMV is an insult. Let the editors decide how they want their work to be distributed.

-DOKool