Your scene selection process for full series ?

[CrackTheSky]

I've been looking to find a software that will export an image every 15 frames or when a frame change enough (20% or so)so I can scrubb a whole episode inside of a explorer window. No luck on that front yet though.

If you use Sony Vegas, you might want to check out this. I haven't actually used it myself, so I don't know how well it works, but it intrigues me.

[ngsilver]

I encode all my footage to utvideo, pull it all into premier, set all the episodes out in a timeline I call clipping, then start scrubbing through one by one, pulling scenes I might like, clipping them out, and moving them over to another timeline I call clips. I also listen to the song on repeat to help visualize potential scenes. If I run into a scene I already have an idea to use for (before I even begin editing I'm listening to the song on repeat and visualizing the anime I'm planning to use and it's scenes) I immediately drop it into place on the actual video timeline. I then keep doing this till everything is done and I've placed all the pre-determined scenes where I want them. I then generally work from the ending, complete that, then work on the beginning and complete that, then work through the rest, pulling scenes from the clips timeline as needed. I rarely use all the footage I clip out.

What often helps me, when I have a large series to work with, and it's been a while since I've seen it, I'll go back and watch it all the way through. This helps put the visuals in my mind more presently. Makes it easier to visualize the clips. I don't make any physical documentation of my videos. I do everything in my head basically and let my muse control me.

[seasons]

I make clips in Virtualdub, name them according to character or whatever will help me identify them later on, then just tack numbers onto the end as needed. So I'll end up with, say, Shinji01.avi, Shinji02.avi, Shinji03-doingsomething.avi, Shinji04-doingsomethingelse.avi, etc. It seemed intuitive when I first started and I assumed everyone did it this way.

From there I just place them on the timeline in Premiere according to whatever I had planned in my head when I first came up with whatever idea I had, usually trying to be very precise from the beginning. From there it's not about scene selection as much as it is about all the other parts of the editing process. Scenes/clips that seemed promising at first but don't work as well as I'd hoped gets moved upwards into one of several other video tracks that are disabled, so I can at least keep them on the timeline in the place where they might come in handy later in case I need them.

In working with longer series, or any project where I'm making a lot of different clips, this system of organization breaks down rather quickly and I spend a lot more time reviewing what I have and trying to find specific shots than I do arranging clips on the timeline and actually making progress. So far this year, I've started 7 different AMVs from 6 different sources -- one movie, and series of 52, 24, 22, 22, and 6 episodes each -- and have cut over 700 or 800 clips between them all (some lasting only a single frame, others lasting as long as a minute). I've planned these videos in great detail -- reviewing footage, "mental editing" when I'm in the car and listening to music, crude storyboarding on paper noting song lyrics and # of bars of music and what scenes should go where -- and I've yet to make any significant progress on any of them.

[qyll]

1) Scrub the timeline. It's not elegant, but it gets the job done. I've tried being organized and noting specific segments and timecodes, but it simply takes too much time and does not work for me.

2) Encode clip.

As for naming, I do <anime name><episode #>, so for example, "naruto 333". Also, make sure to export like 10-20 frames before and after your points of interest. You never know when you will need context.

3) Lay down clips in your editing timeline and leave them there to ferment. Watching segments over and over, you will eventually get the sense that something is missing or if a clip needs to be thrown out. For me, it's better to overedit and cut things out later. Only a small proportion of clips I encode will end up in the final product.

[Tigrin]

Umm, I'm kind of curious... several people have mentioned creating "clips" of episodes... are you literally going through and making separate video files of clips from episodes?? I said "clips" above but actually I meant I make "sub clips"... I have all the episodes I'm working with in a single Premiere project, and make referenced sub clips. Actually, I usually go through an entire episode and separate it into chunks/sub clips using a naming convention something like "ep01_opening" or "ep01_sc01_desc"... episode number, scene number (I decide this mostly based on when the location changes or something like that), very short description of whatever's in the clip. If I did a multi-anime AMV I guess I would include an abbreviated title at the beginning of that too. Using sub clips also allows me to potentially use footage before or after whatever I chose if necessary. I'll usually have a bin for each episode, and separate bins if I'm looking for certain characters or whatever. When making my Death Note AMV I had a bin for "Light crazy faces" and that was fun. :T Anyway, episodes already take up a lot of disc space, so I'm wondering why encode and create clip files on top of that...?

[Ileia]

No, I don't encode them again. I export the full episodes as segments, pull each onto the timeline and search through it for scenes that I would want to use and make clips of just that part (which in Magix, is just a matter of hitting a copy-paste button and pulling the edge of the video clip box back until the scene I want starts/ends). Then I leave them all there on my timeline where I can easily see and access them. Each is essentially a copy of the full file, so I can pull them forward or back if I want to check the surrounding footage again. It should be noted that Magix is different from some other NLEs, the preview window is ONLY a preview window for what is on the timeline and I don't need to load the video there to make clips, I just drop it straight on the timeline.

Anyway, here's what it looks like:



(click to view larger)

Sometimes I organize the clips or sometimes I just leave them in chronological order.

[CmoididiReal]

Ho that look realy useful. So you do the scene selection/encoding episodes in that "magix" software but you also edit in this? or you just do a raw edit and go in vegas or 1ere after that?

[Ileia]

I also edit in Magix. Most of my videos are "raw" (fades, zooms, simple stuff). Magix itself is very simple and has few effects that I find useful, so I need to do an effect or mask something, I just create it in Photoshop.

[Qyot27]

If I know I'll only be using particular episodes, I'll rip only those (or even only the particular chapter sections I need; SmartRipper can do that). Otherwise, I rip the entire series to separate episodes and keep them in a holding area named '[Series Name]\HQ'.

Use DGIndex or FFMS2 on the episodes.

Make tiny MJPEG copies of the episodes, resized down to 432x240. Keep these in a different folder ('[Series Name]\LQ') from the original MPEG-2 or H.264 copies.

Scrub through the MJPEG encodes with VirtualDub (if I need to see them larger, I can use the 200% zoom in VDub itself), noting down the frame numbers in Notepad like this:

Code: Select all

1
345,380
450,678
...

2
432,890
1003,1056
...

At this point, I used to then load the HQ versions into VirtualDub, seek directly to the frame range with Ctrl+G, set the in/out points, and add them to the Job Control. When I was finished setting all the in/out points on all the episodes, I just let the Job Control run automatically, with all the clips going into '[Project Short Name]\clips'. The clips will be encoded as RGB24 HuffYUV and the naming scheme was a simple '1.avi', '2.avi', etc.

One of the big differences these days is that I learned to take advantage of shell scripting, so I no longer use VirtualDub to do anything but scrub the MJPEGs to get the frame ranges. Instead, I turn the frame range notes into a batch script that generates individual AviSynth scripts for each clip (it can do this in less than a second, depending on how many scripts it's generating), and then I use a for loop in bash to have ffmpeg encode all the clip scripts to HuffYUV in the same directory structure that I mentioned above. For simplicity, the names are usually zero-padded now: '001.avi', '002.avi', etc. I think the most clips I've ever had to generate was in the 400s range.

To illustrate, those notes above would be turned into a script that looks a bit like this:

Code: Select all

echo Import("ep1.avs").Trim(345,380)>001.avs
echo Import("ep1.avs").Trim(450,678)>002.avs
echo Import("ep2.avs").Trim(432,890)>003.avs
echo Import("ep2.avs").Trim(1003,1056)>004.avs

The ep1.avs and ep2.avs imported scripts are refering to the HQ copies and have all the pre-processing done in-script. Actually reformatting the notes into this format isn't hard, since you can take advantage of the column duplication and enumeration functions in spreadsheet programs (or get equally fancy and use more scripts and one-liners to do it with CLI tools).

Then to encode:

Code: Select all

for n in *.avs ; do ffmpeg -i "$n" -vcodec huffyuv "../../[Project Short Name]/clips/${n%.*}.avi" ; done

Beyond that, my current project does happen to be from Blu-ray, so those individual 1080p clips will be reduced again, to 480p (still lossless, so my eyes don't bleed during editing; probably resized down with Bilinear). Identical names. I'll edit with the 480p clips, and then swap them out for the 1080s when I go to do the final export.

As far as selection during editing is concerned, it's usually however I'm struck when I sit down to edit. I'll often have a rough idea of how some scenes should look (otherwise I probably wouldn't have started the video), and do any adjustments as necessary to what I had already envisioned. Then I work on the rest, usually working linearly from start to finish. Premiere shows thumbnails of the clips in the clip window, and since I keep the ranges in the clips bounded by scene changes, I know I'm not missing anything. The song itself is usually on repeat, and I'd probably been listening to it a lot before the project even started, so I'll already have a feeling for what sorts of clips I need. Oftentimes I'll just take whatever is visually important, even if the song doesn't seem to support it - you can never fully tell whether you can *make* it work, until you see it placed on the timeline.

If I have a shortage of clips, I think more about what should go there, and then refer back to the MJPEG copies to find the clip I need, and then get the new clip from the HQ copy as usual.

Umm, I'm kind of curious... several people have mentioned creating "clips" of episodes... are you literally going through and making separate video files of clips from episodes?? I said "clips" above but actually I meant I make "sub clips"... I have all the episodes I'm working with in a single Premiere project, and make referenced sub clips. Actually, I usually go through an entire episode and separate it into chunks/sub clips using a naming convention something like "ep01_opening" or "ep01_sc01_desc"... episode number, scene number (I decide this mostly based on when the location changes or something like that), very short description of whatever's in the clip. If I did a multi-anime AMV I guess I would include an abbreviated title at the beginning of that too. Using sub clips also allows me to potentially use footage before or after whatever I chose if necessary. I'll usually have a bin for each episode, and separate bins if I'm looking for certain characters or whatever. When making my Death Note AMV I had a bin for "Light crazy faces" and that was fun. :T Anyway, episodes already take up a lot of disc space, so I'm wondering why encode and create clip files on top of that...?

Yes - see above.

[Bauzi]

I'll scrub inside my editing software after transcoding the entire thing. I go through a lot of hard drive space. =/

As to scene selection in general... Well, I've never done anything without some sort of story or plan in mind for at least a third of it. I tend to put that part together first and logically fill in as many gaps as I can with [...]

The basics are quite similar for me.

If I work with a lot of material I don't retranscode the whole material. I only do this if I work with some movies. That's when I transcode it into a lossless codec, otherwise I remux mkv files with h.264 streams into mp4 files without reencoding. I know that h.264 is not meant for editing and is a poor choice, but it works for me If you know what your system can handle and what you can expect as file handling errors, you can pull it off without major issues and pleasing visual quality. Unfortunately I sometimes have to switch to older Premiere Pro versions which can handle the transcode better.

If I already watched the anime, I won't rewatch it again. When I already have a concept in mind and watch a new possible anime for it, I will take notes and keep a shotlist in Evernote. A shotlist makes creating your clips a so much easier task. Otherwise I just load the footage in my source monitor and start to search for scenes that might fit. Quantity over quality is everything at that stage. It tells me a lot about feasibility of the vision the video that I have in mind. Most of the time I have to rethink the concept at least a little bit.

It also happens that I have to freeze a project, because the current seasons don't have enough material for my concept. That's when I wait for the new seasons to be released on bluray. For example it happend last year in summer when I worked with Psycho-Pass. Season 2 and a movie got announced and I knew that working on the video at that time would have been pointless. The final video would have been much better with S2 and the movie in it for sure. The project is now on ice.

For me spotting clips is one of the most annoying parts of creating an AMV. It's not really fun to me It only gets exciting if you find some surprisingly fitting clips of which you haven't thought before.



It's really interesting to read about your workflow guys Seems like we've all created an individual workflow over the years.