Wow, sorry I haven't said anything earlier, but I just saw the reply notification e-mail.
Thanks for all the comments, good and bad. I'm glad so many of you liked it! I would send it around to more cons, but since it won 2 awards at the first one it was in, I don't want to troll with it...maybe I can find others that want it just for exhibition, but otherwise hopefully people will read this thread and download it.
To address the median issue, there were a couple of reasons for that.
1. This may or may not be the best effect I could have come up with, but I though that doing some of these things with the footage would make the video more closely match the feeling of the music. The gamma/color adjustments and stuff may have worked without the median, but I think they worked better with it.
2. The source wasn't all that great looking, and it even had some pretty ugly looking frames. Altering the look so much allowed me to crop and stretch it to make it anamorphic (unlike the DVD), and hide the imperfections of the source.
3. Are you crazy!? It looks good!
Seriously though, while some people apparently dislike the median effect (I think this thread is the first time I've heard it), others have said they liked it. I guess it's just a matter of personal taste.
As for the noise, I'm guessing you mean the little flashes that go along with the piano (other than at the very beginning)? I'm not sure that's the best thing I could have come up with, but I wanted to put something on those notes. I tried other things that would accentuate them more, but everything else I tried seemed too overpowering. Since the whole video is kinda' crazy and unreal, I didn't think that some noise flashes would detract from it. If you have any suggestions for other things I could have done in those places (or if you think I should have just skipped the piano notes), let me know.
