Instrumental Anime Project

Org Profile · Post by **Otohiko** » Wed Apr 28, 2004 10:16 am

Ah, of course.

Well, I'd have to look at the video first then. A good place to start in this case though is to think of the lyrics in the original. There might be something there, might not. Again, depends how well it relates to the video.

pen-pen2002 · Post by **pen-pen2002** » Wed Apr 28, 2004 2:39 pm

Rose4Emily - Of course bait and switch works! Geez, heathen unbelievers these days.

Oh, and your doing a great job as project director so no worries there. I can't wait to see the new 13'37" video, all that talk about hand coloring has made me impatient.

Agh! The web site! But it was so pretty...

one more reason to hate IE.

aznRAVEr - you might be able to recrop it or add something using AVsynth without losing quality. But you don't have to. I didn't notice it until R4E pointed it out.

Otohiko - sounds great, lot's of dynamic range and such. That groovy sections going to be awesome.

ooshna - you do need to force 24FPS so you can edit in the right timebase in premiere. version doesn't matter as you can just move the file and premiere says "Dohhhh, whered it go?" and then point it to the HQ AVS.

I'm assuming alpha is the latest? Very nice for the most part, a couple of things. In premiere if the speed of a clip is less than 100% right click and go to fields or something like that and uncheck "deinterlace under 100%" that will improve the quality. 1:37 that scene was getting stretched out and here you should really switch scenes after the fire or it looks unedited. 2:06 watch the timing with the unveiling of the bike, try to get it on a strong change in the music. 2:20 this scene also seems a bit long. nice transition at 2:43 but maybe could be timed better. All the flashes were great. Just watch the long scenes and get as much of that musical sync (ha ha, new term) as you can. I especially like the hospital scene, match the high notes very well. The riots are also very nice in terms of mood.

Name? Hmm lots of war, fighting. "Warring Strings" maybe? "Visualizations in the key of A(kira)"

Speaking of which I really like the apocalyptic theme of the first half, I'd like to see more bikers and riots and cityscapes and as little of the main characters as possible, especially the often overused scenes, but again that's just me.

rose4emily · Post by **rose4emily** » Wed Apr 28, 2004 4:11 pm

The dulcet sound of the djembe outside my window. Mmmm....djembes...

Aside from a lone hippie drummer bringing me back to the happiest days of my high school career (which always involved a band called The Captains of Industry, and then Acorn Tree, and finally The Bilbo Baggins Travelling Troubador Experience - we should've just stuck with Acorn Tree - that was really just a junk-band-turned-drum-circle with one stray kit drummer (me) and a few acoustic guitarists), I can also be happy to have finally found something resembling a solution on the web-page thing.

Appearently IE will read certain comments as commands, allowing me to insert these to instruct IE to load a different stylesheet from the one I made for Mozilla and Opera and any other modern browser capable of playing by a few simple rules. This allows me to forgo the floating menu and pop-up text in IE to make the overall page layout at least readable, if a bit less attractive and probably misaligned for time being thanks to IE's equally faulty interperetation of the W3C box model.

The Third Stone video is actually almost ready for its next release. The colorizing is done, and I've just created a buttload of stills from the remaining four episodes of the series to use as the composite material for the rain-bridge scene. Now I still have to do the actual compositing, create the title stills, composite those in, and try to figure out how to use MEncoder to render an XviD from the PNG stream without having to use Cinelerra to render to an improperly-synced DivX first. However far I get this weekend is what gets into v1.4 (probably just the rain-bridge compositing and MEcoder process). Whatever is left goes into v1.5 which should be close to, if not the final version given the amount of change between versions at this point.

Finding out that MEncoder can render directly from PNG streams was exciting for me for two reasons. The first is that I'm writing a Java app for manipulating and playing PNG streams, but don't want to mess with trying to recreate the XviD codec, so being able to just call to MEncoder for that part will be a big help. The second is that after the amount of work I've put into removing every corrupted frame and ugly macroblock I could find it'd be a real shame to use a double encoding that'd put quite a few of them back in.

I'm starting to think that anime and american sitcom animation should have their own codec that actually capitolizes on sparse color pallates, inactive screen regions, distinct layers or varying degress of motion and complexity, pan & scan, digitally representable filters, and the lovely vectorizable black lines surrounding most animated moving forms. It'd have to be a pre-market codec to reach its full potential, but it'd look great.

Now I'm starting to think that Macromedia and the W3C both have versions of this 'theoretical' codec - called "Flash" and "SVG". Hmmm...now if we can get dancing pop artists to realese their hit singles as MOD files with a single sample of their voice for the 50+ times they say any given phrase...lossless P2P heaven. Not that that's any ecouragement for the RIAA to jump on 20 year old technology that just happens to kick MP3's ass when it comes to representing beatboxed music.

Back to AMVs, on the border thing - might the idea of a static image of vines/branches (or something like that) on two corners, along the lines of those middle-aged "illuminated" books (the one's with the fancy illustrations and page borders) sound good? That wouldn't have to at all overlap the glowing edge of the video, but would put something "solid" looking on the edge to anchor it and make it look more like the purposeful decision it was than the technical oddity I mistook it for.

And yeah, it does look like the 'alpha' was the most recent in that string. Numbered versions from now on, please, we can't seem to agree on an order for the Greek aplhabet (though I think the word "aplhabeta" should lend a clue). Not a serious problem or anything, but a touch confusing.

Sadly, Acorn Tree never made any recordings. We were very instumental and very ethnic - albeit a bit confused in how that instrumentation was meant to be combined and what, exactly, ethnicity we were supposed to sound like (my best guess be an especially African version of jazz as played by a bunch of Northern white kids).

Org Profile · Post by **Otohiko** » Wed Apr 28, 2004 8:27 pm

Well, I just watched 'A Boy I Knew', and I also approve. Stylistically and mood-wise, it's just the sort of thing I'd expect from something related to Fantasia. Good work.

***

Too bad there's no recordings left of Acorn Tree indeed - I wish there were more people making AMV's to their own music.

Were I in a band, I'm sure I would've saved something - considering my obsessively archival nature (I've saved almost every shred of paper I've written or drawn on in the last 4 years)

ooshna · Post by **ooshna** » Thu Apr 29, 2004 12:16 am

Well I uploaded my video again. This time its all the way through and for the most part it is pretty good. Tell me what you think of it.

pen-pen2002 · Post by **pen-pen2002** » Thu Apr 29, 2004 1:32 am

Wow. I can't belive that it's been a month since we started all this. To think how much the song/vid ideas have changed while the basic goal of the project has remained the same from the first post. I'm getting very exited as my video nears completion (of the beta anyway) and I think that after I polish it that it will turn out really well. I still hope to do another quick video for this project either jazz or a short experimental Lain.
Anyways, the point of this post: this project rocks.

Rose4Emily wrote:Aside from a lone hippie drummer bringing me back to the happiest days of my high school career (which always involved a band called The Captains of Industry, and then Acorn Tree, and finally The Bilbo Baggins Travelling Troubador Experience - we should've just stuck with Acorn Tree - that was really just a junk-band-turned-drum-circle with one stray kit drummer (me) and a few acoustic guitarists), I can also be happy to have finally found something resembling a solution on the web-page thing.

That's a really long sentence.

rose4emily · Post by **rose4emily** » Thu Apr 29, 2004 3:05 am

I could try quoting Proust.

I think Lain sounds like great territory for some experiments. Maybe even a whole series of experiments. Really.

This project = 1 month
All of my other videos combined < 1 month

Wow. That explains a lot.

Org Profile · Post by **Otohiko** » Thu Apr 29, 2004 10:17 am

I wonder how long this video will take me (especially considering that thanks to having to watch the entire series again, it'll delay me by a week).

I'd definitely try something Lain afterwards. But I'd rather not get ahead of myself here

And yep - the project is indeed good. Let's hope it keeps up that way until release...

ooshna - waiting for your latest version to get moved to outbox. Looks like the FTP is always a step behind you

Org Profile · Post by **Otohiko** » Thu Apr 29, 2004 1:50 pm

gah! NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

There's been a setback

Just as I was getting excited about all this, it transpired that the Bebop DVD's are... no longer with me. Cashing in on their relative rarity, my brother gave them away in an advantageous trade a while ago - now courteously offering me the remaining DivX rips as a substitute. I looked at them and - they're wonderfully resized and filled with artifacts. No go, especially since this is a serious project

.

Dashing to blockbuster as the last remaining alternative, I was again disappointed. No Bebop DVD's within reach

So, my last resort is to dash once again to the local Wal-Mart in hopes they still have Knocking on Heaven's Door available, and using that as the basis.

Now, from my last 2 videos you know well that I prefer editing movies - but The Wasteland is very static (besides the middle section), and Ararat is very linear - and I wanted this one to be neither. So, if I do get my hands on the movie, I'll really have to use the footage tightly to get what I want, and if push comes to shove - economically apply a DivX clip or two where nothing else just works.

Always check your sources before starting a project people

***

On the other hand, to my joy, it appears Blockbuster has all of Haibane Renmei - that could be material for the next one. Hopefully, my wonderfully jazzy project won't go under just yet...

jasper-isis · Post by **jasper-isis** » Thu Apr 29, 2004 4:16 pm

You could join up with Netflix's free trial and cancel at the end of the two weeks...