PatrickD's Ten Commandments of Anime Music Videos wrote:1) Thou shall not take any aspect ratio except one aspect ratio.
Don't intermix full screen video with letterboxed video. Changes
between the two are distracting for the audience. You want your video
to look like one complete product, but intermixing the two aspect ratios
works against that.
Broken, although I can't remember how badly (not including cases where I distorted the ratio by stretching 4:3 footage to 16:9). I may have had a couple videos that did this unintentionally when I was starting out, before I just faced the music and started cropping stuff.
I did, however, blatantly solve this conundrum with the RahXephon video I did. It switches between the fullscreen and letterboxed sections by way of a very very very obvious expanding and contracting border that bookcases the letterboxed portion of the video. It looks like an effect more than trying to mask how jarring it is to mix different ratios.
2) Thou shall make no image with subtitles.
Subtitles are bad. Don't do it. Text distracts the audience. They'll
be too busy reading to pay attention to the video. This also applies to
the logos that networks stick in the bottom-right corner.
Broken, both in my winning AMV Hell CE segment and any video I've released with softsubs.
3) Thou shall not let characters talk in vain.
Avoid having characters talking in the video (unless their lips are
synchronized with the lyrics.) If characters are talking while you
can't hear what they're saying, the audience is left wondering what
they're missing.
I do try to avoid this, but it hasn't always been held to.
4) Thou shall honor thy fellow creators.
Don't take anime footage from other videos. If you actually want to
make a good video, you'll need to do it right and record your own source
footage. Go buy the DVDs.
Broken too, on some early videos I've never released (a couple actually were released, after I went and got the DVDs and remastered them from scratch). This rule seems to be perfectly acceptable in cases of Kings and Retrospectives, though.
5) Thou shall not steal.
Yeah, Napster might be fun, but if you're going to use a song in a
video, go out and buy the CD. MP3s aren't the same quality anyway.
Plus, you'll get a warm, fuzzy feeling for supporting the music artists.
Broken too, although iTunes and Amazon make getting a legit copy much more comfortable these days.
6) Thou shall not let video static lie.
If you're recording from VHS, put a mask over that video static in the
bottom few lines of the screen. Seeing that hop all over the place
while the video plays is distracting...and it looks bad too.
Never had to break this one.
7) Thou shall not kill clips haphazardly.
Don't just stick in footage wherever it fits. Plan ahead and have them
fit with the music. Follow the beat of the music and plan clips around
that.
Oh, this is probably the most abused one on the list.
8) Thou shall not use footage more than once.
Avoid using the same video clip more than once. It shows that you
either have a very short memory or you didn't capture enough source
footage. If it's a humor bit, keep in mind that there's a reason
comedians never tell the same joke to the same audience twice.
Broken, once. Because the audio could forgive it.
9) Thou shall not covet thy editor's transitions.
Just because you have all these transitions doesn't mean you have to use
them. Only use what's appropriate for the scene. Putting in
transitions because they're "cool" isn't a good idea. Only use them if
they add to the story.
Broke this one with my Project 5555 segment.
10) Thou shall keep the output acceptable.
Nobody wants to download a 50 Mb video just to find out that it's been
poorly compressed with garbled sound. Use compression methods such as
QuickTime, MPEG, AVI/DivX, or high-quality RealMedia. Experiment until
you find one that works well...then feel free to stick with it. Avoid
using obscure codecs since nobody really wants to have to install a
codec just to view one video.
I would suppose that my near-100% consistent usage of MKV since 2005 falls under this if we go by 2003 standards (to say nothing of H.264 and AAC). Heck, I was still getting complaints about them up until about 2008, I think - long after people should be well acquainted with them because of that other community's release standards.
And I can't help but snicker at 'high-quality RealMedia'. There was a reason people avoided it then, just like they avoid it now. Regardless of how good or acceptable you could get them to look. The container/format is just a giant pain in the ass, speaking from the experience of actually encoding a RealMedia version of Nights back the first time I edited it, as well as the process of converting between it and other formats (prior to acceptable AviSynth methods coming about for them, anyway). Even WMV is easier to work with.
) but doable
