Anime Boston 2011 Unofficial Ballot and Winners

[snapxynith]

I will admit that I may just have no idea where the feature is inside Vegas.

[kiarrens]

I will admit that I may just have no idea where the feature is inside Vegas.

Yeah, I have no idea either. But I wish to learn. I have sooooo many video ideas I have nixed because it would take SO LONG to do all the masking...

[Shin-AMV]

After seeing tehninjaness' work it made me realize a few preconceptions that have been holding back my videos due to "classical" movie edits. The video effects are easy enough to deconstruct but that doesn't stop them from having impact. They have pop and good screen presence. Before now I had very little respect for transition effects thrown onto a video. It has made me appreciate and start researching plugins and generated effects to reduce my production time while increasing my quality. My video was primarily custom work, masking, and direct redraws of cells that became added on top of the clean cuts.

Lol, I original held back from uploading it to the org mostly because this isn't an uncommon view or opinion on transition effects. I'm glad that they came out more pleasing than cheesy to most people though.

I still don't know how you mask quickly theninjaness but I know each frame takes me 20 minutes to go from nothing to a clean, crisp mask for one to two characters. At least, it does now that I've had to do over 200 or some stupid, similar number after this video.

I think what makes masking quick and easy for me for the most part is I have a Wacom Cintiq, so its basically like tracing with a pen or pencil what I want masked then tedious clicking. It still takes awhile, but I would say that the time is cut down by more than half, but I still have to clean up with a mouse then with the wacom pen.

Also using different compositing modes, chroma keyer, mask generator, find edges, sharpen edges and color corrector can help cut a few corners, usually if the background is mostly the same color like a wall or sky. This might sound like a lot of steps, but since most of the time objects/characters in the foreground are either lighter or darker than the background it saves a lot of time to black and white a clip and then adjust the brightness/contrast and color corrector to create silhouettes first. Get what you want masked into black and the rest white as much as possible, there might be some stray streaks or clouds from other things but you can just quickly mask them out without the need for precision masking for the most part. After that render it out (Keep it the same frame rate as the original clip since they'll need to match, its probably a good idea to just turn off resampling for it too.) Then take the render, make a parent/child track layers, put the render on the top track with the compositing mode set to multiply/mask and the original clip on the child track. Drop a luminence mask on the top clip and it should pretty much cut out what you wanted from the bottom. Make a new parent track below these tracks and put whatever you want there, or you could also just put a green screen behind it, and render it out to keep making more complex things if you wanted to with that. Doesn't work all the time, but its a life saver if you have something that goes on for about 100 frames and would be a nightmare to go frame by frame for a mask.

All right, that does it. Justin alluded to this but I'm going to elaborate on it since I don't have to be nice on these forums.

Stop being a little crybaby. For fuck's sake, your video didn't make the cut. Boo hoo. It happens. You've only been editing for a year according to your org profile, get back on the horse and try, try again. Belittling other peoples' videos isn't going to endear you to anyone, and it is in VERY poor form, particularly when those videos are well-edited, funny and have good concepts. If you want pats on the back and "Awwww it's ok your video wuz good" go back to youtube, where the general viewing audience has the mental capacity of a teaspoon full of sea salt.

I have to agree with kiarrens. Getting a video into a contest requires both knowing the audience and knowing the general demeanor of the judges. You have to choose your battles. You'll either need to change your editing style/concepts to be better in their eyes or change to which venues you submit. When the time comes that you can evoke the audience's feelings strongly while doing it with integrity, all of us will thank you for it.

QFT. Different venues have different tastes, some are more sophisticated and some are rather simple-minded, but you'll find at least a little of both everywhere it just varies a little which one will come out on top or in force. I've had both surprising wins and stunning loses, whatever though it happens. If you have to shout "concept concept concept!" at them while they just wanna bob their head to the beat, you're never going to get through to them and just shoehorning yourself. That being said, its entirely possible, in my opinion at least, to capture the hearts and minds of both these crowds and I think a good editor doesn't just edit for other editors but should try and edit for a universal appeal so those head bobbers can keep clapping with the beat while the 'connoisseurs' can appreciate the conceptual, techinical, or more subtle merits of the video.

[xDreww2]

What does editing for a year have to do with anything about making the cut? I'm not complaining about making the cut for romance or winning action or whatever. It doesn't bother me if I lost to a better well put video at all. I don't take editing and winning that serious. I'm just only saying I wish people will look more deeper into the concept of "action and drama/romance" instead of the song/anime thats being played.

[Kariudo: Edited for flame-ishness.]

[BasharOfTheAges]

This thread is full of lulz.

I've never heard anyone suggest kiarrens was cocky - she's one of the most humble editors I know, even though her trophy case could crush a small elephant to death.

[Monitor Zombie]

I'm almost afraid to join this thread for fear of getting into the line of fire.

I'm delighted that 'Rough Love' won the Romance award, despite my epic loathing of Ke$ha. Romance is usually my least favorite cat, and l33t totally made it worth watching. I pretty much hate sappy romance vids no matter how well they're edited, and it's awesome to see a different take on the genre. It gives me hope for an anti-romance vid concept I have.

I was also delighted to see a Memnosyne vid and s-CRY-ed footage in one of the multi-source vids. Those animes don't get enough love.

The only vid I can say I didn't like was 'A Psychedelic Lover's Dream' because I'm not a fan of anything that doesn't have the traditional anime look, but even then I can admit it was well edited and fit with the song.

[CodeZTM]

I thought all the romance videos were really well done and interestingly presented. O_o Also, I really dug Ouran Love Story.

But DAMN. These cons must be sick to death of Taylor Swift videos by this points. XD

[kiarrens]

This thread is full of lulz.

I've never heard anyone suggest kiarrens was cocky - she's one of the most humble editors I know, even though her trophy case could crush a small elephant to death.

I don't know about an ELEPHANT, but I do worry for my miniature dachshund when he's playing near it. One of these days the little snausage is gonna be playing with a toy, knock into the bookshelf, and get brained with that Best in Show AAC one.

[Sayoria]

Congrats to the winners. I myself made it in, came out empty, but as I say to myself, there is always next year. I have a few ideas already, though, since I suck with editing, it will be pretty damn hard for me, but hey... I got a year.

My only regret though, is that whenever I get into this contest, whenever I hear the audio over the room, something ALWAYS catches me off that makes me dislike it. In the past, I have made sure the audio matches to the speed, but have seen the song lag a bit. This year, the female vocals in my video Friday night, felt overly screechy compared to when I was working with it. I really got to figure out how to predict when such a thing is going to happen. I loved her voice in the song, but at the showing, I was really all "Oh, what the hell just happened? ._." .... kinda funny though, because I was actually expecting the vocals to be flooded out by the rest of the song, like how it sounds when I previewed my video on my HDTV. I could just barely hear the vocals, so it is really hard to pin-point this issue for me. Meh. :/

In short:

On PC: Sounds perfect.
On TV: Instruments flood voice.
At screening: Voice floods instruments.

Atleast I can say, I am glad I didn't fiddle trying to make the voices stronger or something. I would have really hated the screening.

[BasharOfTheAges]

I think they adjusted the levels to handle softer vocals (so it wasn't just a wall-o-bass like last year) but the volume level was just too high. Saturday's screening was much better than Friday's in that regard though.