In early 2002 during Sophomore year, I ended up finding some while just browsing around for other stuff. I vaguely seem to remember that my sister had seen a couple and these were lying around on the hard drive, but I honestly can't recall.
The earliest one I have a clear memory of downloading and watching was Maboroshi's Information High video, around April or May 2002. After that I also started seeing AMVs pop up in searches on iMesh and kazaa. I discovered the Video CD format shortly thereafter, and liked the encoding aspect of it. My first couple of attempts at editing were basically taking cutscenes without editing them at all and slapping music over them in VirtualDub. This eventually evolved into taking shorter clips and randomly assorting them in VDub and exporting (all of the videos from my first year of editing were done in VDub). I found the Org sometime around June or July, and after I'd actually edited my first video using clips I made an account and made an entry for it in the catalog.
How you came up with your screen name:
In a computer class during Freshman year. Had something to do with typing exercises, and 'qyot' was the result of just bringing my hands down on the keyboard. The 27 got appended later when I needed a longer name for an email address or something.
How you discovered the Org:
Probably because I was looking for more information about the videos I'd already seen. I honestly can't remember.
Tell me about your studio, like how you joined/created it, etc... (If you're not in a studio, say why
)To go along with the newbie mistakes, the name I'd thought up for the 'studio' I attached to my videos was there just because I thought it sounded cool during that angsty high school student phase. It was there mostly because I noticed that most of the videos I was seeing had some sort of studio name attached to them, even though I was aware of the fact that it was superfluous for a one-person studio to have (especially when they don't even have a website of their own for hosting). I was already embarrassed by it a few years ago, but tradition sort of overruled my objections and I kept it around until 2009. Since after that I went on hiatus for so long, there was no point to resuscitating it and when I released Daybreak there was no studio tag attached.
Favorite genre to edit and why:
I don't really have a favorite genre to edit. My early videos were almost all action, but as my skills and desire to actually do coherent videos improved, I ended up gravitating into drama videos...with the exception of doing comedy/action shorts for several of the AMV Hell iterations. It's not like I don't want to edit action videos anymore, but I just end up prioritizing other ideas first due to available footage.
Favorite newbie mistake you've made: (Give us a good cringe-worthy one!)
Upselling on some of the announcements for my early videos. It was pretty bad, but thankfully I stopped doing that pretty quickly and just started going with monotonous explanatory notes in the video description.
First contest experience:
The first and only one I've had was submitting a video to MegaCon 2004's contest. Of course, once it got going and I saw some of the other videos that'd been submitted I realized how pointless that was, but I had a good time. When mine came on, I thought I heard people start singing along about 2/3rds of the way through, but it might have just been my imagination.
This isn't counting the round of AMV Hell CE that I won later, since that wasn't a physical contest.
Best experience you've had thus far with the community:
I don't know, I can't really pick one. I did participate in AniMix back in 2003, and some of the mailing list discussions there were lively, but otherwise I've simply been content to frequent the forum here.
Worst experience with the community:
Again, hard to really say because I get the impression that a lot of the real nastiness occurred outside of the forum (barring trolls that would pop up now and again).
Why you edit: (If you don't edit anymore, explain yo'self!)
I've always edited simply because I like the creative process. The excitement of seeing things coming together on the timeline is as enjoyable to me as seeing the finished product, because in many cases I'll surprise myself with how well certain pieces end up fitting.
The major reason for being on hiatus for so long actually had to do with being annoyed at my computer and how slow it was on my ancient hardware. My patience had simply run out (not to mention feeling confined by hard drive space), and because I had nothing in the way of income to put toward getting a better setup, I dreaded having to open up Premiere. Over that 3½-4 years I pursued some other interests: compiling software, actually watching a lot more anime per season, and so on. Yue's Time Travel MEP made me nostalgic enough to edit something short again, and then since the 10th anniversary of my first video on Premiere was coming up, I edited Daybreak. Whether I'll end up going back on hiatus until I get better hardware is an open question.
Future goals: (Editing, non-editing, whatevers)
I have no clue. Things I thought for sure I wanted to do have been getting sidelined, everything I thought I'd be doing by now has failed to happen, and so in general I'd prefer not to think about it and just take things as they happen. It's too depressing otherwise.
I think it was epic though that they were amv editors who explained to me that letterbox is a mistake… but I could not believe it, it was just so normal to me that sometimes there are black lines in my videos:’D
