Instrumental Anime Project

pen-pen2002 · Post by **pen-pen2002** » Tue Apr 13, 2004 8:34 pm

I watched 1.1 and the first one side by side and the changes were all good in terms of longer fades and such. The big change was the brightness (Unless that's the result of using different players but I doubt it.) At first it looked better, the opening scene was nice and easy to see. but by 1:00-1:14 it was looking inferior by a good deal. At 1:41 the brighter one looked a little bit better but by 2:14 it was looking not as good again. at 2:28 it helped in the shadows but at 3:05 part of the frame was completely washed out. Overall I thought the brightness took away the shadows too much and didn't look as good.

I'll get the new one as soon as file permissions are set. Speaking of which why are there two?

On a completely unrelated note, I finally got around to donating and when I went to download something I was completely disoriented cause I was so used to scrolling down to the proceed button that I do it automatically.

That was a really long sentence...

Man, so much to do, I want to finish ops for all those that gave me one on my free op thread plus one for DWP. I could do them really quickly except I set a personal goal to break 1000 in usefulness, or at least 900, so it will take awhile. Then theirs working on my own video and I'm going to be out of town from Thursday afternoon till Sunday

. I encourage anyone who wants to do a second vid as that might give me time to finish my first. I don't understand how people edit so fast... I'll try to pound out a quick WIP of the whole thing by Thursday.

Sorry for the off-topicness.

Org Profile · Post by **Otohiko** » Tue Apr 13, 2004 9:01 pm

Yea, I changed the brightness in VirtualDub. I think it worked out well, so I think I'll keep using it.

The two files are a result of an upload error, so the smaller one is broken.

Now, I looked at my new version and...

I realized I like the titles, but that I hate how over half of them are placed, spaced and how long they stay on - so, I'll probably change their location. I was in a bit of a hurry placing them. You probably won't like them for the same reasons, but do tell me, since you might notice stuff that I didn't.

Anyways... I'm looking at the Third Stone video right now, and hopefully I'll have something to say about it soon.

Org Profile · Post by **Otohiko** » Tue Apr 13, 2004 9:21 pm

/beats self over the head

Gah! While third stone was downloading, I watched my video again and realized what a stupid idea it is to place titles that span more than one shot. What a way to ruin all those transitions! Never do it people

(sorry for the ranting also)

rose4emily · Post by **rose4emily** » Wed Apr 14, 2004 12:22 pm

Song list updated.

I haven't actually had time to look at anyone's newest videos yet, but I have just started on the third version of Third Stone. I've taken out the titles (not permanently, I just want to put them back in after I edit everything else), and am doing some experimentation with the the brightness, contrast, and saturation curves to add some continuity between scenes and give the video a unique look in which you can recognize the elements from FLCL, but they don't look the same.

I've just found out about an editor-ish thing for Linux that might help me make better-looking titles and possibly take care of the timing errors in Cinelerra's output and some of the funky artifacts that flare up for a couple of frames on the transitions. It's called CinnePaint (formerly known as FilmGIMP) and is made for the kind of frame-by frame compositing and image editing used in a lot of commercial pictures (it is, actually, used on a lot of commercial potion pictures). To do it I'd have to clear out some disk space first, though, as it is essentially made to handle sequences of thousands of 1-frame still images in either a raw or losslessly compressed format. Good for quality, but Third Stone would need almost 20GiB to hold all those frames. Argh....

Oh, and it seems the mystery of the InuYasha video's author has been solved.

pen-pen2002 · Post by **pen-pen2002** » Wed Apr 14, 2004 8:28 pm

New greatly updated requiem video!
need feedback.

Org Profile · Post by **Otohiko** » Thu Apr 15, 2004 11:20 am

*cough* damn, I'm falling behind on everything all of a sudden

Sorry for the sudden silence.

Don't worry, I'll get to the others' WIP's before I go on with my own editing. Been a bit sick lately

Org Profile · Post by **Otohiko** » Thu Apr 15, 2004 2:17 pm

Oh yes... by the way...

I just learned the ropes of XviD/DivX encoding, and I've produced the 'I-swear-this-is-the-final-absolute-best-possible-quality-version' of 'The Wasteland', which I guess I can upload as a replacement for the previous 103-meg pure XviD one. Apologies for uploading that one too darn much

rose4emily · Post by **rose4emily** » Thu Apr 15, 2004 3:18 pm

Pen-Pen's new version of Memories (the Requiem for a Dream vid) is now in the Outbox and downloadable.

Sorry, Otohiko, but I'm not seeing the new Wasteland video. Did you forget to upload it, or did you have some sort of error in the process? My computer froze last night while I was trying out CinePaint (I accidentally loaded enough .png frames to fill my RAM and the entirety of my 1-gig swap-space - something even Linux doesn't deal with too nicely, it seems), so it's possible that the connection was interrupted.

Sorry about the crappy, unreliable server and permissions delay, but that's all I can put together without buying more equipment or spending time I don't have on learning how to script my server's behaviour. At least it works most of the time.

I'll probably do a render of my WIP Third Stone vid tonight. It has a very different look from the past two versions, though the scene selection and timing is almost identical. I really like what I've done to it so far, but I'd like to get it up before I do more tedious frame-by-frame stuff to see whether it clicks with any of you. As a teaser, I made the first tho-thirds black and white and adjusted the time-based brightness and contrast curves to cut the scenes down to their essential details and lend them a more abstract feel. I plan to do some coloring of specific items at points for effect (like the few splashes of red in Schindler's List), but I don't think I'll have that done for this render.

Org Profile · Post by **Otohiko** » Thu Apr 15, 2004 6:59 pm

Don't worry - I'll have that version up tonight. I'm just taking time to make sure it's 100% clean.

I'm still wondering whether that's the one I should upload to Local (I just requested a delete on the present version). It's good quality, but I wonder if the size is worth it... so far, no luck getting it to compress properly at anything lower though.

***

Now... I just took my time with Third Stone...

and you know what, as surprised as I am to say this - for a vid this length, and this linear - it somehow keeps the unpredictable element throughout. Kinda tough to explain that... but it just seems to work.

The titles are definitely good. I wish there was more of them.
All parts involving Haruko's Vespa are somehow automatically good and well-synched. The mood sync is close to perfect, and the contrasts, for the most part, are played on very nicely. All faster parts are clearly highlights.
Now, as for polishing it... I'm sure you've spotted a few things yourself in the faster parts by now. Most of my problems is the slower parts, and the one I can really pinpoint is the rain scene. It kind of does drag on for a little long. Then there's basically every scene with the characters just standing around talking; they're not inappropriately-placed considering the mood in the music, but the instrumental nature of the track and just the general static nature of them... I don't know, I suspect there's hardly anything you can do about that.

But you're definitely on the right track with this. Again, surprised though I may be, it works surprisingly well for something that's 14 minutes long. Just keep at it, and I'm sure it'll get better as it moves towards the final version.

Org Profile · Post by **Otohiko** » Thu Apr 15, 2004 8:22 pm

Now to move to Pen-Pen's, as promised.

Wow, again, I'm pleasantly surprised - at least if you ask me, you've got something original going on here. I definitely like the editing style; and judging by the amount of cuts, overlays, etc. - I'll definitely say you're taking your time with this carefully.

In most of the early part, the editing is quite unusual (again, at least for me), but definitely works. The intro is nice with one minor thing: the fact that the music repeats shortly thereafter is sort of odd. But the editing on it is good. I like the overlays, and the 'SOS' sign is definitely a nice touch. Following: (after about the 1 minute mark) now, here I have a bit of doubt about some of the cuts and flashes. It seems like there's too many of both sometimes, and it kind of appeared that some were a bit off timing, too (though maybe that's me not 'getting' the editing style). But once you get to the dramatic part from around 2:40, it gets really, really good in the creepy kind of way. It was sort of a bummer that it stopped where it did

I think you really had everything on the rise there, and I'd like to see more.

Yep, you're definitely on the right track. I'd say take a careful look to make sure you're not confusing the viewer in the parts between 1:00 and 2:40. Otherwise, pretty much all of it looks very athmospheric to me.