Noobie AMV pitfalls - advice from the veterans?

Digitalex · Post by **Digitalex** » Thu May 12, 2005 4:12 pm

requiett wrote:I got the tips for makin' good vids right here.

1. Use what's popular. Everyone loves a whore who rides the wave of fadorific fan-love to skyrocket their material to stardom.

2. Make sure ALL your little friends OP your vids with 10's, regardless of honesty or integrity.

3. Make long-winded posts in response to threads that ask about advice for making good vids. Be sure to use lots of long words in vague context, so it sounds like you know what you're talking about. This will convince everyone you're a pro who makes badass vids, and will venture to watch at least one of your less-than-adequete tributes to Naruto and his oily cornhole-buddies set to emo rock featuring such appealing ideals as wearing green socks, pretending to be intelligent, and crying after sex.

LMAO!!! Sad thing is I bet someone will actually use this "advice".

OmniStrata · Post by **OmniStrata** » Fri May 13, 2005 8:12 pm

Being a former engineer, I do a more logistical and easy approach to an anime music video...

In terms of determining how 'long a scene should be' before changing, the song will tell you. [every song in existance has some form of rhythm or beat or lyrics that can be followed]

making or not making a story is your choice
adding or not adding special fx is your choice
doing anything else is pretty much easy as it is your choice, however...

Standard music works around beats of 8. Sometimes they're fast, sometimes they're slow... But if you can work with multiples of 8 [cut on every 1st, 2nd, 4th, beat] then you've got yourself a working amv with good synchro that won't bore the audience. If you ever want a scene to be 8 beats long, let's hope it's a scene worth having at 8 beats long...

hope this helps

Org Profile · Post by **808-buma** » Fri May 13, 2005 8:17 pm

Hey all,
yes, every bit of this helps! Right now I'm about 2min 40 seconds into a song (of a 5 min song - yes, I know, but I really like the song, may have to cut it a bit, however) and I think I'll have to go back and re-edit the last 20 seconds or so because of the advice given.

Should have expected this when after I did a test burn and I went 'meh' to that part... guess I have a bit more work to do.

thanks again all. This not only helps me, but I'm guessing any other noobie who reads this post (did I say this already?)...

BasharOfTheAges · Post by **BasharOfTheAges** » Sat May 14, 2005 1:24 pm

requiett wrote:I got the tips for makin' good vids right here.

1. Use what's popular. Everyone loves a whore who rides the wave of fadorific fan-love to skyrocket their material to stardom.

2. Make sure ALL your little friends OP your vids with 10's, regardless of honesty or integrity.

3. Make long-winded posts in response to threads that ask about advice for making good vids. Be sure to use lots of long words in vague context, so it sounds like you know what you're talking about. This will convince everyone you're a pro who makes badass vids, and will venture to watch at least one of your less-than-adequete tributes to Naruto and his oily cornhole-buddies set to emo rock featuring such appealing ideals as wearing green socks, pretending to be intelligent, and crying after sex.

go angst!

Bakadeshi · Post by **Bakadeshi** » Sat May 14, 2005 1:30 pm

OmniStrata wrote: Standard music works around beats of 8. Sometimes they're fast, sometimes they're slow... But if you can work with multiples of 8 [cut on every 1st, 2nd, 4th, beat] then you've got yourself a working amv with good synchro that won't bore the audience. If you ever want a scene to be 8 beats long, let's hope it's a scene worth having at 8 beats long...

hope this helps

Funny, I never actually break down a song like that, or at least not thinking about it. When I edit, I edit more on instinct or feel than actually planning where I'm going to put cuts and such. I think it has contributed to my somewhat unique style of beat synching.

But different things work for different people. I guess whats important is to find what works for you.

LenWidleheyt · Post by **LenWidleheyt** » Sat May 14, 2005 4:16 pm

OmniStrata wrote: Standard music works around beats of 8. Sometimes they're fast, sometimes they're slow... But if you can work with multiples of 8 [cut on every 1st, 2nd, 4th, beat] then you've got yourself a working amv with good synchro that won't bore the audience. If you ever want a scene to be 8 beats long, let's hope it's a scene worth having at 8 beats long...

This is sort of how I think as well. I usually try to make a storyboard divided into groups of 8 lines, like this:

-___04 (<- bar #)
- Wind me [1st beat in bar]
- Up,
- put me
- down [4th beat in bar]
- start me
- up and
- watch
-___05 me go [8th beat in bar]
-

And add the lyrics. Some might think this is overdone. It's a hassle to make, but it means you have to listen through the song very carefully to map it out and count all the beats, which means you learn the song very well. And you'd be surprised how much this kind of storyboard helps! It's great for putting down ideas for particular scenes in advance, before you start editing a video (maybe even before you have the source for it).

It also gives you a great overview over a video. You might have a great idea for one of the choruses, and at first you don't think it will matter which chorus you use that idea for. However, planning out the video like this makes you see how the whole song fits together, and you find that using a certain idea for a certain chorus has an impact on the parts of the song just before and just after it. This could mean you want to rearrange or rethink some scenes to make them fit better together, or it could even give you completely new ideas about interesting transitions between scenes that you wouldn't have thought of otherwise. On the whole, it makes you think of your video as a whole that needs to fit together tastefully.

Of course, this will not work for everyone. But even if you think it sounds like too much work, I really recommend doing it at least once; you won't notice the advantages until you try it out.

MomochiZabuza · Post by **MomochiZabuza** » Sat May 14, 2005 4:56 pm

Scintilla wrote:Make sure to compress your audio.

Someone should've told me that

khyron · Post by **khyron** » Mon Jun 27, 2005 7:08 am

Okay, please don't think me impudent for adding 2 cents to this thread as a n00bie editor myself and not a "vetran" (or feel free to delete my post if this qualifies as off topic) but I've read all four pages of this informative post and so far nobody has mentioned my own personal pet peeve about AMV's so here it is...

Be aware of the Original Aspect Ratio (OAR) of your sources and process your video accordingly!

This incorporates several "pitfalls" that seemingly both "vets" and n00bies seem to fall into - please nobody get mad but the reason I say this is that I have seen some AMAZING videos that obviously involved serious talent which were ruined (for me) by:

- "chopping heads" from full screen content
- clipping half of a face to face scene from "wide" content
- sporadically mixing 2.35:1, 1.85:1, and 1.33:1 content
- displaying content from an anamorphic DVD incorrectly

The last seems to be the most prevalent. Please folks, look at the characters in your final output. Before you put your excellent work online or show it at a content, make sure people don't look thin and distorted, or that circular objects like the moon are not oblong. This isn't difficult to fix, it's certainly not as complex an issue as interlacing or lip-flapping, yet this so frequently seems to go unnoticed by editors.

Also admittedly the mixing of OAR's in AMV content is probably agruably a subjective thing, but I will throw in that speaking just for myself and a couple dozen friends who are AMV fanatics (if not creators) it really bothers some people, unless the video is actually supposed to be totally "silly" or something. Definately a mood killer and a distraction from serious work.

jasper-isis · Post by **jasper-isis** » Mon Jun 27, 2005 9:20 am

khyron wrote:Be aware of the Original Aspect Ratio (OAR) of your sources and process your video accordingly!

Zoom player can fix aspect ratio on the fly.

khyron · Post by **khyron** » Mon Jun 27, 2005 9:44 am

Jasper-Isis wrote:
khyron wrote:Be aware of the Original Aspect Ratio (OAR) of your sources and process your video accordingly!
Zoom player can fix aspect ratio on the fly.

That's cool, and many playback devices and software (and even some hardware, like my Sony WEGA television) can do various things to "correct" aspect ratio during playback...

...however as an editor, do you really want to demand of your viewer to "figure out" how to watch your content?

Also, this doesn't help when a video has mixed footage some of which is fine and some of which is incorrectly imported from an anamorphic source. I commonly see this happen when someone wants to mix a related TV show and movie and the movie is anamorphic while the TV show is not.