Bleach AMV "Beyond The Precipice"

Kira_Douji · Post by **Kira_Douji** » Sun Feb 26, 2006 10:12 pm

It's very hard to summarize this video. The main concept behind this amv is distortion. Because of this, there is a lot of heavy filter work and a dingy overlay. Heavy use of the "Find Edges", "RGB Balance" and "Contrast" filters abounds as well as significant tweaking of the saturation property in nearly every shot. The effect that results is something that strikes the eye as dark, out of place, or just plain wrong.

Turn off the lights before you watch this video. Watch multiple times. There's a lot of plot and quick scenes that may pass you by on the first viewing. Turn up the volume a bit, as the beginning's a bit soft, and you may not fully understand the beginning clips if the volume is too soft.

For a more complete description and to download the movie go here:
http://www.animemusicvideos.org/members ... p?v=108924

I look forward to your commentary.

- Kira

Orwell · Post by **Orwell** » Mon Feb 27, 2006 6:33 am

While its taking forever to download, currently it says a whole day, you mentioned compression problems with xvid, I was wondering if you've experimented with h.264 compression? If you'll take a look at x.264, its a free encoder for that codec, which should give great results for a low bitrate. Trythil would probably know more about it if you wanted to ask about it.

Kira_Douji · Post by **Kira_Douji** » Mon Feb 27, 2006 11:29 am

Orwell wrote:I was wondering if you've experimented with h.264 compression?

No offense, but you really didn't read the movie information did you?

If you did you'd know that I had already apologized profusely for not being able to get the x264 codec that I really, really wanted to encode in to work properly. Also, the local download is much faster :/

- Kira

silver_moon · Post by **silver_moon** » Mon Feb 27, 2006 1:45 pm

It took me eight hours to download, but I thought it was a pretty good video.

You really need to put this on local. Most people won't download this if the link goes that slow. To make it small enough to put on local you only have to do a simple thing really: compress your audio. I don't know why you didn't, but if you compress your audio with lame mp3 or something similar it will make the video about 30MB smaller with little or no noticable loss to the audio quality.

Now, about the actual video: I thought it was very different for a bleach video. It was dark and moody, and I thought it was timed pretty well. The effects were interesting, too. Although the black scratchy border got a little annoying after a while. I was expecting it to disappear after the first minute or so, and it just lost its effect and I kept wanting to see the whole picture instead. There also wasn't really very much variation in the editing, and you didn't really seem to accent some of the changes in the song. You also just seemed to play through the second season of Bleach, and the video didn't really seem to go anywhere.

That being said, I think you put some good effort into this. It's one of the few Bleach vids I've enjoyed. Nice work. And put it up on local.

Kira_Douji · Post by **Kira_Douji** » Mon Feb 27, 2006 2:56 pm

Am I the only one who's browser shows a local download? /worried.

I didn't compress the audio because, unfortunately, I only know how to do that with the x264 encoding. If you could link me to a guide, I'll fix this, but as is, I have no idea how to mux avi files :/.

As for the video... Could you clarify what you mean by "not much variation in the editting"? I'm afraid I don't really understand what you mean. Were too many of my cuts the same length? Not enough variation in the filters I used? Something else entirely?

I'd like to be able to improve my editting, so if you could flesh out exactly what you mean, I'd find it very useful.

Towards your other comment: does the video have to "go somewhere"? I wasn't attempting to tell a story with this, it's merely a showcase piece. "This is the dark side of Bleach". Are you saying that I should have chosen a different topic or that you expected more from the topic I gave? If the latter, what would have furthered the intent of the video?

Thank you for replying, I look forward to your responses.

- Kira

Orwell · Post by **Orwell** » Mon Feb 27, 2006 3:34 pm

I blame the massive amounts of homework that had me up that late in the first place, and the fact that I only gave it a cursory glance while scrolling down to local. Think of it as ranting about the quality, despite your best efforts, this really does need either a larger size or better compression. Offense is traded for disappointment, or something.

I really liked it, it kept that central darker theme to it through out the video and progressed nicely. The editing was well done. I think my only complaint besides the quality was the border. If its going to be that invasive onto the rest of the footage, it should have been as active as the rest of the video, possibly moving around to cut off unimportant parts of a scene to only emphasize what you felt was important. But leaving it static like that kinda kills it after a while.

The soul society arc isn't right because they drag out the battles and punish the viewer by giving you a glimpse of how great the show would be if they didn't insert 3 episodes to get done what you can in just a few minutes. Though, after watching a entire arc of it in one go, it's not quite so bad.

Kira_Douji · Post by **Kira_Douji** » Mon Feb 27, 2006 4:28 pm

Yes, I agree with the statement about quality. Unfortunately, a month's worth of troubleshooting took it's toll last night when I angrilly deleted most everything to do with the encodes... and in the middle of the mass delete caught my video clips and raw, original video output, which due to being on an external drive, are not in my recylcling bin to be restored. This is when I cry and bang my head against the wall because just this morning I reverted back 6 or 7 builds of the x264 codec and MeGUI and FINALLY got the damn thing to work... only to have my efforts shot by the fact that I only have a first pass XviD encode as my largest, least compressed version to transcode. I don't know what I did to piss off the computer gods, but I'M SORRY.

The other person who has so far provided feedback for this video also suggested that I remove or fix the overlay in some manner. The idea of having it move is appealing, although I'm not sure how this would be accomplished. The Evangelion video "Fire" comes to mind, wherein their overlay was really a series of ... well, I don't really know how many... different overlays flashed by at approximately one per frame to make it seem like the edges were shifting, moving, and changing shape. Did you mean something like that or more along the lines of somehow literally causing the one overlay to shift or move on it's own?

As for the Soul Society arc itself... well, I did prefer the manga during that, since instead of having drawn out battles for the sake of drawn out battles, it was a little long solely because so much was going on at once. Kubo has a thing for large casts, I guess. I'm glad you liked my shortened version of it, though.

- Kira

Qyot27 · Post by **Qyot27** » Mon Feb 27, 2006 6:19 pm

Kira_Douji wrote:I didn't compress the audio because, unfortunately, I only know how to do that with the x264 encoding. If you could link me to a guide, I'll fix this, but as is, I have no idea how to mux avi files :/.

Open the video in VirtualDubMod, go to Streams->Stream List and click Save WAV...

Convert the WAV to MP3 using an external MP3 encoder, like dBPowerAMP Music Converter (look for an older version; licensing issues make them charge for the MP3 encoder now, despite the fact that it's LAME they rely on). Then click Add... in the Stream List dialog in VDubMod and open the MP3. Make sure to disable the WAV stream. Then click 'OK', make sure the video is on Direct Stream Copy and save the new file.

It is possible to encode with VDubMod if you install the LAME ACM codec (you can get that at Rarewares), in which case you wouldn't have to use Save WAV... and could just right click on the audio stream, select 'Full Processing Mode' and then go to 'Compression' and select the MP3 encoding options. Then just make sure the video is on Direct Stream Copy (if working with the XviD file) and save the new file.

One thing to note, though: VDubMod (and AVI, for that matter) doesn't like VBR, so make sure that the MP3 is Constant Bitrate.

Bakadeshi · Post by **Bakadeshi** » Mon Feb 27, 2006 7:05 pm

Qyot27 wrote:
Kira_Douji wrote:I didn't compress the audio because, unfortunately, I only know how to do that with the x264 encoding. If you could link me to a guide, I'll fix this, but as is, I have no idea how to mux avi files :/.
Open the video in VirtualDubMod, go to Streams->Stream List and click Save WAV...

Convert the WAV to MP3 using an external MP3 encoder, like dBPowerAMP Music Converter (look for an older version; licensing issues make them charge for the MP3 encoder now, despite the fact that it's LAME they rely on). Then click Add... in the Stream List dialog in VDubMod and open the MP3. Make sure to disable the WAV stream. Then click 'OK', make sure the video is on Direct Stream Copy and save the new file.

It is possible to encode with VDubMod if you install the LAME ACM codec (you can get that at Rarewares), in which case you wouldn't have to use Save WAV... and could just right click on the audio stream, select 'Full Processing Mode' and then go to 'Compression' and select the MP3 encoding options. Then just make sure the video is on Direct Stream Copy (if working with the XviD file) and save the new file.

One thing to note, though: VDubMod (and AVI, for that matter) doesn't like VBR, so make sure that the MP3 is Constant Bitrate.

the easier way is to just grab the AMVapp package here:
http://www.animemusicvideos.org/guides/ ... mvapp.html

Wich has all that stuff in one package rather than hunting around the internet for everything seperately. Also has the added benefit of most things already configured properly to work with each other in an AMV editing environment.

As for guides on using Xvid and compression, this is the best one I know of:
http://www.animemusicvideos.org/guides/avtech/

Kira_Douji · Post by **Kira_Douji** » Mon Feb 27, 2006 7:23 pm

I have the AMVapp (as noted in the AMV description which I guess no one reads

). I've Read <a href=http://www.a-m-v.org/guides/avtech31/>ErMaC & AbsoluteDestiny's Friendly AMV Guides</a> and followed their instructions exactly, so that's not the issue with the XviD encode, really, it's just the encoder itself not being able to compress that small and still look good. This was then compounded by the fact that I used a wav instead of an mp3, creating the large filesize which I was trying to overcome by making XviD compress smaller. What I should have done instead was change the wav to an mp3 and compress normally.

However, all I can do now is watch VDM pump out a HUGE Direct Stream Copy version of the currently released video and wonder how in the world this is supposed to be smaller than its wav counterpart.... Qyot27? The mp3 itself is smaller, but after I added it in, disabled the wav and chose "Direct Stream Copy" ... it's giving me a projected filesize of well over 2 gigs. Can you think of why this might be?

- Kira