Do you still like the old stuff?

[sh00tingstargrl]

The first one I ever watched was a Hellsing AMV by Deathmajor Productions. The song was Burn - The Cure. It's still one of my favorite AMVs ever. This is from back in 2001 I believe, but it still has the same effect on me.

[Joon27]

I like some of the older ones better or at least ones that use an older style. Now, when I see suggested videos, they're epilepsy tests. To be a "good" video these days seems to mean cutting every quarter of a second and using so many stupid effects that the anime itself is tinted, embossed, and has some lame wave effect going across it. You don't need to video to flash with every single drum beat. Funny thing about videos, I like to be able to watch them. Might as well just turn on the "Random" effect in WMP and play music to get the same feel as half of the videos in the recommendations forum.

[Cornwiggle]

I like some of the older ones better or at least ones that use an older style. Now, when I see suggested videos, they're epilepsy tests. To be a "good" video these days seems to mean cutting every quarter of a second and using so many stupid effects that the anime itself is tinted, embossed, and has some lame wave effect going across it. You don't need to video to flash with every single drum beat. Funny thing about videos, I like to be able to watch them. Might as well just turn on the "Random" effect in WMP and play music to get the same feel as half of the videos in the recommendations forum.

Here Here. Videos that are so whored out on effects that you can't even see what's going on is stupid. Thankfully, the old style as you're talking about is not dead, but those are rare finds. If you have to have cool effects, use them enhance the video, not just show off.

[Gepetto]

The first AMV I saw was Caldwell's Engel, so... Hell yeah. Still my favorite, because it's simple, yet fantastic. My second favorite is actually the same thing: Caffeine Encomium. Same editor, same concept. I love a good sync.

[Knowname]

well considering my first vid I LIKED was Engel than BBT's stuff than that Livin' in the Fridge Cowboy Bebop video absoluteley cracked me up.... I guess not. Coarse it helps that I started off basically perusing through the top 10% (back in 01 it was more like the top 50%, 100 out of 200... downloadable ;p, and the top list was easily found on the FRONT PAGE! Aaah the good ole days). But no. I can without a doubt say that I'm BETTER than you -_-.

[Knowname]

I can't remember my first amv but I remember several videos from around that time. A lot of them are still in my top 20. Some of them are in my top 10. I really don't care if the quality is bad compared to today's standards because they were made yesterday. I remember that and I can enjoy a lot of them just as much as I did back then. They remain classics to me because back then I watched them continuously and when I break them out from the old pile they still bring back all of those good memories. If it made me sappy, want to shake my butt, rock out, or get absorbed into the video then I re-live it.

In all honesty though, I am finding lately that newer videos aren't having that same kind of impact on me. Whether it is because I am more critical or if they lack that certain spark I'll never know.

for some reason I don't put classics in my top list. I mean I look and I'm like 'Caffein Enconium is #80?? Engel is nowhere to be found?!!' I still watch these, but for some reason they'd fallen out of my top list! Not a clue why. I mean I KNOW why. It's cuz in 5 years I'd found many other 'unbeatable' vids, but, still...

[Rorschach]

Yeah, some of the stuff I like does look more stairstepped and pixelated now, especially since I went from an old 800X600 display on a smaller screen to a 1024X768 display on a bigger CRT screen that I was able to pick up cheap when the new flatscreen displays finally caught on. Still, a lot of the old stuff looks very good compared to today's AMVs, even if it's a bit clunky. The differences between early AMVs and the ones I see now are more than a little like the differences between 1980s comic books and 1990s comic books that I noticed when I was buying them.

The differences are mainly these: that while the technology for making AMVs now is better than ever, the skill for expressing themes and narratives, whether dramatic or comic, has become more of a rarity in the makers. Also, a cool visual effect touches the emotions only the first time it's done. The overused clip from Cowboy Bebop which has the camera panning into Spike's eye, for instance, was only effective in the first Cowboy Bebop AMV I saw using it, the one set to "Dust In The Wind" by Kansas.

Hence, some of the earliest AMVs I have, (DBZ set to "Particle Man" and the hilarious "Living In The Fridge" Cowboy Bebop AMV) have not lost their appeal for me, even though they're small and grainy compared to stuff we've got now. Meanwhile, the stuff made these days is increasingly so emotionally vacuous and visually boring that I'm having trouble enjoying any of it. Some technological innovations, such as Windows Movie Maker 2, have actually made newer videos look worse than the old ones! The colors are brighter than ever, the pictures are bigger and clearer than ever, and we viewers are swimming in a bigger ocean of uninspiring garbage than ever before.

Our craft may very well be going through the same coming-of-age that pulp fiction and comic books did in their time, from the Golden Age when a rocket or a guy in a cape on the cover could sell anything simply because it all seemed so new, to the Silver Age when a few professionals became celebrities in their field from putting out polished best-sellers. Mercifully, we may well avoid the Gilded Age that followed for these fields, during which gold-digging parasites raided each respective industry's fans for whatever they could get from them. In AMVs, there's no gold to be dug; we're not paying money to see each other's works. However, I doubt the anime industry itself will be able to avoid such gold-diggers with such a massive influx of fans. Meanwhile, we are facing a flood of newbies.

Beyond the Gilded Age, I'm not sure what comes next, except maybe expansion into other fields (as with comic book heros being all over the movie screens, thanks to Hollywood), and the prevalence of group efforts over individual works. (Compare the number of people involved in making a comic book in the old days to the number of people it takes to make a movie from a comic book now, for example.)

In short, the stuff that's good is really good, and is likely to remain so for a long time to come, while the stuff that's bad is mostly just mediocre, but there's a rapidly expanding mountain of it. This is the dung heap through which we'll be digging for gems from now on, I believe. The good times were too good to last.

[sayde]

I know I still like many of the first amv's I've ever seen. To this day, I admire them for being so simple but so effective in there editting. They used hardly any digital effects, but still produced an amv worth remembering. For example, KimoNo's FF tribute done to "When Angels Deserve to Die" or Adam Rook's FF8 tribute to the song "Supernatural", or even Dark Kamui's DBZ tribute to Vegata done to "In the End" were just great simple amv's that still haven't gotten old (and probably never will to me).

[Ojamajo_LimePie]

I still love a lot of the AMVs I first watched. Of course, I was watching stuff from Aluminium and Doki Doki; who were the top tier back then. 'Blue Mercury' and 'Senshi on Springer' are still on my Top 20 AMV list.

[Kionon]

<SNIP>

x2.

Back when I started, you were either forced to learn the complex software suites or you already came from a video editing background. I was the latter group. In 1999, I joined a vocational radio/tv broadcasting program. By 2000, I recognized I could use my abilities learned on $5000 editing computers (computers, running NT with play's trinity and Adobe Premiere 5.0 and Final Cut Pro) to make anime music videos. So I started working on Utena (Story of a Girl) and Heero's a Mess with Robert Romig of R3 Studios. I loaded Premiere 5.0 on a 333mhz Celeron with 64MB of ram and proceeded, very slowly, to create Story of a Girl, it was finished in January 2001, and posted to the Org in March (along with Heero's a Mess which was produced on a much better machine [for the time, of course]).

This would simply not have been possible had I not been provided a copy of Premiere free of charge for particpating in the radio/TV broadcasting program. I was among the few who had access to this sort of thing, most of the others from that time period were much older than me (I was only 17), and had jobs or were in college. They had the experience and the funds to purchase the necessary hardware. I had only a finicky DVD-ROM and a cheepo TV card. If not for Premiere, I would have had no "editing rig" to speak of. Robert and I, at our age, were fortunate. And it shows that the company we kept in 2001 was definitely older.

It is also important to note that there were no torrent sites, very very few digital fansubs, and no raws or rips at all available on the net. Our source was what we could physically get our hands on. Which is why my Utena (Story of a Girl) is half VHS and half DVD, because of course, only the first two discs were out for Utena at the time (Much to my amusement a recent opinion of Utena [Story of a Girl] told me I should only use DVD or "downloaded" footage, but not both. Made me laugh).

Now, the ability to A) procure a suite B) procure footage C) slap things into a suite D) upload final version is so easy and simple, that everyone is doing it. Including young teens. This drastically changes the way that most amvs will be made. Since most amvs are the products of better equipment but more immature editors (who in general, have neither the pride nor the patience to synch adequately), the gap of good to bad videos inevitably grows further apart than even simple growth of the artform would normally allow. It is my theory that the reason older videos were better is because they were produced by adults. Most videos being produced now are being produced by teenagers.

No offense to the minors on the site.