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Information

• Member: JCD
• Studio: Anime Corp
• Title: Morningstar
• Premiered: 2003-01-27
• Categories:
  • Action
  • Drama
  • Romance
• Song:
  • AFI Morningstar
• Anime:
  • Crest of the Stars
• Comments: Hello Creators and Fans!
  
  In this video I tried to create something else than before. First of all I'd like to say that the vid doesn't contain mainly action, it focuses strong on Drama/Romance. The reason why I still added action is because of the ending of the song/video, those of you who know this cool ballad of AFI will know what I mean.
  
  Since 15 of 15 videos that I've done so far all focus on action, I simply wanted to do something else. I've been looking around for a beatuiful ballad which could be done to some anime like Escaflowne or Shamanic Princess. Quickly I was getting annoyed by these slow songs and so I wanted to look after some harder punk-music just to vent. I've also heard more of AFI these days and finally I heard their beautiful ballad Morningstar from the f***ing awsome album The Art Of Drowning. That what I thought of in this moment was nothing else like Crest of the Stars (we're always getting these inspirations by accident, eh?)
  Anyway, Crest of the Stars is one of the most beautiful animes I've seen so far, also something else like mainstream. Morningstar fitted very good to the Flair of the series and I hope I've gotten it right (can't say that right now).
  
  As for editing, I used a borrowed HK Bootleg (Remember, I'm one of these poor students which has to spend his money on the car driving license). This was also the first time I edited a DVD directly via Avisynth, pretty slow, but it worked. I began to edit and after some scenes it was like first time ever doing an AMV! But it made fun like hell! This was the first time I edited such calm scenes right and the thing that is different and what made such fun is that these calm scenes, still standing pictures etc. are much easier to manipulate! Lip movements with no lyrics? No problem, I'll just make a frame hold at a mouth-close picture. Picture seems too static? No problem, just letting the frame scroll a bit. Scene doesn't match the lyrics? No problem, just inserting a lens flare to act as sun to match the lyrics :p
  You guessed it, the video has a lot of effects. Both subtle and noticeable, I think they match the video pretty well and I finally used them in the right way -> When a clip matched the lyrics & mood, I didn't do an effect or something, I just used a lot of them to help the video, to make it more asskicking.
  As for the final scene, I just edited it like I always edit action: Synching shots, rockets & explosions to the clashes and guitar sounds in the song with trying to let the anime play as much as it goes. I think this final action scene matches the rest of the video pretty well and flows with it.
  
  I'm overall very statisfied with this video and it made much fun to edit, I hope you have as much fun watching it!
  
  Now I'll quickly add something for the most unimportant thing in an AMV, the video quality (Overall it's just fun as well for me to get the best quality at lowest filesize):
  The Bootleg I used was alright at most parts, just some artifacts, but it hat one major problem: GHOSTING! Already that much that you probably can count the seperate frames while watching the bootleg :p Another problem was that the ghosting caused some additional interlacing althrough I edited in IVTC. As I've used calm scenes for the most time, I'm lucky that the ghosting doesn't appear in these, for other scenes I could get rid of it. Just one 3 second long scene it is noticable.
  If you want to know how I got the quality, here's my filter-combination in Avisynth 2.5 for the video:
  
  TemporalCleaner()
  Telecide(threshold=12,dthreshold=5,firstlast=true,blend=true,chroma=true)
  Crop(10,2,-14,-0)
  BicubicResize(576,432,0,0.75)
  tiya3dd(1,3,0,255)
  Convolution3d(preset="animeHQ")
  DCTFilter(1,1,1,1,1,1,1,0.375)
  
  For compression I used the last stable binary of Koepi's XVID with 70 % of the first pass filesize. For those who can't "read" the above, all was done in the high resolution 576 x 432
  As for Audio, it's a CBR mp3 at 192 kbps encoded with Frauenhofer IIS Codec (Lame might generally be better, except this bitrate in cbr! It sound better to me than lame)
  
  Enough for the encoding stuff, doesn't belong to the (I hope so) important artistic work of the video.
  ENJOY!
  
  Programs used:
  Smartripper
  DVD2AVI
  Avisynth 2.06+ & 2.5
  Adobe Premiere 6.0
  Paint Shop Pro 5.02
  Windows Calculator (again)
  
  Alright, the download is up again, just a renaming problem with the folder in wich they were stored.
  Thanks to Anime Corp! You guys rock