a music video maker

[rose4emily]

Trythil hinted at this earlier, but...

There's this thing called Linux. It's an operating system. It's also commonly associated with penguins, technologically inclined hippies, and wannabe ninjas. A lot of that's just folklore, though (well, maybe not the wannabe ninja part - I've seen a few of those).

On it, you can run things like MEncoder, Transcode, FFMPEG, AVIDemux, Cinelerra, and Kino.

Cinelerra's a bit complex for someone just learning how to edit. At least that's what I thought while I was just learning to edit. It's also very powerful and flexible once you get to know it and stop hurting its feelings by yelling obscenities at it when you can't figure out how to do something. Or maybe I just stopped with the obscenities because I had gotten used to it. I suppose this is one of those areas where correlation and causation aren't necessarily the same thing.

Of course, it also helps to RTFM. Unfortunately for me, I didn't even find TFM until I had been using it for a month and a half. Talk about unnecessary sources of frustration.

Kino, on the other hand, is pretty intuitive. It'll only work with DV, however, so you best be prepared to clear a lot of disk space before editing. On the bright side, it's really best to work in DV, anyhow, since it's a pure Intraframe codec fixed at a high bitrate and the same two video formats used for DVDs and most of the world's televisions (NTSC and PAL, in case you're thinking of "format" in some other sense). While DV is a lossy codec (something a lot of people don't know), DV editing is a lossless process for any frames to which you apply no effects or compositing. In other words, DV editing will simply copy frames from your source to your render if you don't apply any effects to those frames. No sense in re-encoding frames if you're just moving them around.

Now, the hard part: Getting DV footage from a DVD. You can do it, you just need to use a few command line tools. MEncoder, Transcode, and FFMPEG all offer quite a bit of transcoding functionality - and the three combined are enough for you to turn any kind of video into any other kind of video if you know what you're doing.

As to getting DV from things other than DVDs (which shall remain unspecified), I wouldn't bother. Unless you're talking about film, or DV from a digital camcorder, but I doubt a 12-year old AMV maker is planning to paint a bunch of cels and shoot them on a crane somewhere (and live-action footage from a digital camcorder isn't exactly anime). Other things, like DivX video from the Internet, tend to be both multigenerational and in formats other than PAL and NTSC, despite the fact that virtually all anime is orignially distributed in NTSC (seeing as how both the United States and Japan are on the NTSC television standard). It's possible, but involves an ugly format conversion process and isn't going to look any better than the multigeneration DivX rip did - and will look worse once you add yet another generation when you create your distribution copy.

As to the Linux bit, it's a lot easier than it used to be, but still something that requires a little patience and a lot of reading. I think a 12-year-old should have no problem with installing a copy of the current Mandrake release (10.1 Official), and things like URPMI make software installation a piece of cake compared to RPM "dependency hell" or the simple but time consuming and (to some) intimidating process of "./configure; make; make install". KDE shoudn't seem too foreign to a Windows user, and apps like OpenOffice, Firebird, Thunderbird, Kopete, KWrite, Eclipse, Audacity, gFTP, Amarok, Azureus, and MPlayer let you do everything you could in Windows (other than play fancy Direct-X games).

Still, I don't think anyone, 12 or otherwise, should bother switching from any OS to any other if they don't have some good reason for doing so. If the only reason you'd use Linux is to make a couple of music videos as a hobby, you'd probably be better off paying for a decent Windows-based editing app and saving yourself the trouble of getting used to a new system. If, on the other hand, you want all the free software you could ask for without ever dealing with "warez" - or feel the need to prove your geekdom or fight back against "The Man" (which is actually sort of crazy, but what the hell...), Linux is the way to go. If you have a lot of money and like shiny things, you might want to pick up a Mac. Maybe a Commodore64 is the perfect machine for someone. Just not for anyone I know (who wouldn't want it more for nostalga value than anything else).

[navs92]

so vnow can u say that in english... and shorter

[mantlepicture]

so vnow can u say that in english... and shorter

What rose said was much closer to English than what you said.

[navs92]

ur point being

[rose4emily]

VOLASNE IN LATINVM SCRIPTO?

[bum]

At second glance, WMM does seem to have a trimming tool. But Avid has a trimming MODE. Let's see you do slipping and sliding with WMM's pathetic excuse for a trim tool. Haha, WMM can't even do dual-sided trimming! Horrible. AOL is more efficient.

Any program that dedicates 10% of the screen to "movie making tips" is an obvious kid's toy. Face it, Fisher Price could make a better video editing program.

[/quote]

You know, comparing something which costs thousands of dollars to something which is free is prety stupid. And saying that wmm is a kids toy is like saying cartoons are all for children. Its stupid and your only saying it because you feel "higher up" (read=ego) because your using a more powerfull program.

And you also have to go back and forth through the tape to find your footage. It took about two hours to make a :60 music video, which I can do in about 10 minutes on Avid(if it's cuts-only).

I could do a 60 second music video in 2 minutes, that doesnt make it any good.

[navs92]

that's right everything is the same really all people wanna see in music vids is mainly the music and some cutting of videos

[bum]

ur point being

His point is that you've got no idea how to spell or use grammar. And any part of this thread somehow relating to you ended somewhere in the second page of this thread.

that's right everything is the same really all people wanna see in music vids is mainly the music and some cutting of videos

You've got no idea what your talking about. Then again, I knew that when I read the first post on this thread. People want to see good amv's. Amv's which have a high level and quality of editing. It aint simple and it certianly isnt easy.

[navs92]

yup and back to the topic ...which i made ... can u tell me a good free does blurry effects and all the effects on music vids and is compatable with all formats

[rose4emily]

If you want "good" and "free", you pretty much have to pick from one of two choices:

1) Use Linux and all of the stuff I mentioned in my last English-language post.

2) Get AVISynth and VirtualDub, and become a master of editing videos through scripts on your Windows machine.

Either way is a lot of work, but will give you a degree of flexibility rivaled only by the most fancy and expensive of the commercial programs. One you know what you're doing, whichever path you choose, you can also work very efficiently - especially when you use scripts and know how to batch anything repetitive.

That having been said, I should really emphasize the "LOT OF WORK" portion of that last paragraph. You'll be able to work with any source format and do anything within the limits of human imagination and mathematical possibility, but only after you put some real effort into researching both the nature of digital video / digital video compression and the nature of the tools you're working with. The high-level professional stuff like Avid, FinalCut, AfterEffects and Shake (though those last two are more for effects, compositing, and original animation that editing of pre-existing video) wil wrap up a lot of that inner-workings stuff so you don't have to think about it. It still helps to know that stuff, same as it's good for a photographer to understand the chemical processes by which film is developed, but the super-fancy apps allow their users to only think about those things when they want to. The mid-level apps provide the same sort of abstraction, often more, but are a little less flexible and offer less in the way of optimizing repetitive tasks. Still, many users would find that preferable since editing at a more relaxed pace is often a good thing for hobbyists, especially one's who develop their ideas "as they go along". Then the beginner stuff will abtract everything to a rediculous level - to such a degree that your editing choices are also severely limted. This isn't to say that you can't make a good video in WMM or iMovie. You can, if it doesn't require a lot of super-flashy technical editing. I actually think a lot of people go overboard with the easy-to-apply and often tacky preset effects offered by most video editors - so you might be best off making a video or two with nothing but cuts and fades. Take a look at professional films (not music videos, most professional music videos exhibit an inexplicable and inexcusable level of suck), and follow the editing style. Mostly cuts and fades - with any flashes, split-screens, wipes, psychadelic colors and the like being reserved for very select moments of emphasis.

Now - since both "the Linux way" and "the AVISynth way" tend to favor the patient and technically inclined over anyone who just wants to make a video and get it done without spending at least a week reading about container formats, the DCT, color spaces, television broadcast formats, scripting languages, command line arguments, and unusual user interfaces - I'm going to suggest you use the WMM or pay $50-100 for an entry-level commercial editing package. It'll save you a lot of frustration, at least in the short run, and give you a chance to learn the basics without being overwhelmed by the environment (which would probably happen if you went with either of the open-source paths, or one of the prohibitively expensive and complex professional-level applications).

If you do work with WMM, I might add, work with DV instead of WMV9. It's a much better editing format, seeing as how it was meant for editing. WMM can only work with and export DV in the AVI container format (because, being Microsoft, they coudn't have just stuck with the standard...), so you'll have to find some experienced Windows-based editor to tell you how to get your source into DV and how to transcode that DV into a more distribution-friendly format once you've exported your finished video.

If you want to trade up from WMM to something fairly intuitive and Windows-based, I hear Premiere Elements is a pretty good deal for the $99 price tag. It also is an app a fair number of AMV makers are likely to be familiar with (or at least familiar with it's more advanced counterpart Premiere Pro), so getting help on how to do specific technical things shouldn't be too much of a problem for you.

---

BTW - by "blurry effects", I imagine you mean the Gaussian blur (sometimes called "unsharp" or "soften"), which is a specific type of spatial convolution kernel in which each pixel's value is partially propegated to the neighbouring pixels in a discrete simulation of a circular pattern and the sum of all elements of the convolution kernel is equal to 1 - in order to avoid brightening or darkening the image as a side-effect of the convolution. There's also an approximate inverse of this operation commonly called "sharpen" in which each pixel's value is adjusted to increase the difference between it and the values of the neighbouring pixels. There's actually a lot of other cool stuff you can do with convolution kernels - but those two are the only one's you'll see in most video editors, and the actual kernel is rarely exposed in video/image editing apps despite its usefullness. Probably because an effect you control by typing a bunch on numbers into a grid isn't terribly high on the user-friendly list.

"All the effects on music vids". Dear God! I hope you don't plan to use them all at once. The horror!!!!

Seriously, there aren't really all that many video/image effects that are really entirely different from the rest. I don't know if you play the guitar, but I'm going with a guitar analogy here:

You could get a "MultiFX" box with 90 tacky presets and maybe 10 good ones, and say it offers you a 100 different effects OR you could get a delay pedal, an overdrive pedal, an EQ, a volume pedal, and a wah-wah. With those five items you can magically produce almost any sound that's ever come out of a guitar. How? By knowing how they work, what all the parameters do, and how to chain them together.

Image and video editing are a lot like that. You have colourspace operations, convolution operations, transforms, translations, and (in video) temporal convolutions and transforms. That's really about it for "FX". Everything else is really just compositing in disguise, which is like calling an audio mixer an effects box because the sound that comes out of it is different from any of the two that went in. Your program (especially if it's in the "prosumer" range) might come up with all sorts of preset variations and combinations of those basics, but those few effects are really all there is deep-down in the core of your program.

As to "compatible with all formats". Good luck. The only things I've seen that come close are MPlayer/MEncoder and Transcode on Linux. Everything else seems to want to work with only the stuff it's designers feel some political motivation for including. WMM like Windows Meda - almost nothing else does. Apple's products have a serious bias toward Quicktime. A lot of the prosumer apps will import DivX and MPEG2 video - but this functionality tends to be buggy since they aren't meant to be editing formats. Really DV and HuffYUV are your serious editing choices if you want your editor to be stable and your end product to look good. Otherwise you'll be making a blunder I once made quite frequently by transcoding one unsupported highly lossy distribution format to another partially supported highly lossy distribution format and getting pissed when the editor crashes while encountering misplaced b-frames or corrupted data in some tiny part of the stream.

---

...and don't complain about my writing style, or I'll be obliged to post another response enirely in Latin. Or maybe just post the whole of Alice's Restaurant - 1|\| 1337!!!!!!!!!! That should be almost as much of a pain in the ass 2 reed as iz sum AOL speek sum kid rote B4 he new how much sum peopal H8 teh AOL speex.