How to select clips?

[seasons]

I'm just running through episodes one by one and making subclips out of anything that looks usable. This is a horribly inefficient and time-consuming method but when I have (what I think is) a good but uselessly incomplete draft of the video in my head, this is the only method I've used to help bring it into clearer focus prior to editing.

I rarely take advantage of the extra sequence feature in Premiere, I might try LittleAtari's method just to see what happens.

[Kitsuner]

If you find out a clip you imagined doesn't actually exist, animate it yourself.

[macchinainterna]

Sacrifice A LOT of virgins.

[Knowname]

I'm just running through episodes one by one and making subclips out of anything that looks usable. This is a horribly inefficient and time-consuming method but when I have (what I think is) a good but uselessly incomplete draft of the video in my head, this is the only method I've used to help bring it into clearer focus prior to editing.

I rarely take advantage of the extra sequence feature in Premiere, I might try LittleAtari's method just to see what happens.

uh. why not just use the entire episode

like the first guy said (after ileia she's a girl -_-) just put the full vob or video file or movie into premoere or w/e you use and work from there in real time.

good it saves time. makes it very easy to backup too. all you need is the same vobs put into the folder and boom you got your entire project back. so's all you need to save when your backing up is your project file (and maybe any titles/ graphics/ alternate sources you might use). OFC I don't use After Affects so that might add something else but.

bad is well you can't really clean this footage... unless your gonna clean the entire thing or do it post-editing. also it makes an awful mess of your timeline unless your VERY organized. If your not very organized it could be difficult to even think with all of that possible footage.

[downwithpants]

try to storyboard your amv first, even if you can't think of specific scenes from the anime during this process. then go through your source and try to see how you can make something fit.

otherwise if you don't have an overall direction for your video, one tip is you can use the story of the anime itself for a segment of your video. more specifically, look for a segment of the anime where a sequence of events is presented visually and it makes you want to see what happens next. for extra points look for such a segment that you can tie to the music. this can allow you just take clips from just 2-3 minutes of one episode and allow you to fill like 10-30 seconds of the amv. it's not as creative (you're using storytelling and presentation elements from the anime), but... it can work.

[RottenJesus]

If you find out a clip you imagined doesn't actually exist, animate it yourself.

Ok, with my background knowledge in AE and the sort of, that's not quite the option for me now ^^

bad is well you can't really clean this footage... unless your gonna clean the entire thing or do it post-editing.

Is that really so bad? Cleaning all of it is just a matter of time, and if you're not extremely near the deadline, it should work. (I remember doing this for my first vid, I used like 6 DVDs but I don't remember it taking too long).
On the other hand, is cleaning post-editing also a problem? You don't need the filtered HQ-files for editing, can do that later too.

try to storyboard your amv first, even if you can't think of specific scenes from the anime during this process. then go through your source and try to see how you can make something fit.

That doesn't sound too bad. Even if it's a storyline from the anime, if it fits with my own story it should work. Normally I have the the starting and the ending point of the atmosphere/mood I want to create in that clip, so if the anime covers that it should be fine.

Overall, thanks a lot for the hints guys. I see that everyone uses a different method here and now I can try some different approaches.
And it's great to see that so many people still helping noobs, really gets my spirit up ^-^

[x_rex30]

What I have done which works great is make fake avis to edit in Vegas with vfapi, then to find the scenes I want to edit with, I just scroll through the anime using Avsp. I'll put like 20 anime dvds on my computer, make the fake avi out of the vobs using scripts as well, then scroll through them in Avsp to find the scenes I want. I will find the exact frame through the program Avsp and then just type in that frame in Vegas. The reason I do it with avsp is because you can do custom speed when scrolling. Pressing down skips a second worth of frames and pressing page down skips a minute worth of frames. I can think of a scene I want and scroll through the anime's in no time. It's how I made my 'Reiterate to Irritate' video. The visual quality is great and I finished the video in an hour and it uses 15 different anime. It's because I was able to find the scenes really fast and then add them into the timeline. I'd show you the video if I could find a host. My server became unreliable so I have to get a new host.

Also make simple scripts that don't hinder performance in vegas. Always keep deinterlacing, frame rate/size changes alone alone because if you change it later, all the scenes will be moved around in your timeline. When you are done editing, you can just add scripts to clean up the footage, remake the fake avi with the same name and have it in the same folder, then all you have to do is re-open vegas and export. Very easy process if you want it to be.

[RottenJesus]

Also make simple scripts that don't hinder performance in vegas. Always keep deinterlacing, frame rate/size changes alone alone because if you change it later, all the scenes will be moved around in your timeline. When you are done editing, you can just add scripts to clean up the footage, remake the fake avi with the same name and have it in the same folder, then all you have to do is re-open vegas and export. Very easy process if you want it to be.

Believe it or not, I read the whole fakeAVIs thing in the guides and tried it out with a little project (which I didn't finish again -.-) and I found it to be really, should I say economic? You don't have the problem which files to input into Vegas to get a good workspeed and having limited hd-space at the same time. I will stick with that, but it didn't help me finishing the project the last time ^^
The avsp-thingy seems neat though, will try it out!

[Douggie]

I was really inspired by Walter Murch's interview in the documentary The Cutting Edge - which I recommend you people to watch.



You see that wall in the background? That wall is filled with shots of all the tapes he needs/has spot. The cool thing about that is that you can search through your footage really fast and, if it's timestamped, you can go to that footage real easy. Murch also annotates his shots I think. I t is much much faster than going through all the footage in your NLE even if you use markers for your footage and notes in that markers.

Ok, now I had the same idea of having this, but just with a bunch of thumbnails generated from your tapes - or anime in your case - instead of all printed out on the wall, so you can use Explorer or what ever thumbnail viewer to go through all the scenes really quickly. I talked about it with a friend of mine, Daniel, and he said that he could easily write a an AVS-script for that that creates JPEG-files every x seconds/frames/whatever and he did:

Daniel's post from the Animecon.nl forums - http://forum.animecon.nl/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=2225:

On a slightly related note, Douggie and Rellik were discussing during dinner about how there aren't any good thumbnail generators. I promised to make one in AviSynth and here it is.

Code: Select all

function Thumbnails(clip c, string "dest", int "every", int "col", int "x", float "ar") {
    c
    dest  = default(dest,  "")
    every = default(every, Round(Sqrt(framecount)))
    col   = default(col,   Max(Round((Log(1.0 * framecount / every) + 1) * Sqrt(2)), 1))
    x     = default(x,     1280 / col - 1)
    ar    = default(ar,    1.0 * width / height)
    
    ConvertToRGB().Spline36Resize(x, Round(x / ar)).SelectEvery(every)
    ScriptClip("Subtitle(GetTime(current_frame / framerate), text_color=$ffffff, align=2)")
    StackFrames(AddBorders(1,1,0,0), BlankClip(), 0, col).AddBorders(0,0,1,1)
    ImageWriter(dest, type="png")
}

function StackFrames(clip c, clip thumbs, int i, int col) {
    StackFramesHorizontal(c, BlankClip(), i, col)
    i < c.framecount - col ? StackVertical(last, StackFrames(c, last, i + col, col)) : last
}

function StackFramesHorizontal(clip c, clip thumbs, int i, int col) {
    i < c.framecount  ? c.Trim(i, i > 0 ? i : -1)                  : BlankClip(c, 0)
    i % col > 0       ? StackHorizontal(thumbs, last)              : last
    i % col < col - 1 ? StackFramesHorizontal(c, last, i + 1, col) : last
}

function GetTime(float cur) {
    h  = String(Int(cur) / 3600)
    m  = String(Int(cur) / 60 % 60)
    s  = String(Int(cur) % 60)
    ms = String(Int(Frac(cur) * 1000))
    return h + ":" + (StrLen(m)  < 2 ? "0" : "") + m + ":" + (StrLen(s) < 2 ? "0" : "") + s
           \ + "." + (StrLen(ms) < 3 ? "0" : "") + (StrLen(ms) < 2 ? "0" : "") + ms
}

Quick usage guide: Save it as Thumbnails.avsi file in your AviSynth plugin auto-load directory. The arguments dest, evert, col, x, and ar represent, respectively: the destination path, how many frames should be skipped between two thumbnails, how many thumbnails should be displayed horizontally, what horizontal size one thumbnail should have, and the aspect ratio of your video. If an argument is not specified a reasonable default value will be used instead. For example, the following would be a valid way of using the script.

Code: Select all

AVISource("anamorphic_lossless_source.avi")
Thumbnails("C:\thumbnail", 240, ar=16/9.0)

This will create the file C:\thumbnail000000.png containing thumbnails that are 240 frames apart and have a forced 16/9 aspect ratio. Note that the process is not that fast, partially due to AviSynth being single-threaded and all. Processing a 24 minute long 1080p episode on default settings takes well over 2 minutes on my ridiculously awesome Core i7.

Sorry for wasting all this space here but who knows, it might even be useful to someone.

I never actually got it to work, because it seemed to crash my Premiere, but Rellik did seem to get it working. It might be because of different AviSynth versions (that's the most annoying thing about AVS) though.

So I hope this is helpful for you people who want to spot tapes/sources in a faster way. Of course, I do recommend actually seeing the source footage first, because stills cannot be a substitution for motion, but I think this system is a really good one to remind you of them and browse through them in a faster and more complete way than scrubbing through your video files.

In order to make it better, is there any plugin/code for AVS that can detect scene changes and can be combined in one way or another with the script? Because that would be awesome: no duplicates and no missing shots!

So anybody wants to improve the script with that?

[Knowname]

is cleaning post-editing also a problem?

actually it's really logical. you have effects like crossfades and if your typical you have LOTS of them, these make it so one scene melds into another so say at some point you'll have 50% one scene 50% the other, well if you try to clean that it just knocks that ratio all to hell. It's as bad as color-banding for fades to black.

Only... I can't quite see it lol. BUT it's logical that you just don't clean edited footage. I think.