LittleAtari wrote:1 - If you dont edit in HD, why are you not editing in HD? Is it because of the sources you use are not available in HD or is it because your system cannot handle it or it becomes an inconvenience at times?
Mostly because I've not been dealing with HD sources. My system can't handle it either, but that's beside the point, because it struggles enough with 480p HuffYUV as it is. This is a big part of why I haven't done any serious editing in a little over a year. I finally just got sick of my hardware being a hindrance.
Income-willing, I would actually use the Blu-ray version of any series I was planning to edit with, although this would largely extend only to those series I don't currently have. If I loved the series enough I would get it on Blu-ray even if I previously had the DVD. But if there's a BD available now, I'm just going with that one and forgoing the DVD entirely - even though I don't have a Blu-ray player or BD-ROM drive (although my mom has a laptop that does). Certainly didn't stop me from buying Eva 1.11 on BD.
2 - If you do edit in HD, what method do you use? Do you bait and switch or edit directly off the 720p or 1080p? Do you edit in both 720p and 1080p? Are you restricted to only 720p at the moment?
The times I've edited in HD, the target was 720p - and that's only because the sources were in 720p's ballpark. Doing 1080p with them would require upscaling.
Two were done entirely in After Effects, one was simply a remaster of a previously edited AMV Hell-rejected segment. The two in AFX I cheated on by making it render previews at 1/4 or 1/8 size, so even though the source was way too big, the previews played back fine. Doubly-cheated, in fact, because one of them was always intended to be 720p60 but edited at 24fps, the other one was 720p30 but I went back later and re-rendered it at 60fps just because. In both cases, I could get away with it because neither had video elements - only stills.
3 - How do you like editing in HD? Is the extra render time and larger file sizes worth it with your current system?
Not applicable, although the time necessary to render out whatever I edit in the resolution I'm aiming for is inherently worth it, even if it is a longer amount of time than usual. But there is a reason I've only done it a handful of times.
The same logic also largely applies to my distro encoding. I'll take 0.2fps out of x264 if I have to (although the availability of much stronger computers makes this largely irrelevant to me).
4 - Do you watch AMVs in HD or grab the lower res or both?
Watch, not on this computer - it can't even play 480p H.264 smoothly in most situations. But in all cases I'll make sure to download the highest quality/resolution version available. I put pretty much every video I download on DVD, so they're all getting converted to standard-def MPEG-2 anyway, and it can handle that no problem. I still put the originals in storage, though, and have access to a couple of other computers that
can play them at the original size.
5 - How are conventions adapting HD into their AMV showings and is it a priority at your con?
I wouldn't know, I've only been to conventions thrice, and only one of those times did I enter the AMV contest - in 2004, when 640x480 AMVs were just starting to become commonplace (with most widescreen videos - a pathetically-small amount at the time - being
at most 720, 704, or 640 width, not a full 848; usually they were 512 or 480 width).
No change of method, I use the same method to edit since 2007!
