a question [about titles]

[seasons]

Why do people use brackets [like these] on the file name for their AMV? They're almost always around the editor's name. I may have done it myself at one point but I couldn't tell you why.

Why do people put "[AMV]" in the actual title of their AMV?

Why do people use brackets like 「these」 or put the square root symbol in front of their AMV's title?

Do editors think they need to do this or this to get viewers to notice them anymore?

This isn't a rant, I genuinely want to know.

[Sephirothskr]

I only did it on one video ever and that was for iron chef.. It is rather strange isn't it?

[Scintilla]

I've been seeing "[AMV]", "[MAD]", and "[editor's/studio's name]" in filenames for as long as I can remember. I wouldn't be surprised if it was originally a way to easily identify them on file-sharing utilities.

Also, it seems like most digisub groups do the [studio name] thing as well, so maybe people picked it up from them?

[AceD]

I think that guy put Tokyo Ghoul √A in the title...because shit, the anime is called Tokyo Ghoul √A.

[irriadin]

I do it sometimes because it makes the filename look cleaner to me. But then it messes up a lot of bbcode because of the brackets.

[BasharOfTheAges]

IIRC, some operating systems used to not handle certain delimeter characters in fIle names that well, but square brackets were generally safe across the board.

[CrackTheSky]

Honestly, these days it's probably more for visual flair than anything. Formatting your video's title in an unusual way can be cool, if done properly, but I personally find the brackets and stuff annoying most of the time. Like this kind of thing:


Like...just call the video "The Phoenix" and put all the other important information in the video description. (Maybe not the best example, as this is obviously a YouTuber who just cataloged his video here to get more views, but I think you get my point).

...Actually though this probably is a good example as to WHY people do this: to convey the "important" information all in the video's title so that the people scrolling through AMVs on YouTube will know exactly which videos are "Akatsuki Kojou Tribute" videos in HD, or which videos are "[MAD]"s or whatever. That mentality has, unsurprisingly, made it over to the .org.

[Qyot27]

The full-width brackets and half-brackets are common in Japanese text (not sure how common their use is for Chinese or Korean), and most MADs picked up via file sharing or later on YouTube would have had those symbols already there in the filenames. So those symbols catching on through users seeing it on YouTube isn't that strange.

I've been seeing "[AMV]", "[MAD]", and "[editor's/studio's name]" in filenames for as long as I can remember. I wouldn't be surprised if it was originally a way to easily identify them on file-sharing utilities.

Also, it seems like most digisub groups do the [studio name] thing as well, so maybe people picked it up from them?

Very possible on both accounts, especially for the fansub case since most said groups nowadays use a pretty standard naming template. It has its uses for AMVs, particularly when needing to denote video/audio format (especially when using something exotic that viewers might not immediately expect, or to distinguish between copies of the same video in multiple formats) or checking file integrity.


Or [adult swim].

[UnluckyArtist]

I'm guessing they just make the video listing stick out, or make the listing clean looking while giving lots of information.
Brackets are boring though, I prefer slashes and what not.

[Corran]

At least on Windows, if you sort a folder's contents alphabetically then files named this way come before the videos that start with letters. I always assumed it was a way to get your video at the top of the list, and thus more attention, though I agree with the formatting suggestions that people are mentioning above as well.