Your scene selection process for full series ?

[Mol]

Yeah im interested in it, i usually go along with whatever is at hand if its movie or short ova series, which is very convenient for me~. Tho i seem to get stuck now whenever i go for "not totally sure what to put in it" amvs (example: a fun themed amv from fun themed anime). Well at least with anything 12eps +.
I can go all eps choose what seems interesting , but then Im totally lost in it ;p. So yeah if could share some of your examples of sorting/picking scenes for some "full series" if you use any ;3.

[Farlo]

open vdub, open video, shift+right arrow, cut, continue till clips gathered. get anything that looks good, go overboard, make sure you have lots extra so you can adjust for best fit and sync.

[BasharOfTheAges]

I'll scrub inside my editing software after transcoding the entire thing. I go through a lot of hard drive space. =/

As to scene selection in general... Well, I've never done anything without some sort of story or plan in mind for at least a third of it. I tend to put that part together first and logically fill in as many gaps as I can with pacing that matches the general pace of the music. If I'm stuck, I'll go through 3 or 4 episodes at a time and create clip bins for segments based on characters, scenery, "camera" motion, etc. (I even did it based on color once).

What may help for something upbeat and sorta not story driven is if you can abstractly describe what you're aiming to do in a few words, you can tag clips that fit your interpretation of those words, then mark your song into sections that correspond to those words. It should get you started with a bare-bones framework at the very least.

[Tigrin]

I'm kind of interested in everyone else's process too!

Whether I'm doing a movie or a long series, I usually go through all of the footage first and chop it up into clips and sort it into bins (folders for each episode, and folders for particular characters or themes I'm looking for). Doing this gives me a chance to review all of the footage and pick out particular shots that I'm looking for quickly. This sometimes takes way way longer than actually editing an AMV. ._. Which is part of what mystifies me as to how people make multi-anime AMVs. How does that not take a million years.

Most of my AMVs revolve around a story or a character, so I'm usually picking shots that either fit the lyrics or are setting up a story. Almost all my AMVs end up with the shots in chronological order this way, which makes things easier. I'm not sure how people create AMVs based around a mood, like purposely trying to make a "fun" video. I guess what springs to mind is a video from last year that combined a lot of clips from different anime of people throwing snowballs at each other. I guess it makes sense to pick an action or idea, and look for clips based around that... then pace it to the music.

I've been looking at doing this using all 60+ episodes of Avatar and cutting together a video just of characters fighting, but I am so daunted by the idea of doing this, and unmotivated by the fact that there's no story to it, that I've put it off for like a year. ._.

[Mol]

open vdub, open video, shift+right arrow, cut, continue till clips gathered. get anything that looks good, go overboard, make sure you have lots extra so you can adjust for best fit and sync.

Yeah i have been using this method the most , i tried some naming patterns stuff with numeric and vague scenes desc in name, but this way still kinda kinda suck when it comes to grasping my head around it (if i want to be a little more picky with scenes at least )Or Im horrible at picking this way as i found myself once without scenes this way for 50+ anime ; d.
I usually use it tho or lazier way like this for variety

I'll scrub inside my editing software after transcoding the entire thing. I go through a lot of hard drive space. =/

If I'm stuck, I'll go through 3 or 4 episodes at a time and create clip bins for segments based on characters, scenery, "camera" motion, etc. (I even did it based on color once).

Oh yea I did try binning stuff once, tho not this way, any samples if you have anything at table for better idea?

What may help for something upbeat and sorta not story driven is if you can abstractly describe what you're aiming to do in a few words, you can tag clips that fit your interpretation of those words, then mark your song into sections that correspond to those words.

Mhm, thats something to try. I did do markings too, but with different intentions usually lolz. Last 2 attempts 1 succeed for rush project with method like this: Cut it up move around whats more interesting into "higher" video track if its super interesting mark it. Seems pretty average, if i need something out of theme I selected (well duh kinda expected ). Abstract descriptions, mhm im horrible at naming >_< . I tried some vague scene descriptions but it kinda sucks. Would be nice if you have some some projects screens (with small naming examples) to show

multi-anime AMVs

Yea it's been years since i tried that .. I feel like best is to actually watch animes write down or straight cut out scenes when you find what that might fit D:

[Kai Stromler]

This is a rough outline of how I approached SH126, which was a 60-plus-block cut equating to somewhere between 20 and 30 hours of source anime.

After developing the idea, I did an initial select on my anime collection to identify sources that might be able to contribute, then watched through everything on that list. In addition to junking stuff that wasn't going to be helpful, I sorted the sources that were going to make the cut into "major" and "minor" buckets; if I recall correctly, I ended up with about nine major sources and like 30 minors. Major sources needed to be close-cut, but the minors got marked as such because there wasn't a lot in them that was going to be useful. If I was going to scrub rather than cut in advance, I probably would have taken approximate timecodes on them to make skipping to the useful parts easier.

Once all that prework had been done, cutting and cleaning took about 45 hours spread over 43 days. If you're not picking exactly one cut per source to do a survey video, eventually a large source volume is going to involve a lot of crap, boring scutwork. This generated about 1550 cuts, about 200 of which actually ended up in the finished video.

With this done, I then essentially re-watched everything that I'd cut, which was effectively bucketed by title; I had to do this because Magix is kind of bad and building its clip indexes in the actual editing process is a pain and a half, but on a big project like this it's also helpful in terms of reviewing what kind of source is available, and how that's going to inform the process of turning the video from an idea into an actual arrangement of scenes. Even if your editing environment doesn't force you into it, though, some kind of review pass is desirable just to load everything "in memory" conceptually; I dunno how that would work for the "scrub" school, but doing so for an advance cut is conceptually easy.

Caveats apply; this video is what it is, not something that is going to be in the discussion for awards or anything, and most of the source in addition to being old was pretty damaged, which added additional cleanup time that is probably not going to be a factor for stuff that's more modern. Still, the basics don't change: handling large source volumes is probably best approached by doing multiple filter passes to discard or stop thinking about stuff you're not going to need, and at some point you're going to have to just grind.

hth,

--K

[CrackTheSky]

I'm kind of interested in everyone else's process too!

Whether I'm doing a movie or a long series, I usually go through all of the footage first and chop it up into clips and sort it into bins (folders for each episode, and folders for particular characters or themes I'm looking for). Doing this gives me a chance to review all of the footage and pick out particular shots that I'm looking for quickly. This sometimes takes way way longer than actually editing an AMV. ._. Which is part of what mystifies me as to how people make multi-anime AMVs. How does that not take a million years.

This is exactly my process. I don't know how people make multi-anime AMVs, it's too daunting for me to try (besides the fact that I have no actual interest in doing so, as it's not my style). I tend to make way more clips than I'll need, so doing a multi-anime AMV seems like it'd be an organizational and time-consuming nightmare.

Most of my AMVs revolve around a story or a character, so I'm usually picking shots that either fit the lyrics or are setting up a story. Almost all my AMVs end up with the shots in chronological order this way, which makes things easier. I'm not sure how people create AMVs based around a mood, like purposely trying to make a "fun" video. I guess what springs to mind is a video from last year that combined a lot of clips from different anime of people throwing snowballs at each other. I guess it makes sense to pick an action or idea, and look for clips based around that... then pace it to the music.

I also edit this way -- usually chronologically, and I tend to group certain shots together so that there's consistency in the scene selection (i.e. characters' clothing, the setting a scene takes place in, etc). I've tried making videos that center around a "mood" or theme rather than a chronological story, and it's really, really hard...every time I start a video intending to do this, I end up defaulting back to story mode. I think my videos are fine this way, but I wish I didn't have such a mental block to more random scene selection. Maybe for my next video. (I say this every time).

[dragontamer5788]

This is exactly my process. I don't know how people make multi-anime AMVs, it's too daunting for me to try (besides the fact that I have no actual interest in doing so, as it's not my style). I tend to make way more clips than I'll need, so doing a multi-anime AMV seems like it'd be an organizational and time-consuming nightmare.

Nightmare? No. Not if you have the correct naming conventions that take advantage of Windows Search.

For example, verse 2 of a particular AMV I made recently had an upbeat and romantic theme. The beat began to pick up (but wasn't climaxing), so I wanted something with moderate movement, two people. So I went into the folder of all the clips I had and searched for "(name: move3 OR name: move4) AND name: pair"

A few clips from Chunibyo and Baccano popped up, and I used those. This required me to go through all of my clips and "tag" them with keywords (which are somewhat specific to the current project). But the "database" of clips and the ease at which you can take advantage of Windows Vista / Win7 / Win8 searches really helps out a lot.

The nightmare was the day or two figuring out the naming scheme that would work. Again, the naming schemes seem particular to an AMV project, but in my experience... it was worth the effort.

[Ileia]

I call it "clip buffet". I process the entirety of the anime I'm using into UTvideo, pull it into Magix and make clips of anything and everything that I MIGHT use. Typically, I have the song running on repeat so I can catch potential scenes more easily. Then I just pick and choose from those while I edit. I don't use all of them, sometimes only a fraction, but they're all there and accessible.

In the case of multi-anime videos...I just remember what anime has what scenes I want and I process only those portions. It helps if you watch a TON of AMVs. If I see an anime I don't recognize, I check the name of it and file it away mentally for future use.

[davenfonet]

I follow Bashar's idea, I export everything and then scrub in premier. I'm using 10+TB of space.

I've been looking to find a software that will export an image every 15 frames or when a frame change enough (20% or so)so I can scrubb a whole episode inside of a explorer window. No luck on that front yet though.

Longest show I've worked with was Bleach when I actively was watching it but, these days I like the 12-24 episode series and editing with them right after i'm done watching them so stuff is fresh. It helps if I've got an idea before watching the show.