Persona 3: Those Voices at Night

[DF Ash]

Wow, thank you! I haven't bought a new editor yet, but your advice helped break the tie on which one to buy (well, the prices broke that tie, but this helped too!). One thing I do like about Movie Maker is how the intuitive, drag-and-drop timeline interface lets you test out different arrangements on the fly and just focus on the creative aspect of editing. Checking out the Sony Vegas screenshots, it looks like it has a similar interface, lots more stability and everything else I could need AMVwise. So I'll hopefully be spending the weekend trying out Vegas and learning what all it can do...

[Kireblue]

Wow, thank you! I haven't bought a new editor yet, but your advice helped break the tie on which one to buy (well, the prices broke that tie, but this helped too!). One thing I do like about Movie Maker is how the intuitive, drag-and-drop timeline interface lets you test out different arrangements on the fly and just focus on the creative aspect of editing. Checking out the Sony Vegas screenshots, it looks like it has a similar interface, lots more stability and everything else I could need AMVwise. So I'll hopefully be spending the weekend trying out Vegas and learning what all it can do...

yeah, you should definitely download some of the free trials from Sony's website before you buy anything. http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/dow ... egasfamily Last year, I bought the "Vegas Movie Studio 9 Platinum Pro Pack" from Amazon for $80, and I pretty content with it. But if you plan on masking, Platinum Pro makes it a bit harder since you can only mask out geometric shapes (circles, ovals, squares, etc). The version that is called simply "Vegas Pro" is actually better and allows you to draw a outline around what you want to mask. Thus, its a lot more flexible. Of course.....the problem is that Vegas Pro 9 is $500. You may be able to fine older versions of Vegas Pro for around $100- $200 though.

[Hagaren Viper]

I took my sweet time replying to this, didn't I?

I didn't think much of this vid at first, the song and footage didn't click with me for a while. When watching a Persona 3 AMV, I expect something with a much darker tone, and this one was pretty upbeat. But you know, that's what makes this video unique.

This vid totally grew on me. You took advantage of a lot of the school scenes in the game...something I've honestly never seen in a P3 amv, there were some pretty nifty things done with the sync [The changes from 'normal' vision to the static vision on the beats, for example, happened to work pretty well]. I'm not super thrilled with the effects, but the fact that you actually put some thought into them and that they have meaning makes me look at them differently.

And I have to ask...how did you get the scene of Aigis holding Minato while the S.E.E.S members arrive? That's the only scene I couldn't find on the disk.

4/5 from me~

[DF Ash]

No worries, I'm grateful for the time you put into thinking about it, and glad that it grew on you! I'm a sucker for songs with moody, ominous lyrics backed by cheerful, upbeat music, and though it didn't even occur to me that "Spaceman" fits the bill, it really does (and the Killers are all about those kinds of songs anyway). Still, the structure of the song reminded me a lot of the game's own story structure, and some of those lyrics are just so, so fitting for Persona 3... ^_^

P3 and P4 strike me as sort of the opposite of each other in a way. While P3 has a very dark background story and setting with the Dark Hour and the heroes' own troubled pasts, it has a very bright and cheerful "foreground", with Gekkoukan High School set in the middle a sunny, lively city. P4 is the exact opposite: its supernatural elements are somewhat lighter and more colorful, with Teddie and the Velvet Limo (pimped-out Igor, I love it!), and the less troubled heroes, but the setting itself is darker, with a small dying town, dark and cloudy weather and a lonelier, more downbeat home life (poor Nanako!). So with P3, the contrast between S.E.E.S. fighting against the end of the world and their ordinary upbeat school lives really stood out as a visual theme.

(On a random note, Aigis and Nanako share the same VA. That's still blowing my mind. )

Oh, the Aigis epilogue - it took me forever to find that thing! It's during the last few seconds of the file called "Staff_Roll_A", the good ending's closing credits. Unfortunately, it's embedded in the video as a picture in picture, so the resolution's way lower than the rest of the cutscenes (I was hoping maybe a full-sized version was being played separately at the end, but nope, it's all just one big video). I used Virtualdubmod and Lanczos3 to resize it, and then a slight whitening blur to soften the image and make it fit with the other shots of Aigis and Minato (and to give the impression that the world's fading away into light and we're seeing his last conscious moments). The other credits have their animation bumpers at the end too: Yukari singing karaoke for the bad ending (Staff_Roll_B), and another Aigis shot for The Answer's ending (Staff_Roll_F).

About Vegas, I've never used masking before and can't imagine needing it, but you never know! Can Vegas Platinum use PNG images as masks, like Movie Maker? If not, and I ever need a custom mask effect, I guess I could always use WMM to create the masked clip and then import it into Vegas (or maybe just upgrade it ...someday).

[Kireblue]

About Vegas, I've never used masking before and can't imagine needing it, but you never know! Can Vegas Platinum use PNG images as masks, like Movie Maker? If not, and I ever need a custom mask effect, I guess I could always use WMM to create the masked clip and then import it into Vegas (or maybe just upgrade it ...someday).

Are you talking about the blue screen effect in WMM? Back when I was still making AMVs with WMM, I never even knew that it had any masking capabilities. But now that I've searched youtube for "windows movie maker masking", I see that its actually like a water downed version of the Chroma key effect in Sony Vegas. Instead of using a just a PNG image with a blue background, Sony vegas allows you to use any image or even a actual video. Also, there aren't any restrictions on what the background color has to be.

[DF Ash]

Yep, it's a Chroma key effect in WMM. The background color can be played with via .xml, and I think you can use two videos so long as the pixels have the right RGB value, but it'd be a nightmare to try to do it frame by frame since it's a transition effect (I think the best WMM can reasonably do is something like having a second video playing in the solid black part of a shadow, or in the bluest part of the sky and so on). But if Vegas has a Chroma key effect with no limits, that's more than I'd need.

Edit: I've been trying out Vegas, and you're right - this one's much, much easier to deal with.