Post
by Kionon » Wed Jun 17, 2009 7:37 am
Hmm... Your description isn't very detailed. Welcome to the org. I am Kionon, Apple Mac Guru and current proprietor of #amv-review. Okay, I have now watched this video six times, and I've read the thread. So I will offer a little bit of bio info so you know my bias. I am very old school Org. In fact, editing wise, I predate the Org. This means I have not only internalised, but indeed, helped create and propagate the philosophical and stylistic biases that have been brought up by others in this thread, and in general, I stick by them.
(tl;dr, you crazy kids, get off my lawn!!! *shakes walker*)
Okay, the technical aspects. First off, with your editing ability, I should never see you put something in a .wmv container. Period. Following that, I don't want to see you using any other codecs but XviD and MP3 in AVI or x264 and AAC in MP4. You are clearly much too good of an editor to have your work accosted by inferior codecs, especially since you had to cut out the credits and and reduce segments due to the org requirement of being under 100MBs. You should have beautiful HD at HQ and still have plenty of space left over. You should never have to hit 100MBs unless there is some special reason.
Also, the watermark has got to go. People WILL steal what you have done. It has happened to others here, with some people, it happens every time they release a video. One of my videos (Popularity) was even submitted to a convention by a thief, so people taking credit in hostachel is really just part of the game. Once I noticed it, about halfway through the first viewing, I couldn't stop looking at it, like a scab I just couldn't help picking at. Please, dear God, kill it.
I have never heard this artist, but the audio sounds really, really, really, really washed out on both my stereo system and my editing headphones. I will assume this is the codec you used in wmv. Otherwise, you need a better audio source. Video wise, some colors also seemed very washed out... or... blurry... mmm... vocabulary fails me... not crisp. The video was not crisp. Again, I assume this to be the fault of your codec. The effects were well done, and personally, I liked them. I don't think you over did anything. I enjoyed the way you did them. The issues I had with them usually had to do with high movement, so I blame the codec again. I think your video quality got understandably worse when your codec tried to deal with really high energy sequences. The section around 00:03:13 has just awful, shoot myself because I am watching this on a 42" plasma, banding.
Okay, the non-technical. I don't know this anime, and I don't know this song and artist. I like what I see and hear, and will probably investigate further. Immediately, I balk at you including your personally identifying information in the beginning of the video. Not only is this immediately disqualified from most conventions, it is also just plain tacky. In in-joke amvs, this might be okay, but again, this is very much a competition video, and so including the video information that way is just bad manners.
Here is my thought process from run number seven, it is amalgamated from things I noticed in all previous runs.
00:00:14 You should have feathered the rotoscope, I can easily see the edging of the underlying background even without pausing the video. You seemed to have adjusted for the next rotoscope at 00:00:15, and it looks much better.
00:00:53 Is this lip synch or lip flap? Either way, it's incredibly distracting wanting to know which it is. If it is the former, it is nowhere near correct, toss it up into technical. If it isn't, toss it down into non-technical, because my opinion is that lip flap should be reduced when there is possibility for confusion.
00:00:58 Same. If lip synch, I would probably have taken it as such without 00:00:53, however the former spot's ambiguous nature has me question this as well...
00:00:59 Ditto.
00:01:00 Dittox2
00:01:06 I liked this effect. Done a lot, but since it was done well, I enjoyed it.
00:01:15 I did not like this section. Way too much blank space that had either a tiny percentage of the source anime (or added background), or was just blank period. You showed earlier in the video you could add interesting backgrounds underneath your rotos, so I don't like this, didn't get it, and didn't think it was up to your obvious ability in other sections.
00:01:21 lip synch or not?
00:01:34 0 to blurry in one second. What happened here? The difference is so jarring it was what I referred to mostly in my last line of the technical stuff. My guess is that the codec just could not handle that much movement and so it pixelated the heck out of the incoming roto, and even when the transition is complete, the visual quality is still very blurry compared to the section before it.
00:02:28 Your masking here is weird, if it is a mask. It looks, actually, like you overlaid the video onto the mask, instead of the mask over the video. Your TV here has curved edges, but the masking doesn't show that, meaning your video appears to be hovering in front of the TV rather than being displayed on it. Furthermore, the quality is too perfect, especially compared to the mask it is replacing in the transition. Best would be to use some sort of scan line effect until the transition is over with, and we have gone "into" the TV.
00:02:58-00:03:02 This is probably the worst visual quality in the entire video. Compared to the effects heavy scene before it, you are slapped in the face with just how awful it is because of how slow the panning effect shows up, especially since it appears you actually slowed it down.
All in all, this video has high review quality. It is cute and fun and pretty, and I like it a lot. However, I could do with a better encode, smaller file size, corrected beginning titles, and the credits returned. Please do so, and I will gladly download again. And leave off the watermark!
...guess that was an op. Oh well.
!)
