I Still Wake Up - Sword Art Online [premiered at AnimeNEXT]

[Megane Girl]

I made another AMV! Hey wow, pretty soon I'll need two hands to count how many I've edited ...

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This premiered at the AnimeNEXT 2013 AMV Contest in the Drama category.

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Feedback - of both the positive and constructively critical kinds - is much appreciated. ^_^ Thanks!

[xexyzl]

I liked it well enough despite not having seen SAO (or liking fun. but I don't like a ton of music so no worries). Wasn't overly beat-centric but still had a good brisk pace and thematic cohesion. Some loose lip flaps that were frankly puzzling considering how easy they would have been to excise, some unnecessary (though thankfully subtle) effects, but most importantly you seem to have some very bad and distracting compression artifacts that really shouldn't be there with the bitrate you've got on this thing. I'm not sure what part of the workflow they were introduced into but it made the whole thing difficult to watch.

Thanks for sharing!

[Megane Girl]

I liked it well enough despite not having seen SAO (or liking fun. but I don't like a ton of music so no worries). Wasn't overly beat-centric but still had a good brisk pace and thematic cohesion. Some loose lip flaps that were frankly puzzling considering how easy they would have been to excise, some unnecessary (though thankfully subtle) effects, but most importantly you seem to have some very bad and distracting compression artifacts that really shouldn't be there with the bitrate you've got on this thing. I'm not sure what part of the workflow they were introduced into but it made the whole thing difficult to watch.

Thanks for sharing!

Thank you for your feedback!!!

Re: lip flaps - You say they would be easy to excise, but, um ... do you just mean cutting the footage differently, or is there some other trick? I'm sure there's a tutorial somewhere I should read before editing my next AMV ... I mean, I know there are ways of manipulating the images, but - uh, well, I don't even know how to use (or own) Photoshop ... ^_^;

Re: the compression artifacts - heh heh, yeah, I didn't even know what a "compression artifact" was until a contest coordinator pointed it out to me on this one. Something I will try to learn more about for next time!

Thanks again!

[xexyzl]

Sure thing. It depends on what editing program you're using (to me it looked like Vegas perhaps?). Here's a tutorial for Premiere, and here's an old tutorial from the org, although the principle remains the same across any editing platform (and whether or not you're trying to lip sync or just remove lip flaps). Essentially you matte out a frame of the mouth closed and overlay it when a character is talking. It varies in difficulty a lot depending on how much movement there is in the scene, but a lot of the loose flaps in your vid shouldn't be too difficult (the first I spotted at 00:19).

[Megane Girl]

It depends on what editing program you're using (to me it looked like Vegas perhaps?).

iMovie '11, actually - I know, I know, let the Mac spurning commence. Not sure how much they'll help with my particular system, but I'll take a look at those links! Thanks so much!