Instrumental Anime Project

[Otohiko]

Just out of curiousity, how long will the entire project go on when it's finished, or has that not been determined yet?

Hmm, last I checked, I think it's somewhere in the area of 1.5 hours or more.

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I tend to think of this project as an "album" of sorts - like in music, a number of artworks that 'belong' together, even if they're individually different.

[Songbird21]

As to audio, I need Song to do a narrative for 13'37".

I'm here! Chris said you were looking for me. Subscriptions on this thread seem to run out if one doesn't repond for a while. What do you need me to do?

[jasper-isis]

About the aspect ratio problem from a while back:

It's solved. The new 13'37" is 4:3 (no subs in the new source footage, and the 16:9 wasn't really adding anything that wasn't offset by some of the awkward cropping it required). Thus, it can be switched with "A Boy I Knew" and "Ararat" - making those 16:9, as they should be.

The catch: Wendy (Songbird) is going to need to do a narrative for 13'37", and I'll have to come up with narratives for "A Boy I Knew" and "Ararat". Still, this solves a pretty big visual problem and maintains balance between the two sections of the project.

Though I think Rose has yet to post a copy of his narrative...

dwp: the stuff in your "We are still waiting for:" section has already been taken care of. Ooshna was fine with the generic "missing persons" picture, and Rose said that he had chose screencaps for those who didn't submit any.

Also, Rose: have you decided on the new playlist?

[ooshna]

When the video is finnally done someone let me know I should be able to upload it to my server for direct downloading for all the editors at about 300k-400k then we can all do the torrent thing..........i just remembered talk about .org hosting and now i feel dumb

[rose4emily]

Readme

I'm downloading "Forbidden Memories" from Kalium's server now.

I've noticed a partially-uploaded version of "Requiem" on my FTP. Any big changes from the one I have, Pen-Pen? The version I have in full is a nice MPEG2 encoding, but I was wondering if you made any changes that you want to see in the compilation.

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Known Bugs:

My own FTP is completely offline for time being. Some script kiddies used an automated IP probe to locate my open anonymous FTP, and turn it into their own personal warez site. Not very smart script kiddies, mind you, since they didn't hide themselves behind a proxy, and the uploader's IP lead me to one HUGE warez site, complete with a couple of large video files and a PHP forum. It also contained personal information matching that in his "tags". Needless to say, a quick DOS attack lauched from my (now thoroughly firewalled) machine using three site-crawlers feeding to /dev/null took it down in under a half-hour - replacing it with a "bandwidth limit exceeded" page. Stupid bastards. Give some 14-year-old a couple of cracking utilities and he thinks he's some sort of "l337 haxor". Really, they should fucking all just learn how to write real programs, turn to Sourceforge for some real "free software", and step away from their desks from time to time to behold the beauty of the real world in which we are meant to spend our lives (the Internet's a great thing - but it's only a supplement, not a surrogate, for air and earth, flesh and blood).

Can anyone tell I'm not so fond of the "warez kiddies"?

Anyhow, now that my own trusting and generous online presence has been abused, the FTP will return only after I've had a chance to reconfigure it with login, password, advanced permissions handling, a chroot jail, and a non-standard port. I know that most of you didn't like the stricter version of the FTP I had up a few months ago (hence the super-open anonymous one) - but my IP is probably now on the warez communities "suckah" lists (and a little research indicates that these automated probes are becoming really popular amongst the wannabe hacker crowd) - so convenience has to be pushed aside for the sake of security.

Fortunately, there isn't all that much left, in terms of incoming FTP traffic.

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Release Notes:

I'm going to compile the "fullscreen" half of the project and release it this upcoming weekend. The format of the release will consist of a new account, "Instrumentality", with each segment (complete with narrative, title, and video) uploaded in the format:

Animasia 00: Introduction
Animasia 01: Tomoe in the Moonlight (downwithpants)
Animasia 02: Simplicity (ooshna)
Animasia 03: Warrior's Dance (songbird21)
Animasia 04: 13'37" (rose4emily)
Animasia 05: Forbidden Memories (jasper-isis)

The "widescreen" section, once I've completed the narrative footage and fixed the problems I've found in the end credits (namely, that I seriously messed up something in the script which makes the rendered product look like unintelligable crap), will be appended to the project page as:

Animasia 06: Intermission
Animasia 07: Oratorio of Ghibli (bakadeshi)
Animasia 08: Ararat (otohiko)
Animasia 09: Requiem for a Nightmare (pen-pen2002)
Animasia 10: A Boy I Knew (azraver1022)
Animasia 11: Surrealism (jasper-isis)
Animasia 12: The End of All Eva (anubisx00)
Animasia 13: The Wasteland (otohiko)
Animasia 14: Credits

This should also answer Jasper's question concerning the new playlist, along with any questions remaining on what we'd do if the .org wouldn't let us upload a pair of CD-sized files (where AD never got back to me on that).

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Dependencies:

Ah, yes, I forgot to put up the 13'37" narrative for Song. In the intrests of keeping the narrative to such a long video short (and with respect to the fact that I've removed all text from the revised version of the video) here it is:

Strange beautiful grass of green,
With your majestic silver seas
Your mysterious mountains I wish to see closer
May I land my kinky machine?

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Erratia:

I finally saw Akira last week. It was actually a lot more to my tastes than I had expected, and really worthy of it's title as a "classic".

I also saw "Beyond the Clouds". Absolutely incredible. Good writing, a beautiful mix of traditional and CG artwork (that actually did play nicely with one another, quite unlike several other attempts I've seen at doing the same thing), and a wonderful use of lighting. The lighting part might seem a bit weird, since that's normally more of a live-action (and sometimes 3D CG) thing than something you'd see in an anime, but it was used to great effect in "Beyond the Clouds" and really gave it an extra dimension while maintaining strong ties to the "traditional" anime look-and-feel. Done by an indie studio, too. Anyhow, I highly suggest getting the fansub from (Nevermind, as Jasper points out four posts down, it was just licenced - please skip forward to next statement), and then buying the DVD if/when it becomes licenced in America (which I certainly hope it does, and soon).

[angelx03]

Hehehe, actually check this thread out:

http://www.animemusicvideos.org/phpBB/v ... hp?t=49166

[rose4emily]

Hehehe, actually check this thread out:

http://www.animemusicvideos.org/phpBB/v ... hp?t=49166

Oh, well that changes things a little...

Thanks, Sal, and again this Thursday if you don't get around to reading this.

[Songbird21]

ROSE---- What narrative do you need me to do?

[jasper-isis]

Yeah, seriously, creating a new account and listing our segments as separate database entries (if that's what you had meant) is not a good idea. It defeats the purpose of having a whole multieditor project in the first place.

Creating duplicate accounts is also against the site rules...

... not to mention that it is 10x more annoying to download many separate files than it is to just download one file, large as it may be.

Are you still having technical issues with the joined audio?

If VirtualDub (or whatever program you're using) is still failing you, I don't see any big problems with dropping all the segments into an editing program and exporting everything out into a giant huffyuv file. Or, if the video is fine, then just export all the audio into one large wav file and append it that way.

<__<
>__>

I think that in this case, having a non-Windows platform may have caused more problems than it was theoretically supposed to relieve.

_______

I also saw Beyond the Clouds recently (Triad's version), and I must agree that it is stunning. I was expecting a piece similar to Hoshi no Koe, which I had liked for its charm, but I soon discovered that Beyond the Clouds surpasses its predecessor in every single aspect. You've really got to see it to know what I mean. It seems like ADV is planning a theatrical release, so keep your fingers crossed! (That also means that Katana should be pulling down their torrent soon... hmm...)

[rose4emily]

Nope, I found the ultimate solution to the file-joining problem, involving one very large chunk of hard-drive space and raw YUV footage. I don't think this is entirely an OS or program-related thing, since I had audio problems in VDubMod and plain AVISynth on Windows, as well. A couple of odd encoding issues showed up as well, where the indices of the joined files weren't playing nicely, so the all-raw thing seems to be the only lossless way of getting all the video into one "common base" from which the final encodings can be made. HuffYUV, due to the nature of the Huffman-tree encoding, didn't play nicely at all when joined, degenerating into colourful noise after the first splice.

I should note that, while my main computer is running Linux, my laptop has been an all-Windows machine for a while now. I certainly don't refrain from using it if I think there's something it can do better. Video editing is really one of Linux's biggest weak points at this point in time, so I expected to run into some problems sooner or later. It seems the nastiest one, however, is actually rooted in the MS DirectShow playback system, and doesn't respond well to any of the more convenient workarounds I know of on either major platform.

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I'm not worried about the "Duplicate Account" thing. The account really is for the group, rather than a duplicate created as a sockpuppet for some individual who got kicked off of the forums or wants to pump up his own opinions ratings. I do think it's important to not lump the project in with my account - since I think it'd suffer from the association.

Splitting the project into short segments wasn't to be done because I can't get the join to work (the all-raw thing does work, albeit in a space-hungry brute-force way), but because I thought there'd be no other way to get the larger files resulting from the two-file distribution scheme to fit within .org regulations. Upon seeing that an adjustment to those regulations really has been put into effect, it's now a moot point. Now you can look on those lists as the playlist, but trust that the video listing will now contain only two files, one for each major segment.

Trying to make everything into one file might be a bit much, both because of the aspect concerns, and because of the uninterupted download time it would require. Two files seems like a nice compromise.

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As to a theatrical release of "Beyond the Clouds", that'd be awesome, especially if it makes it to a theatre within afternoon driving distance of wherever I am at the time.

If I'm not mistaken, "Hoshi no Koe" was also called "Voice from a Distant Star". Yup, it has charm, but also suffered under the production limitations under which it was produced. Honestly, I liked the "She and Her Cat" extra better - where it had such a simple and understated story that the even tighter production limitations it worked within weren't an issue. "Beyond the Clouds", however, really proves that Shinkai really is capable of doing beautiful things with a big idea once given the resources to really run with it.

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SONG:

I'm thinking the narrative should be just that four-line Jimi Hendrix quote out of the song lyrics. There isn't much more that I have to say about the video that wouldn't make the narrative unduly long, so I think doing a really simple and quick lead-in would be appropriate.

When you're done you can either e-mail me the audio, submit it to Kalium's FTP, or wait for me to send you a PM with the login instructions for the secured FTP, once I've secured it.