Alright, you've planned out your video, captured the footage, and cut, spliced, and synced for weeks. It looks great!! What's left?

BUMPERS

The first thing is the intro and closing captions, also know as "bumpers". Bumpers are completely optional. Many of the top video producers don't use them, so don't feel obligated to. If you are going to use them, try to keep them around the 6 to 8 second mark and definitely under 10 seconds each. Not many people want to sit through a 10 to 30 second intro before they see your video no matter how cool the intro is. People want to see the video, not some 3D graphic that took 30 hours to render. Simple bumpers are the best. Some text about who you are, the name of the video, music, and anime is all you need. Plain text is fine.

COMPRESSION

The last thing is compression. Not many people want to download the couple-hundred megs of your completed video. Compression is necessary. There are tons of ways to compress your video. I'm going to talk about three of them: MPEG 1, AVI, and RealMedia.

MPEG 1 is considered to be the method of choice to compress and distribute your video. If done correctly, it gives a clear, smooth picture and excellent sound quality. A resolution of 320x240 or there abouts is the usual distribution resolution.

For AVI distribution, people like to use the DivX codec. It does a heck of a job compressing with good results.

Finally there is RealMedia. Many people poo-poo this method of compression, mainly because there are not that many examples of good output. Most people for some reason use a low bitrate when compressing with RealMedia. If you use RealMedia, make sure to use a high bit rate when you compress. You can get the free version of RealProducer, but it will only compress as high as 450 Kbps, which is not bad at all. You can use higher bitrates with the retail product. The best example I have found of a good RM video is "Blue Mercury" by Aluminum Studios. It is compressed at 650 Kbps, is 15.8 megs, and looks better than his 25 meg MPEG version (in my opinion).

There is a giant guide dedicated to video compression "AbsoluteDestiny & ErMaC's Technical Guides to All Things Audio and Video"

DISTRIBUTE

Now all that is left is to enter your video information here at AnimeMusicVideos.org and then distribute your video to some conventions or on some server. Good luck!!

-- Phade --