SH008 - breakout

video: Dragon Knight 2
audio: Blind Guardian - "Don't Break The Circle"
link: depositfiles [39.2 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: July 2001

What's a SH video doing here? It's here because this is the infamous "lost video" that isn't connected to the normal profile. There are worse videos published, and there's nothing illegal in it, so there's no point in continuing to hold it back. Hence, here it is. Old notes below, from the last time this was publicly available.



Yes I own this anime, and yes I kind of dig it. This was mostly a really fun vid, and Takeru's fight with Shade over the guitar solo is probably as close as I'll ever come to a pure action AMV. It was really tough to manage all the clips that went into the final fight with the bishop/Lord Leonard, but I pulled it off. Unfortunately the same cannot be said of my first attempt at lip-synch with Jodis at the end, which was worse before a reapplied audio track fixed most of the problems.

About the music: "Don't Break The Circle" is originally by Demon, a forgotten band among many lesser lights of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal, whose luminaries included Iron Maiden, Saxon, Def Leppard, Angel Witch, Motorhead, and Diamond Head. The version in this video is a cover version by German power/thrash metal band Blind Guardian, released as a CD-only bonus track on their 1989 album Follow The Blind.

About the anime: Dragon Knight 2 is a loose sequel to the original Dragon Knight OAV, based on the popular hentai RPG by elf. The third installment of the Dragon Knight franchise was adapted for American release in the mid-1990s. Both the first and the second Dragon Knight OAVs are licensed for North America by A.D. Vision; all source for this video is from their subtitled VHS release. There are also four OAVs based on the fourth game in the series, but these had not been licensed, or even competently fansubbed, back when I originally wrote this for the CD release, and I'm too lazy to check and see if they've indeed come out commercially (I think I've seen them reviewed somewhere....).

Shin Hats/KK/Inso hardware and software information

This was formerly on my .org profile, but got moved off to here in the update process, because it was getting seriously ridiculously long.


Old editing setup "Keystone":
--
CPU: 500MHz AMD K6-II
Disk: 20GB Maxtor
RAM: 160MB
Capture board: Dazzle DVC II
OS: Win98 original (and they said it couldn't be done...)
Editor: Dazzle MovieStar 4.22
Utils: TMPEG, Virtual Dub, Sub Station Alpha, Nero Wave, CDex, MEIMI, SnagIt, AviSynth, DVD2AVI, Acid
Videos produced: SH001 to SH092, INSO01 to INSO03, BAS01 to BAS17
In service since: March 2001
Effectively retired: December 2004
Notes: Keystone is entirely retired for AMV production at this point, and is no longer operable.

Next-generation editing rig "Battlefreak":
--
CPU: AMD Athlon XP 3000+
Disk: 1x 40GB Maxtor, 1x160GB Maxtor, 1x300GB Western Digital
RAM: 1GB DDR400
Capture: 16x Rosewill DVD-ROM/DVD Decrypter
OS: Win2K Professional
Editor: Magix 2.0+ Deluxe
Utils: TMPEG, Virtual Dub, SSA, AviSynth, DVD2AVI, CDEx
Videos produced: SH093 to SH098, INSO04 to INSO07, SH106 to SH118, INSO09 to INSO10, INSO12 through INSO14
In service since: October 2004
Notes: Battlefreak was effectively out of service between April 2005 and April 2006, and has since gotten a forced upgrade to Vista. This is the current editing station.

Provisional stopgap editing rig "Steelplank":
--
CPU: Intel Pentium M 1.5 GHz
Disk: 30GB internal, 120GB Fantom external
RAM: 512MB SDRAM
Capture: 16x AOpen external DVD-ROM/DVD Decrypter
OS: WinXP Professional
Editor: Magix 2.0+ Deluxe
Utils: Virtual Dub, DGIndex, BeSweet, AviSynth, DVD Decrypter, CDEx
Videos produced: SH099 to SH101, INSO08 [80%]
In service since: May 2005
Retired: July 2005

New generation portable editing rig "Onslaught":
--
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3200+
Disk: 55GB internal, 120GB Fantom external
RAM: 1GB SDRAM [Hypertransport]
Capture: DVD-RW internal
OS: WinXP Professional
Editor: Magix 2.0+ Deluxe
Utils: Virtual Dub, DGIndex, BeSweet, AviSynth, DVD Decrypter, CDEx
Videos produced: INSO08 [20%], SH102 to SH105, INSO11
In service since: June 2005
Retired: April 2006
Unretired for limited service: May 2006
Retired for reals: October 2006

INSO14 - Conet track

video: Pretty Cure
audio: The Conet Project
link: mediafire [19 MB]
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: March 2007

This is the actual track that went into Conet, and is somewhat improved on INSO13. It's here more for contrast; it's decent on its own, but really needs to be seen in context with everything else as a part of that project.


That's it for now; there may be some other junk in the future, but this is all that's applicable under this caption at present.

INSO13 - condition 33

video: Pretty Cure
audio: The Conet Project
link: mediafire [20.1 MB]
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe, Virtual Dub
production date: February 2007

The original version of what I would end up contributing to the Conet project, this one still gets published, even though from that perspective it's more of a beta, because this is the pure and unvarnished version of what I wanted to do with the effect. If you've seen Conet, this is pretty much what's in there (appearing later here as INSO14), but a little more difficult to make out. There's only one colorized clip in this one, and it looks so bad that I radically redid it in the final version; this though, I was prepared to let out the door as it is, so here it goes.

This should also help those who want to reverse-engineer the effect in this; you can do this almost completely with Virtual Dub's built-in filters, but you'll also have to have Lags' difference filter, which should be in the toolbox of everyone who wants to destroy video. You can see a better example of just using this to remove animation paint and restore something like the original line in SH088.

INSO12 - gorehog

video: Spirited Away
audio: Obituary - "Redneck Stomp" (sample)
link: depositfiles [7.8 MB]
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: June 2006

I was in production on SH107, and the Graveyard was still going on, which led naturally to this one on clip reuse. It also got audio-stripped in the final compilation, which makes it a lot less funny. On the other hand, it may be a little more noticeable; Obituary's riffs tend to be a little thunking and repetitive, which made it easy to put this together conceptually and may mean that it actually works as a video, which kind of wasn't the point of that project.

INSO11 - nonviolence

video: Elfen Lied
audio: Berserkr - "Southern Vision" (sample)
link: depositfiles [11.1 MB]
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: May 2006

Another Graveyard video (which did not get in, if I recall correctly), this one involves a lot of actual editor work....well, on the program's end, not mine. The subject was transition overuse, and this one is just a bunch of nonviolent selections from Elfen Lied episode 1 jammed together using every transition available in Magix, probably not in order like that Berserk vid SSGWNBTD did way back when. The point of the title is probably absent from a naive viewing of the video, not knowing that this is an anime where people's appendages randomly fall off and a right-wing death metal band (again, not linked).

This one was edited in China during the brief time I was posted there, in work downtime not associated with the option to go out and do stuff that requires being in China.

INSO10 - Fucking Tight

video: Maria-sama ga Miteru ~ Haru
audio: Municipal Waste - "Guilty of Being Tight" (edit)
link: tinyupload [14.5 MB]
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: April 2006

The shitty Graveyard version of what eventually turned into SH106, this is if nothing else proof positive that I can break footage better than I can fix it. Seriously, watch this one; this looks like worse garbage than the Dragonball clips at the start of SH056, themselves upsampled from postage-stamp-sized ASF and kind of fucked up.

All the cuts I did for the Graveyard project are being put up here, despite being compiled in that video, because they got their audio stripped, and I'm still kind of steamed about that. The idea behind the project was good, but it turned into nearly as much fail as some of the ideas parodied. If there's no audio on this track, as on the others, there's no point. This one got in; INSO11 didn't and INSO12 did. All of them show up here.

INSO09 - Cthulhu Gokkun

video: Naruto
audio: The Vision Bleak - "The Curse of Arabia" (sample)
link: depositfiles [690 KB]
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: October 2005

As the trailer card indicates, this is a AMV-Hell-style joke that doesn't have a video to go into that was put together in a total of about 35 seconds, including rendering and final export. You may have to listen to it a couple times to get it; the piece is three frickin seconds long.

INSO07 - Die Katze Hoch

video: Azumanga Daioh
audio: Intimidation One - "Frederick The Great" (not really)
link: mediafire [6.8 MB]
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: April 2005

Done as a piss-take track at the end of SH095, which also took a lot of time and effort, this video combines a one-clip sequence from somewhere in the middle of AzuDai with the march that appears on the end of Intimidation One's cover of this Landser tune, which has nothing to do with either band, but is probably coming from the same place politically. (Note how none of these bands are linked; there's a reason.) Appropriately, this was omaked onto the end of INSO08, but now you can get it in remastered fidelity without having to sit through all the offensive and disgusting crap in that video first.

INSO06 - ...entferne ich mich mit dir

video: Der Krieger und die Kaiserin/The Princess and the Warrior (same movie, prefer the original title, but not everyone can read German)
audio: Mary Black - "Columbus"
link: depositfiles [53.3 MB]
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: February 2005

This video was done for the "Live In '05" contest advertised on the animemusicvideos.org forums in early 2005, and was kicked together in blithe disregard of the expectations of the contest. I had been into this movie for a while, and it meshed very well with the song, saving me from having to buy Last Exile to do a video with this. Among very slow romance videos based on sources where the protagonists show extremely little physical intimacy, I think it came out pretty well.

About the music: Mary Black is an Irish pop singer; I found this track scouring the net from some blog that also turned me on to Bamboo Soul and Les fatales Picards.

About the movie: Tom Twyker made German cinema history with Lola rennt (Run Lola Run in English): for the first time since the arrival of New German Cinema in the 1970s, a German film was fast, experimentally composed, and quick-cut. It was heralded as a fresh start for German movies. Then Twyker turned around and made this film, which is a classic NGC piece clocking in at a smooth and weighty 150 minutes. It still has many of Twyker's stylistic quirks, including carefully plotted and symbolic color schemes and highly dynamic camera motions, but its captivating power is slow and deep rather than the gripping speedfreak edge of Lola rennt.

Miscellaneous: The title of this video is a convoluted word-play that will only make sense to those with a fair degree of fluency in the German language. It roughly means "I will distance myself with you/I am distancing myself with you", and the case which is meant is unclear, dependent on the omitted first word or phrase, which would be something like "Jetzt" [Now] or "Zuletzt" [At last]. If this sentence element is not there, the title isn't grammatically legal. Beyond that, "entfernen", to distance, doesn't take a "mit" (with) prepositional phrase. It requires a "von" (from) phrase, which only makes sense: nothing can distance itself if it has nothing to distance itself from. Both prepositions are in the same grammatical group, keeping the sounds and sentence flow consistent, but the inversion of the relationship (uniting instead of dividing) and the reduction to not specifically moving away from anything, but simply distancing oneself in general really address themselves to the central themes of the video.

A potentially interesting but of course ultimately fruitless thought exercise might be to speculate whether, if the title is intended as a spoken line, Sissi or Bodo is the speaker.


Is this pretentious tripe? Of course. But a pretentious title is better than an unoriginal crap title, and almost as good as no title at all.

INSO05 - Fate of the Family

video: Death Collector/Family Enforcer (same movie, two names)
audio: Halford - "Slow Down"
link: depositfiles [47.1 MB]
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: February 2005

After the intense production work on SH094 wrapped, I really didn't want to look anime in the face, editing-wise, for a while, and there was also a "Live In '05" contest running around the same time. Thus this one and the followup, which is probably better. This is still decent, but probably the worst of the live-action videos in my catalog.

About the video: this is kind of a drama piece focusing on Mafia small-timers. Joe Cortese stars, but if you look carefully, you may be able to catch Joe Pesci in a godawful toupee...at least I hope it is. I mean, if that was his real hair, going bald was the best thing that could have happened to his career.

INSO04 - nice video with a nice song

video: Night of the Living Dead
audio: Ben Jelen - "Christine"
link: depositfiles [45.2 MB]
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: January 2005

This was done partly to work out my new editing environment and get more used to ripping and processing DVDs, and partly as a practical joke on the .org forums, because I like messing with people. Putting the picture and the standard source block in gives it away, but the video holds up on its own beyond that, which is useful.


And now, a blast from the past, as promised in the end titles:

THE WHOLE SORDID STORY

I found this CD early in 2004 while at U-M working on my MSCS (since abandoned for industry). I was in one of the Media Union labs, and I had to upload some stuff I had written -- I forget whether it was some code for an assignment, or just some doc I had to print -- from CD onto the workstation there. Well, there was already a CD in the machine. I took it out, moved my stuff off the ferry disc, and then threw it back in to listen to while I worked on other stuff. It looked like it would suck, but I have eclectic tastes in music and am willing to give nearly anything a fair shot.

Yes, it sucked. But it wasn't earbreakingly bad like, say, Maniac Mattox. So I let it play and eventually it got to track 4, "Christine". As soon as I heard "taste of Christine" come up the first time, I immediately thought of Night of the Living Dead, partly because I had just watched it recently and partly because I hated the song and like to make fun of shit. The image of this song playing while some girl is ripped apart and devoured by zombies still cracks me up, but maybe that's just because I worship the devil.

So, I did what I had to. I took the CD home, ripped the track, and brought it back the next day. It was gone later, so maybe the person who left it there got it back, or maybe someone else stole it for real. And the music sat and sat on my harddrive until I got spare time and a working DVD drive. When I finally got one, I decided to do this as a tuneup for my editing suite, and really realized just how MUCH of the movie can be applied literally to this song -- ofcourse for completely comic effect.

The idea of this video just continues to crack me up. I'm glad I was able to make it and give a purpose to the TRL idiot who wrote the music in the first place.

INSO03 - Hall of Feline Entombment

video: The Cat Returns
audio: Nile - "Unas, Slayer of the Gods"
link: depositfiles [7.8 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: March 2004

Put together shortly after SH086/ANM1 ("demo 4") wrapped, this is based on the general idea of INSO02, another -- better, and also much longer -- one-clip video that qualified to go in the .org catalog on a whim and thus did not appear here between INSO01 and this video. This is less good, especially the shaky ending, but otherwise sticks together ok.

INSO01 - homebound

video: Boondock Saints
audio: Ignite - "A Place Called Home" (Hungarian version)
link: depositfiles [35.4 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: January 2003

Done between SH063 and SH064, this was the first real excursion I did into non-anime editing; it's been shown before, but here it is remastered, in a position that is probably going to stick around for a while. The later videos are probably better, but I still like this one.

INSO00 - Kirika no H

video: Noir
audio: Noir
link: tinyupload [715 KB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar (not really)
production date: September 2001

This isn't really an AMV, or any kind of video that requires actual editorial or compositive input. It's mostly a random joke, and the picture basically gives it away. If I remember correctly, I picked this out of episode.....11? while clipping on SH017. It's one of those things that you see while clipping, something that may get overlooked watching it live, but in clipping you go "wait, what the FUCK?" and shift the slider back to make sure that your eyes aren't playing tricks on you. I saw it. Now you can see it, and also not look at Kirika the same way ever again.

BAS17 - Demo 3 outro

video: too many leftovers of Demo 3 to list properly
audio: Evergrey - "Rulers of the Mind" (remix sample)
link: depositfiles [13.8 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar, Virtual Dub, Nero Wave
production date: June 2002

The last video done for BAS, and the last video in this demo, this one includes the most editing that I did on this kind of credits video. Not so much the video track, which is pretty much the same long series of long fades that came up in the prior two, but in the audio, definitely, which led on to stuff like SH046, SH085, and way down the line, SH096.

BAS12 - Demo 3 intro

video: Run=Dim, titles
audio: Soilwork - "As We Speak" (sample)
link: depositfiles [4 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: June 2002

For the last BAS demo, done up after I graduated, a different song sample with a linkable band and something more approaching production values. This was done up over that summer and, I think, mailed back, because good bandwidth was scarcer back then. I have no idea if this actually screened, or if this is the first time it's been out in front of general audiences.

BAS11 - Demo 2 outro

video: too many leftovers of Demo 2 to conveniently list
audio: Borknagar - "Embers"
link: depositfiles [14.7 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar and Virtual Dub
production date: January 2002

With a bunch of levels work on the pre end and some fancy Sub Station Alpha titles in post, this is a definite step up from the previous outro, if only in the "knowing how to use Virtual Dub" department. The levels of "editing" here are not generally high, but there isn't absolutely no synch.

BAS06 - Demo 2 intro

video: The Boy Who Saw The Wind, titles
audio: Bound For Glory - "46 Years In Hell" (sample)
link: depositfiles [3.9 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: January 2002

This video uncoincidentally uses the same audio as BAS01; it was lying around, I didn't have to worry about finding another upbeat riff-section, and it connected this demo with the last one. This one, though, was made at a good resolution, and "remastered"; this is actually the first time that this has been mixed down for distro as opposed to strung together with other MPEG2 files, but it was mixed down in the SH Remasters Project, so, "remastered". Doesn't matter; what does is that this preserves the "polar bear" clip that was used as the interstitial on this demo.

BAS05 - Demo 1 outro

video: Ranma 1/2 movie 1, Bounty Hunter: The Hard, Cowboy Bebop, Berserk, Mystery of the Necronomicon, Rurouni Kenshin OVA, Rounin
music: Linkin Park - "Cure For The Itch" (edit)
link: mediafire [15.5 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: August 2001

Using, like all the outros, scraps left over from the main videos of the demo, this one set the tone for the rest to follow. Even though I mismatched aspect ratios and did horrible titles and produced this thing in MPEG1, it did successfully set the tone for the outros to follow, which improved steadily. And yes, Lord Rae has a credit in there; I used his 8 Stops 7/Eva vid in the screener reel, which is the reason why it is not going to get distroed here, even though I do have a copy of the whole 30-minute thing. On later demos I used playlists; here, old-school all the damn devastating way.

BAS01 - Demo 1 intro

video: original; titles
audio: Bound For Glory - "46 Years In Hell" (sample)
link: depositfiles [3.8 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: August 2001

This is pretty much a nothing video; titles done in MovieStar's horridly bad internal titling app and an audio track just cut down to the opening riffs. This is straight out of the editor; like everything else before SH017 (except SH011, of course), there wasn't any remastering to be done because better versions don't exist.

An Introduction

As Kai K. Stromler, I make too many AMVs. I also, in eight and a half years of chopping up other people's video and merging it with other people's audio, have made or, occasionally noticed, a bunch of other stuff that is not AMVs. That is what this record is for. Posts to follow; stuff that isn't on the .org, but that I have some kind of ridiculous compulsion to publish regardless.