SH042 - burn the candle at both ends

video: various
music: Sentenced - "Neverlasting"
link: depositfiles [36.3 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: June 2002

Like SH024, this video was done as a kind of afterthought to balance the demo it appeared in, but in this case the balance was going the other way. Also like SH024, this one uses a Sentenced song that starts with the letter "N", which occasionally makes it confusing for me looking over my private AMV archive -- in which I ditch titles as being unproductive and pretentious in favor of the formula band_name+anime_source-song_title. These two videos both start with the string "Sentenced+various-Ne", and it takes an extra half-second to make sure I'm pulling in the right one.

SH041 - hold your head high

video: various
music: Pain - "On And On"
link: depositfiles [39.2 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: June 2002

In earlier notes, this one was flagged as being not metal, or at least sufficiently non-metal to qualify it as a 'dance' video, which I have pretty much not done since. Then Pain goes and gets a sub-1000 page number on metal-archives. I don't know whether this is irony or just another "lol metal-archives" moment.

This was supposed to be the last new video in demo 3, but it turned out not to be. The 28-second cut from which the preview image is lifted is still the longest sequence used unaltered in a SH video.

SH040 - blind to see

video: various
music: Iron Maiden - "Can I Play With Madness?"
link: depositfiles [35.3 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: June 2002

There's a fair amount of guff in the .org entry for this video about it being broken, and coming out in weird versions, etc., so this is probably the right place to discuss why.

The reason is that MovieStar, while a decent linear editor, was piss-poor at exporting stuff. This is the reason for the very small and very weird frame sizes on the original (non-remastered) versions of SH videos before SH093; well, that and that I didn't entirely know wtf to do with a MPEG2 output. What I should have done was process the final HQ build of the video like a DVD stream (that I didn't have any experience working with yet, but what the hell): drop into DGIndex (or whatever the equivalent was back then), save project, import AviSynth script into VDub, build standards-compliant full-screen two-pass XVID encode like a civilized person.

What I actually did was quite different, though close enough to make any overly neurotic video quality types want to bash me to hell and back with a brick: I exported from MovieStar as a "high quality" .asf (whatever that meant), then brought that into a legacy version of Virtual Dub that had ASF support, which was removed before I started making AMVs even. (In this video, the ASF didn't and wasn't able to export right, cutting the production chain off at the knees.) This was the source for a 3000 Kbps DivX distribution copy with, necessarily, damaged audio, but my speakers were damaged as well, so my ability to hear that the audio was fucked was kind of impaired.

This is the sort of thing that keeps guide authors awake at night: a theoretically smart process that doesn't even know how brain-dead it's being, or how few changes would be required to make it truly intelligent. I obviously had the high-quality MPEG2 builds; that's what all these remasters were done out of. I also had and was able to use AviSynth, at least after I started cutting stuff in Virtual Dub in the fall of 2002; I just didn't put it together for whatever reason. Stuff like this keeps me on my toes process wise: always conscious of needing to be aware of what I may be missing, and what I'm not seeing that I ought to.

SH039 - kimi no tameni

video: various
music: SHIMOKAWA Mikuni - "Tomorrow"
link: depositfiles [36.3 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: June 2002

It's somewhat fitting, in the same ironic sense that anything at all is fitting for Shin Hats, that the only multi-part demo that is really accessible, and primed to attract anime-fan demographics, is the last one, and the one that I had no control over getting actually shown, since I mailed it up to my former kouhai in BAS (page hasn't been updated in forever, the club's still alive though) midway through the summer rather than lamely driving up and participating post-graduation.

This video is the first unambiguously non-metal song to go into a SH demo (yes, Linkin Park and Adema require some unholy twisting to get to that point, but you know people are going to fight that corner), and the first, period, not in English, though by this point I'd already done videos with bands from Finland, Sweden, Norway, Germany, and Russia. Despite weird historical accidents like three videos done in German and only one (the shortest) in English between SH107 and SH111, this is actually the norm. It's a lot more common for English speakers to not understand the lyrics in a SH video because of the vocal style than because of the language used.

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.