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.

SH037 - gambarimasho!!

video: Comic Party
music: Iron Maiden - "The Wicker Man"
link: depositfiles [46.1 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: May 2002

Like SH035, the song here was originally booked with this source before getting pulled back into demo 2. In this case, though, it's easier to argue for direct improvement, because the thematic of getting back on track and standing on one's own feet plays into the source available from this title a little better than with the diverse bucket available on the demo. Of course, in discussions I've had about this video since, this perspective isn't universal; it seems to be restricted somewhat to people who first heard the song in its original historical context, as the first indication that Iron Maiden was going to be relevant again as a result of Bruce coming back, rather than just a museum piece. Without this context, the theme of "rising to the challenge" isn't as prominent, but if I do my job properly in the video, I can convey that perspective to the audience regardless of where they're coming from historically.

SH025 - your time will come

video: various
music: Iron Maiden - "The Wicker Man"
link: depositfiles [45.1 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: January 2002

It's really weird for an AMVer to reuse songs, especially someone focused on the music; you do exactly one treatment of a song, and the thought never crosses your mind to re-edit it with a different video source. This makes demo 2 super weird, because this one both and SH027 got redone, more or less exactly ten videos later, as real videos rather than demos. Part of this is that this is a good song that deserved its own video with the source that got used there, and part of it is that this song was never actually intended to be in the demo as per the original script. As noted a long time ago on a different site, demo 2 might better be known as "Musical Chairs Demo" rather than its unofficial internal title of "Revolution '02". Sometime, when I dig out the draft scripts and slotting, I'll put together a full post on the evolution of the final listing, which will be uninteresting except as an illustration of my "start a fight in an empty hoose" abilities as an editor and project coordinator.

SH017 - kill me ce noir

video: Noir
music: Iron Maiden - "Kill Me Ce Soir"
link: depositfiles [68.2 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: September 2001

In many ways, this is a quintessential noob video: built out of digisubs without a complete understanding of what that required technically and suffering massively in the video qualify department because of it, and biting off more than it can chew conceptually as well as technically. However, it's important for everyone at some point in their career to make these mistakes, realize that they're mistakes, and work out what they need to do in the future to avoid them. This video kicks off a period in history going from this one through SH032 where I learned a shitton more about the ins and outs of digital video than I ever thought I would need to know when getting into it, a learning experience that has had positive consequences in my real professional life as well as in this hobby.

On the other hand, this was my first time driving a video out past the six-minute mark, which is a skill that people ought to pick up, but most don't, and also the first time blending in a somewhat professional intro as opposed to the abortion on SH010. There's a silver lining to every cloud, even if it's there only because the Chinese shot said cloud up in order to get the rain out of it.

For Iron Maiden fans, this video is probably the easiest way to get this song. It was a B-side on the "Holy Smoke" single and IIRC has not been present on CD re-releases of No Prayer For The Dying, which people have not exactly been knocking down record store walls to buy either. For those who want the original, Golden Earring's Switch record may still be in print, and more convenient than getting the tape re-release of said Maiden record and finding a cassette player these days that's not going to eat it.

Utterly irrelevant historical note: final mixdown of the master copy of this video was done in the early morning of 11 September 2001. There was sort of a delay in getting the first-gen distro copy produced for the campus intranet site afterwards.