SH002 - Angel in Black

video: Vampire Hunter D
audio: Sentenced - "White Wedding" (Billy Idol cover, duh)
link: depositfiles [30 MB]
editor: DazzleMovieStar
production date: June 2001

This was the first of what would turn into, eventually, eight Sentenced videos. There's at least one more left, maybe two, before Shin Hats folds the tents permanently. Sentenced, at least post Amok (and, as everyone knows, this song was on the Love & Death EP that's packed onto the most common re-release of said album), is just a super-eminently videographable band, but for too goddamned long, I was the only one using their music as a backing plane for the rearrangement of other people's video. Boo on other people.

Like the original version of SH001, the picture in this video is small and crappy because it was made from VHS sources capped into MPEG1 at about 1Mbps, and at the native 320x240 that you see in the output. Unlike that video, it was never remade from DVD, and this is not likely to change in the future. At the time of production, this resolution was standard, but now it's verging on postage-stamp. The project I'm working on currently is in HD, with a screensize exactly 12 times larger in area than this one.

The Every Shirt thing went at a pace of one shirt per day, but that was because I could only wear one at a time. This will go a little bit faster.

SH001 - Nagisa Overhyper-Rhapsody

video: Here Is Greenwood
audio: Linkin Park - "One Step Closer"
link: original depositfiles [23.9 MB]; remastered depositfiles [26.2 MB]
editor: DazzleMovieStar
production date: May 2001

This is so old as to have almost become kvlt by osmosis. This doesn't make the music any better, but it does help in the making-excuses department. When I got started, Linkin Park was a disease in AMVs that had not yet become the roaring, all-devouring plague that they turned into by the middle of the decade, and this video kind of shows why; short, not especially complicated songs that are easy to videograph. So, I started with one too, like everybody else, because it was a two-and-a-half minute project that would allow me to work from what turned out to be only 22 minutes of subbed VHS footage (none of the stuff from ep 1 actually made it into the video) without a) tearing my hair out; b) including stuff with subs on them like a noob; or c) having to figure out some lolpro way of getting around subs in a consistent fashion. Path of least resistance wins every time.

incoming - way too much SH crap

In this entry I break the rule I laid down initially. The SH catalog is going to get crossposted here, with some minimal notes, over the next three or so months (maybe more like 4, we'll see), partly for lack of better things to do, and partly as an AMV complement to the Every Shirt thing I did last year over at OFtS. This will let me get some pictures in for old videos, modernize the catalog entries over at the .org, and also shift the legacy catalog to the new model where everything that is on local is also available on indirect.

SH034 is not going to get published as part of this, but SH090 might....just not linked. Like an internet treasure hunt, except the "treasure" is a garbage bag full of mutilated limbs and decaying organs. That aside, it's legitimately important to not exclusively put stuff inside the .org-wall. My remit initially and continuing has been to bring underground music to new audiences, and I'm not sure how making people create one-time-use accounts on a-m-v.org directly assists in that.

There is still going to be no official youtube presence. Policy is still to let other people jack my stuff and deal with the commenters and occasional takedown notices.

INSO16: GIRUY ya (Tokyo) Huns

video: Giant Killing
audio: Celtic FC - Bye Bye Rangers
link: depositfiles [11.8 MB]
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: May 2010

Caveats:
1) I know the colors are wrong. But from the helpful pictures above, if not the video itself, it should be clear that the hardworking protagonists who do the Huddle are standing in for Celtic, and the insufferable cheating assholes who nevertheless get all the calls and have more stars on their shirt than Brazil, but to commemorate relatively pissant achievements, are, well, Huns.
2) I know it's only 7 wins in 7, and that that in itself means ignoring the Ross County disaster, but I can't exactly change the song, especially for something so off the cuff, and anyways, we beat the Hun yesterday, so time to finally celebrate what we have available to celebrate.

This video came about in the general course of watching Giant Killing, the best new show of spring 2010, and the amazing coincidence that Tokyo Victory, the opponents in the first friendly that Tatsumi's ETU plays, are cheating, diving, arrogant hun bastards who happen to have five stars on their shirt. There are other Timmy dogwhistles scattered throughout the show, at least so far, but this is pretty frickin obvious.

If you like and follow fitba, you need to be watching this show. And if you like this show, you should probably pay attention to the World Cup this summer, dig into the backgrounds of interesting players, and find a club in a non-Big 5 league to support. Giant Killing offers not only real actual football as played by real people rather than magical teenagers, but also a good look into what it means to support a team, and this is something that, if picked up, will go on a lot longer than the show's run, even if it turns into another Star of the Giants.


[UPDATE:] Also, in even better news, the very end of the video is wrong. We are still playing in Boston this year, but not against the Huns, which is a good thing.

[UPDATE 2:] Barely two years after initial release, and this video is completely dated because, of course, Rangers FC went into liquidation on 12 June 2012 and effectively ceased to exist.  The video got re-upped anyway, but I'm not making another one if/when the newhuns get back to a level to trouble anyone.

Shin Hatsubai 2009 .org stats, now with pretty graphs

One of the neat things about having a stupid amount of videos on the .org, as a stats nerd, is that you get to have your own statistically significant data set to draw conclusions from without being an admin. Here are some numbers (actually, graphs, because this is MAI data and NO U CANT HAZ, make your own 83 local videos) from 2009 and some probably bogus conclusions about them.



This is a graph showing SH downloads for the past year by volume; that is, how many actual times somebody pulled the video from the .org servers. This is a fairly normal heavy-tailed distribution, with a moderately broad shoulder. Does the .org look like this, as a whole? I'm not sure, because 83 is really not a big enough sample to talk concretely about a sample space three orders of magnitude larger, but I'm willing to bet it looks something like this.



This here is a graph of SH downloads over the same period by weight (in MB); that is, the actual impact on the .org server of transferring the downloads graphed above. The shoulder is smaller -- if taller -- here and the tail falls away at a much faster pace. Does the .org look like this? Since I don't have the whole dataset, it's not a firm conclusion, but I'd hazard a guess that it probably does. The number of high-demand videos is very small, and the decay rate off that looked, the last time I looked over the bracketing of the star scale by week, seems to mostly match with this kind of slope.

Now here's where things get really interesting (well, at least as far as graphs based on statistics about AMVs can get, anyway).



This shows volume as ordered by weight. The sinusoidal ebb and flow between short ("fat" videos that reach a higher (further leftwards on the graph) transfer on fewer downloads) and taller ("thin" videos that need more downloads to get where they are weight-wise) bars in the tail is interesting, and indicates that .org users, at least the ones who download SH videos, are not selecting on filesize.



This one here is weight ordered by volume. This is the first time I've seen a sawtooth wave in an AMV-related graph, but all this is doing is pulling the information in the vol-by-weight graph out a little more dramatically. The sawteeth in the tail show transitions between roughly equivalent levels of transfer; the spike that starts is the fattest video with ~x downloads, and the last one before the next spike is the thinnest.

What does all this mean? Basically, that the motivation to compress your videos correctly is social rather than egotistical. A-m-v.org users are not selecting on either heavy or light videos, but, dun dun dun, presumably on some function of content and popularity. You won't get more people to download your video if it is the smallest filesize in the list of their options; the only motivation to compress properly is to minimize your bandwidth footprint. This is a social motivation, not one for the individual -- if you need a kick, though, donate, and the usage of the local server then does become more directly your own issue.

INSO15 - Re-Animaniac

video: Maniac
audio: Revocation
link: depositfiles [45.4 MB] youtube
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: November 2009

This video is without a title because music videos don't have titles other than the song out in the real world. This isn't a compositive art piece or anything like that, just a zero-budget music video for a song that the band probably isn't going to have a pro video done for (I'd think "Anthem of the Betrayed" and "Dismantle The Dictator", at least, would be ahead of it on Relapse's list).

Most of the video is cut out of Maniac, but there are bits from The Ape Man, The Gorilla, and probably most obviously White Zombie. All this stuff is public domain, so I can publish-publish it unless Dave/Anthony/Phil or their representation tell me to eff off and pull it. The music under the end card is a sample from "Alliance and Tyranny" off Revocation's first album, Empire Of The Obscene.

buried by time and dust

INSO15 isn't done yet -- though it will appear in this space after a) getting Youtube'd; b) I PM the link to the band on myspace and get some reaction other than wtfdood this is garbage; and c) both the streaming and HQ links show up on RTTP. In the meantime, though, I happened to run across the following guide to digital video editing:

Digital Video: A Guide for the Fearless

The guides that I had access to when I started editing were about as primitive; I'll see if I've still got any of them around and may append them later. What's interesting is that not only has this guide survived for 13 years online, but large portions of it are still valid even in the age of BluRay, Blender, and After Effects. Some, though, like the stuff on Quicktime compression, are pure lulz for their datedness, and the section on doing your own embeds will probably have some saddos moaning about starry wisdom lost; way of the world.