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.

SH038 - way up high

video: On Your Mark
music: Skyclad - "Dreamer Deceiver" (cover)
link: depositfiles (remaster) [36.9 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar (remastered Magix 2.0+ deLuxe)
production date: May 2002 (remastered October 2009)

The picture up above does not represent the full fidelity of this video as it currently exists. This is because the pictures for these entries through about like SH089 were all done back in 2003/2004 when I was first putting together a SH web presence at UofM, and as noted above, I rebuilt this video shot for shot from non-beat-up source in October 2009.

A DVD print of the On Your Mark video was included, quite unexpectedly, at the back of the version of Umi ga Kikoeru (ok, ok, I Can Hear The Sea) that I picked up at the grocery store when I was in Beijing back in May 2006; however, due to not being able to read Chinese, I missed it until I ripped that DVD for use in assembling SH111 in January 2009. That video got hopelessly delayed for various reasons, but after eight months of mostly-not work, I had the opportunity to do this remaster as a follow-up project, made possible because I'd been inactively looking for the song on CD (or suitable fascimile) over a lot of that time, and it eventually paid off. The jump from upscaled-Indeo-from-LD to DVD video source is almost equalled by the jump from watery-room-mic to proper-CD-rip in the audio....and when this initially came out on the .org last October, it was replacing a 320x240 Divx encode that looked like the picture above. Video salinity shock, pur.

This is the second of two SH videos rebuilt; SH005 got redone as SH097, while this one obviously didn't get a new number. I'm currently working on a rebuild of SH007, which looks like it'll more likely get the SH116 designation rather than slotting in over the old version.

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.

SH036 - Trip At The Brain

video: Cowboy Bebop
audio: Fishbone - "Post Cold War Politics"
link: depositfiles [10.8 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: April 2002

I like this video. The .org hates it. I can't say that I don't occasionally see the point of view that gets this marked with the lowest score of any locally-available video, because this is relentlessly weird, and for a long time the print on the available copy of the video looked like absolute crap. Thanks to the remasters project, the print now just looks mostly like crap, but the video is still relentlessly out in left field, so scores aren't going to improve.