The Bucket O' Nothing

Anime music videos.

I don't know how many people have heard of them, and of those how many people would willingly watch them. There seem to be enough that AnimeMusicVideos.org can thrive - there even seem to be enough willing to pay for storage space for their AMVs that there's already a system set up on the website.

Now, there are several ways to make anime music videos, basically depending on the software or hardware you have access to. Generally, the best way to produce something that people will watch is to use decent clips from stuff that's not got subtitles in (in fact, the rules of the site prohibit using fansubbed anime - it's DVD source or nothing, folks - but that doesn't stop the vast majority of the video makers, me included), and use a nice non-linear editor like Adobe Premiere. Premiere also has many special effects that can be used to spice up videos. In fact, there's even been a fairly well known video posted there called Euphoria (done to footage from RahXephon) which shows off how many effects can be added to a video to go with the music and still not overpower the whole thing.

According to an acquaintance in our university anime society, Euphoria also has a fairly rabid fanboy following, since whenever anything threatens to displace it from its "Best Video" slot on the website, the fanboys go and vote for it many many times to get it back to the top. This, to me, seems to be a pity. Not only is it stopping other good videos from being recognised, it's also sending completely the wrong message to AMV creators - "More is better".

This has resulted in many videos that I have downloaded, only to find out that the thick coating of Premiere filters on the footage has rendered them unwatchable. The video's entry on animemusicvideos.org is here, and is called Fade to Black. In fact, before this filter-mania started, the only place I'd seen this many ridiculous effects used was in a video that parodied the large amount of crappy Dragonball Z videos posted on the website, the All Purpose DBZ Music Video.

Of course, I am rather biased on this matter, as I don't have a copy of Premiere and the program I use to edit my AMVs is VirtualDub, which really isn't intended for that sort of use at all - everything has to be done linearly, the frame rates have to match up exactly, and there's no way to put (say) credits on the end, even a short screen with writing on. This is why the only video I've actually done enough on to post is still not properly finished, and thus there is no proper link to it, even from my profile page (yes, that's a blatant plug for publicity, I know).

Still, even without taking into account my opinions as someone who makes rather poor videos rather slowly with not-particularly-good software, I prefer to watch videos where the effects are only used to help the story, not to hide it behind layers of funky waveforms and page-turning transitions. So I'll leave you with a good (though full of spoilers for the end of the series) video for Angelic Layer, called Beyond the Angelic Dome.

(Oh, and I recommend all the videos I linked to here, other than Fade To Black. Even Euphoria has its good points.)