To be quite honest, I even thought of closing Solstice Productions for a while because I release so little these days. Nonetheless this site has some useful video tutorials I want to keep around. Like you, I consistently forget what settings I need to use when I’m encoding or converting something.

I’ve developed a new theme for the website since the old one was getting more and more problems with newer browsers. I’ll come back sometime and update / correct some information on this site. Enjoy!

I spent most of the editing so far on getting the intro right, of which I will give a sneak preview by a screen capture.

As you can see the intro has a pretty big warning icons. Contains violence, sex, drugs, mobbing and swearing.

Generally this OPV is all about exaggerating. I simply took 7 bits of pieces of this story and exaggerated it to no end. The end result will be so evil it has no equal. Especially somewhere in the chapter ‘Meaningful male dialog’, I’m trying really hard not to let Yamapi say the last sentence to that but I make absolutely no promises hahaha. God help me if it fits with the facial expression and mouth movements…

Let’s just say the one thing I’m not exaggerating are the warnings on this video.

So far I’ve edited up until chapter two, and it’s going to be longer than my usual videos because of the massive amount of ideas crammed in there together. I do hope I’m able to get it done in my vacation, when I go back to work it’s going to be harder. ^^; Hope to show it to you soon!

So here’s a 1 minute long promo of SCRYED and about 50 seconds of Wolf’s Rain (click the pictures).

I never bothered to look this video up for myself, but apparently it’s been on Youtube for a very long time. I tried to comment but Youtube gave me the finger after I gave it the finger a long time ago. haha. Payback, thought Youtube.

What I love that’s clearly visible through the comments, is that people discover both the music of Nevermore and the anime Vampire Hunter D. AMV and OPV editing really is something great.

This video made me become an even bigger Nevermore fan, and watch this movie. ^_^
You can click the video to open up the comments, or this link.

lol. That’s so cute.

Anyways, the full video can be downloaded from Megaupload. I’ve uploaded it, because of this entry. Even though it gets rave reviews I’m not particularly proud of this one. It was the very first I made with a very limited video editing tool. It has some timing mistakes and stuff I’d definitely want to do over, but I’ve retained something I did in this video in my current releases: trying to build a good concept. Getting gravity, and holding on to it. It makes me happy if people feel that even a little bit when they watch some of my work.

Every year I re-encode Johnny’s Countdown 2008-2009 using HDTV footage to create a High Quality AVI. This entry will show you the process of this year’s massive re-encode. If you don’t have about 300 gigabytes disk space, don’t even attempt this.

This year someone posted “TS” format video on jpopsuki. TS is apparently the extension video gets if it is captured from a HD source. To process this video, you must use a conversion tool to get it from TS to MPEG-2. There is a freeware program called “HDTVtoMPEG2″ that will do this for you. Program explains itself, though I have two tips:

• Don’t change the max file size value. Leave it at 1024. Anything higher and your pc might have problems accessing the footage later.

• Don’t throw in all TS files at once. It will generate 1024mb files and it will work, but it’s safer to load them up once at a time. This is because you may need the original length of the files to gain a better insight into the audio track(s). The problem is that once you go to MPEG2 the audio track becomes unstable. Some of the clips will have audio, some of them won’t. On my machine I’m missing AAC/MP4 audio codecs, this may be the cause of this problem, but I’m fairly sure it would have crapped out on me anyways in tmpgenc.

In tmpgenc, leave the video on Display 16:9 mode and assign progressive. Also take off the audio track if there is one, because it’s likely it will cause problems. In Filters go to Resize and make sure Full Size (No Margin) is selected. Choose Uncompressed RGB for video output and set the correct size. This should always be slightly smaller than the original HDTV aspect ratio, which is 1440×1080. I choose to do 1240×880.

Audio:
I have streamsaved the audio from the original TS files to mp3 by using VideoLan. Another tutorial on this website will show you how.

So now you’re left with MPEG-2 files, AVI files and MP3 files from the TS files. Open up your favorite video editor and start pasting them after eachother, correcting sync mistakes and ensuring it all runs smoothly. Export it Uncompressed to ensure the quality has not degraded.

After that that, open VirtualDub and apply compression settings just like you would any file. Perhaps a deinterlace might still be necessary, so do a few test runs first.

It’s not bad really, I was merely still experimenting with big blocks of footage. I also did something wrong exporting footage to RAW which I have to do anyways so the program will import it (hates xvid or divx with a vengeance). If you export to raw and you want to use the audio you also have to export the audio to PCM to have the program be nice to you. If you don’t it’s just going to import the video only. Got a couple 100 gigabytes? I luckily do.

Furthermore I had an issue trying to get Premiere to ‘remember’ the edits I made to audio tracks. I dimmed the volume here and there and I’m sure I’ve done it right, but every time I restarted the program all volume was down to 0 db. If I had money growing on trees I would definitely own a Mac as I’ve been hearing so many great things about it. Unfortunately… I must make it happen on a Windoze.

The only thing I’ll be able to tell you up front is that it’s going to take me weeks/ months to get this done as it’s going to be a full customized dvd. I’m unsure if I’ll be able to release it to public, but we’ll see that when the time comes. It of course depends on how happy I am with the result as well.

In the meantime I’ve been sifting through my mom’s classical music collection for a detail I’ve already managed to work out.