melodytree (
melodytree) wrote2022-07-24 11:21 pm
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Hikari no Densetsu, "You're Really Pretty, Girl" [AMV] (Hikari/Hazuki)
Title: You're Really Pretty, Girl
Fandom: Hikari no Densetsu, Hikari/Hazuki
Song: Pretty Girl by Hayley Kiyoko
Contains: N/A
Notes: A rhythmic gymnast strives to become good enough that the older gymnast she admires will notice her, too.
Download: Here (contains lyrics in softsubs)
Embed: (also has lyric subs)
Misc notes:
I finished the first draft of this quite a while ago, but I wasn't satisfied with it. Then I saw that the newest effect exercise at
vexercises was masking, and that made me revisit it. The main thing I wanted to try masking on was an effect I've seen in AMVs where an object/character is masked for a very short time to make a smoother transition between clips; I mostly used it on the ribbons here, but also on the ball once. I'm very happy with how the poster mask about a minute in came out, too. I also tried using masking on top of lowered opacity/fades, and more boringly to cover up some lip flapping and a couple of video errors.
All of it was done using the pen tools directly in Premiere. This worked out okay and was convenient, but for more complex masks, it quickly gets frustrating because the controls are not as good as they are in Photoshop. Next time, I would probably look into how to best import/export from Photoshop for anything more difficult.
I also experimented with using whip pans as transitions. One or two of them might've been a bit gratuitous, but overall I like the motion they add.
This was not the easiest source to work with; it's an anime from 1986 that had a DVD release of poor quality and, as far as I can tell, that was it. (I think it might not have even been released on DVD in Japan; the only references I could find were imports from France.) The footage is shaky and has ghosts, poor colors and color shifting, a serious noise problem, and torn frame edges. I did my best to fix the frame edges through duplication and occasionally masking and also brightened the footage by a lot before adding in my color effects.
I experimented with anime upscalers, but I didn't get good results (even with the one I could even get to run over all the footage instead of skipping most of the frames...). I noticed that it did do a great job of denoising the footage, which made the AMV look much better, but unfortunately, it also added contrast and saturation, and that made some of the scenes I'd color-corrected darker and muddier or kind of eye-searing. There doesn't seem to be any way to disable this effect, so I ended up not using it after all the time it took to process. Afterward, I found that Premiere had added a new denoise filter since I'd last checked (the old one looked terrible on this footage) - it's marked as being for VR film, but it worked well on this anime! Got almost as good results as with the fancy neural net denoisers with only a tiny bit of tweaking, and it looks so much better with the majority of the noise gone =D
Storytelling-wise, although we do see the characters using the other apparatuses, the ball and the ribbon are by far the most prominent. (I suspect this is because ball = easy and cheap to animate and ribbon = icon of the sport.) Early on, I decided to pretty much only use those clips of those two and to shift from the ribbon at the beginning to the ball in the middle. My thinking was that ribbon == metaphorical 'red string of fate' and the ball is like a mirror that reflects themselves and each other.
I know this is probably not going to be seen by a lot of people because the anime is so obscure, but I had a great time making it :)
Fandom: Hikari no Densetsu, Hikari/Hazuki
Song: Pretty Girl by Hayley Kiyoko
Contains: N/A
Notes: A rhythmic gymnast strives to become good enough that the older gymnast she admires will notice her, too.
Download: Here (contains lyrics in softsubs)
Embed: (also has lyric subs)
Misc notes:
I finished the first draft of this quite a while ago, but I wasn't satisfied with it. Then I saw that the newest effect exercise at
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All of it was done using the pen tools directly in Premiere. This worked out okay and was convenient, but for more complex masks, it quickly gets frustrating because the controls are not as good as they are in Photoshop. Next time, I would probably look into how to best import/export from Photoshop for anything more difficult.
I also experimented with using whip pans as transitions. One or two of them might've been a bit gratuitous, but overall I like the motion they add.
This was not the easiest source to work with; it's an anime from 1986 that had a DVD release of poor quality and, as far as I can tell, that was it. (I think it might not have even been released on DVD in Japan; the only references I could find were imports from France.) The footage is shaky and has ghosts, poor colors and color shifting, a serious noise problem, and torn frame edges. I did my best to fix the frame edges through duplication and occasionally masking and also brightened the footage by a lot before adding in my color effects.
I experimented with anime upscalers, but I didn't get good results (even with the one I could even get to run over all the footage instead of skipping most of the frames...). I noticed that it did do a great job of denoising the footage, which made the AMV look much better, but unfortunately, it also added contrast and saturation, and that made some of the scenes I'd color-corrected darker and muddier or kind of eye-searing. There doesn't seem to be any way to disable this effect, so I ended up not using it after all the time it took to process. Afterward, I found that Premiere had added a new denoise filter since I'd last checked (the old one looked terrible on this footage) - it's marked as being for VR film, but it worked well on this anime! Got almost as good results as with the fancy neural net denoisers with only a tiny bit of tweaking, and it looks so much better with the majority of the noise gone =D
Storytelling-wise, although we do see the characters using the other apparatuses, the ball and the ribbon are by far the most prominent. (I suspect this is because ball = easy and cheap to animate and ribbon = icon of the sport.) Early on, I decided to pretty much only use those clips of those two and to shift from the ribbon at the beginning to the ball in the middle. My thinking was that ribbon == metaphorical 'red string of fate' and the ball is like a mirror that reflects themselves and each other.
I know this is probably not going to be seen by a lot of people because the anime is so obscure, but I had a great time making it :)