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Information

• Member: AbsoluteDestiny
• Title: Aim For Victory!
• Premiered: 2004-01-01
• Categories:
  • Action
  • Drama
  • Character Profile
• Song:
  • Vince DiCola War
• Anime:
  • Gunbuster (Aim for the Top!)
• Comments: Introduction
  
  This video is Action/Drama/Cheese :)
  
  The decision to make this video was a real spur of the moment thing. I don't actually remember what made me think of this piece of music but the instant I did (and thought of Gunbuster) I rushed to the shops and bought the CD so that I could make the video. It was one of those videos I could see in my head instantly.
  
  Aided by the internet being inaccessable and friends being away, I spent a weekend putting the video together. It was probably the most fun I've had editing in a very long time - the idea and execution were so straightforward, I just had to do it.
  
  About the Song and Anime Choices
  
  The anime is one of my all-time favourites. It's a crime that there hasn't been a US DVD release of what is one of the greatest OVAs ever made (you can thank Manga Video for that). Many people criticise recent Gainax endeavours for having weak endings... I don't think anyone could critcise Gunbuster for that. It's one of the most touching moments in anime history...
  
  A moment that doesn't feature in this video. See, this is an Action video. A cheesy, nostalgic, action video. There's a lot of reasons why I havent used any footage from the last episode but mainly I don't think I needed to. Sure, I'm telling the story of the show, but there's no video that could retell the more heartfelt moments of this show - so I stick mostly to the action. It also means that people who havent seen it dont get that fantastic ending spoiled for them.
  
  The music fits really well, in my opinion... and I think there's good reason. Vince DiCola is only really known for doing two things... the first is parts of the Rocky 4 soundtrack (of which this is one of the tracks) and the second is the Transformers: The Movie score. This man is used to writing music for 80s giant robots, it just so happens that this piece was meant for Sylvester Stallone not Optimus Prime.
  
  As such , this video is intended as a bit of 80s nostalgia.... Rocky 4, Gunbuster, synthesisers... you get the picture.
  
  Tech stuff
  
  The video is fairly low tech, really. I've tried to keep the effects I've used as close to the original show as possible. All I've really done is a few colour changes, the odd transparency - that sort of thing. As such I haven't selected the Digital Effects option in the description because blink and you'll miss them.
  
  The picture quality of the source is absolutely dreadful. Seriously, this has to be one of the ugliest DVDs I own in terms of pure video quality. Despite the fact that I have the Japanese DVD release, which is the best print around, all it does is show up how bad the masters are for the show. It has all the old gainax bad mastering problems - jitter (LOTS of jitter), dreadful field-blended telecine, chroma bleeding and moire rainbowing. A digital editor's worst nightmare. Some of the scenes have slightly less than smooth motion, mostly in parts that were completely ruined by the bad telecine. I tried every method - sometimes I had to use a different deinterlacing/IVTC method depending on the scene and I still couildn't get some scenes to look any good. The vertical pans were the worst. I had to almost completely remove them from the video because they look so bad.
  
  Of course, the age of the show means it has a lot of noise and things like that. I've removed as much as I can without hurting details. It's about as good a transfer as I'm willing to try without some really complicated techniques. It's just never going to look pretty without a remaster from Gainax like they did with eva. This is worse than the orginal eva print by far. *sigh*
  
  Awards
  Winner: Best of Show - Jacon 2004
  
  
  The downloadable file
  
  Unlike my previous videos which all use Simple Profile mpeg4 (encoded with xvid api3 branch) this video uses some Advanced Simple Profile features - namely B frames. The video is encoded with 2 b-frames as opposed to DivX5's 1. As such it may have difficulty playing on *some* hardware players such as those based on the early Sigma Designs chipset. Mediatek-based standalone players should be able to play it fine and pretty much all software players should be able to as well.
  
  The large ~70mb file is thanks to both the length of the video and the hard-to-encode footage.
  
  The audio is encoded at 192kbps mp3.
  
  You will need an ASP-compatible decoder such as Divx5, ffdshow, etc to play this video.