Ranma Kombat: Notes

Video: Ranma 1/2 Movie: Big Trouble in Nekonron China
Audio: Mortal Kombat Theme Song (Utah Saints)
Awards: Anime North'98 - Technical Award
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Although people on the Anime Music Video Mailing List often talk about high-powered computer systems, I was able to make this video on a Pentium 100 with an ATI All-In-Wonder video card and 1gig of hard drive space in 1998. Adobe Premiere 4.0 was used to put it together.

I first converted the song on the CD to a wav file and then used Sub Station Alpha's timing-from-wav-file feature to find the sync points I wanted in the song. After getting the sync points, I did some rough scripting. (good guys pose, bad guys pose, good guys get beat up, bad guys get beat up yadda yadda)

Then I went through the first Ranma movie and captured all of the scenes that looked like they were something I wanted. Since uncompressed video takes a lot of space, I compressed all the clips after they were captured. This took up a fair bit of time. Unfortunately, before I knew of better codecs, I used an old version of Cinepak, but switched to Indeo 5 for the final output. While I hear that QuickTime 3.0 is good, and multiplatform, it doesn't seem to work with PC-Premiere 4.x. Most of the 1gig drive was used at one point or another for uncompressed clips, but in the end about 400meg was used for compressed clips, some of which weren't used. Clips were captured at 320x240x15fps, but newer ATI software seems to be able to do 30fps on my system with the "VCR" option. Hopefully this will lessen some of the jerkiness in the video on my next project.

Then it was just a matter of referring to my timing notes and doing some drag-and-drop. One thing I like about the digital process is being able to speed up and slow down video. If I needed to extend a scene just a little, I could set the speed to 80 or 90%. Conversely, some were sped up, in some cases to try to give the video a slightly "frenetic" pace.

(The video was redone with a better setup in 2000)