Premiered: 2012-04-12

  Do you remember Galaxy Bounce from 2006? It was good, it got some awards but I always thought it could be improved. Well here is Galaxy Bounce 2012, remake of the 6 years old AMV with improved editing, special effects, 720p, 60fps and an exclusive remix of the original song Lifelight by Andy Hunter.

2013/04/17 update : Making of video and Sugar Jesus Lifelight Remix available

  I got the idea of doing this remake 2 years ago when I was chatting with Overdrive (who already helped me with video encoding). I was telling him that I was looking for a bluray version of Pale Cocoon (which doesn’t exist) and he proposed to upscale the DVD version and filter it to improve quality. The result was really impressive, just what I needed for a HD remake.

  The improved video quality was nice but I figured that a simple remake with the same song wouldn’t make a good impact. I needed something to freshen the AMV, like a new version of the song, remix maybe. Since I recently worked with Andrei Basirov from Sugar Jesus for my Binary Overdrive AMV and I knew that he was very good at remixing songs, I thought I’d ask him if he would be interested in taking part in this project. It was last year, just after we released Binary Overdrive. He immediately accepted and explained to me that he needed the vocal track of Andy Hunter’s song as well as some other elements like SFX and chorus tracks in order to start working on the remix.

  Contacting Andy took some time but I managed to get to him and tell him about the project. He already saw the first Galaxy Bounce AMV few years ago and loved it. He agreed to help and sent me the audio tracks that Andrei needed. It took a while for Andrei to come up with the first version of the remix as he’s been very busy with his job but it was worth waiting. This first version was already high quality but Andrei is a perfectionist and he kept getting back to me with improved versions each time I gave him feedback.

  I put my summer AMV project on standby and started editing as soon as I got the first version of the remix. Although I basically just had to replicate the editing from the 2006 AMV, it took me a while to remember and redo some effects. I also realized that I already had a good level back then and there are even some quick transitions that I didn’t manage to redo very well so I just took them directly from the old Galaxy Bounce, hopefully you won’t notice it.

  Once again it was a pleasure to work with Sugar Jesus and having Andy Hunter on the project kinda put some pressure and motivated me to do things well. I spent about 5 months working on this remake (including lazy-time playing Deus Ex). There are a lot of new effects, most of them are about details that you might miss but if you compare with the old Galaxy Bounce, you should notice them (I might do a making-of video later). This remake is about 1 minute longer and the final part has a whole new editing with new stuff.

CAPTURES

FOOTAGE

Pale Cocoon

  22 minutes long OVA by Yasuhiro Yoshiura and upscaled by Overdrive. The intro is my 2010 AMV Binary Overdrive and I also used other old AMVs on screen tracking.

  Some comments about the old Galaxy Bounce were saying that it looked like the story was about a guy editing AMV and suddenly discovered some footage that made him want to explore reality or something like that. I thought it was a very cool idea and I could develop it using screen tracking to insert my previous AMVs everywhere. It required a lot of time and effort; I had to spend about 1 hour for each screen tracking. I did try to simplify the work using some tracking plugins but the result was disappointing. I guess I shouldn’t expect much in this situation where screens are mostly blurry in the background and they also move from and to the outside of the frame. So I just had to do them using Premiere’s basic effect corner pin and track manually frame by frame each corners of each screens on every scenes. I think the final render is satisfying and my tracking is accurate enough.

AUDIO

Andy Hunter – Lifelight (Sugar Jesus Remix)

  From Andy Hunter’s 2005 album “Life”. I really love how Andrei works with music. He also did amazing stuff with ambient sounds like for the intro and other computer sounds in the beginning of the video. The song is available right now in 3 different versions on Sugar Jesus Soundcloud.

www.andyhunter.com

www.myspace.com/andyhunter

www.sugarjesus.com

www.facebook.com/SugarJesus

PREMIERE CS5.5

  So far, I’ve been using Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 which was released in 2006. It’s been working ok and I learnt how to predict crashes but I wanted to upgrade it in order to be able to use the full potential of my computer with multi-core and 64bit. After using Premiere CS5.5 for this AMV, it turns out that I didn’t notice any major improvement over the old version. Rendering might be faster but playback seems a bit heavier to handle. I did however get a lot less crashes, only 3 or 6. The menus have been heavily modified and are confusing, I had to try several times before managing to export correctly. Adjusting effects on the frame is still heavy and reaction time is very long. I didn’t find any new useful function or tool and I noticed a few fucks-up with key frames randomely resetting and the usual problem with render files that disappear without reason (video and audio render files). Lossless codecs are very badly handled and make Premiere crash very often during playback (I tried Laga and utvideo) so I had to work with I-frame only MPEG included codec which isn’t lossless so every time I exported lossless, it had to re-render.   —  EDIT: latest utVideo update seems to fix the problem.

  I guess I’m gonna stay with CS5.5 for now as it’s not crashing as often as Pro 2.0 and it doesn’t generate errors during rendering.

DOWNLOAD

 * h264 10bit requires heavy CPU power and updated codec like cccp