Where's the creativity?

[Afro_Ninja]

Hey, you guys probably have no idea who I am, but I've been lurking the smash boards off and on for a while now. Sure, I'd always seen combo vids here and there and all the target test/home run records... but I never got that interested in smash vids till FC6 where they showed 'the wrath of giga bowser'.

That was a great vid and made me realize the potential for cool videos, between using action replay and the in-game camera mode. That's why I came to the video forums, to see if there were other ones like it. Unfortunately I haven't really found much yet- Smash Bros custom was kinda cool, but was just a strung together compilation of some cool stuff and non-cool stuff. Then there's vids like the sandbag combo video that are kind of funny but feel like they could have been better.

Instead though all I really find are the regular combo vids (not to copy too much from randall's post). Sure combos are cool but there's not a whole lot of new stuff left you can do. Fox waveshines people off the stage. Falco pillars people. Falcon strings together knees and nairs. This stuff has been driven into the ground.

With the talent out there I know you guys could come up with some seriously cool stuff. I realize some people only make vids on the footage they find available, and that's cool. But to everyone else, set aside your fox practice drills for a second and try something new. Yeah yeah, you can waveshine, but ken is still going to kill you at that next tournament

Tomorrow I'm going out to pick up a capture card and blank vhs tapes. I've got some ideas lined up so hopefully the learning process wont be too annoying to get through. I've done flash for years and I did basic video edting back in high school, so that should help at least a little. To be honest my smash skills aren't quite up to professional par (hah) so rather than invest time trying to beat someone who is already years of practice ahead of me, I want to create entertaining and different smash vids to show.

Well... wish me luck : /

 

[Xx swift xX]

I understand what you mean as far as the whole "been there, done that" view. Howver, I believe that combo videos are not all the same. Many videos open up our eyes to good music. Most of them are just there to let a player show off his skills. To be honest, i don't even like the non-combo vids too much. I sort of like the AR vids that show what a 'perfect' player would be capable of, but even that would get old really quickly.

All in all, I see no reason to stop making combo vids. Please realize that I'm not telling you that non-combo vids are bad. My post was not meant to dispute the importance of them, it was for the combo vids. Good luck with your vid!

 

[Afro_Ninja]

Likewise, I'm not saying combo vids should be stopped or anything. And you make a good point about the music. It's mostly just the 'been there done that' part of it. I guess I'd give combo vids a try too if I could move my fingers just a little faster

 

[Miharu]

Hey, good luck with this project of yours. I'm excited to see the results =]

 

[Wak]

I always wanted to be one of those dudes that shows their creative side instead of showing how good they are at the game.

But I never had any cool idea like SDM (plus I never had any AR). So I decided to get as creative as I could by taking Young Link and I invented many new combos with him... >_>

Anyway, you got my respect. Can't wait to see your stuff!

 

[Afro_Ninja]

Update:

after checking out capture cards and almost buying one, I took a look at dvd recorders and realized (given the increase in quality) I might as well just get one of those instead of a capture card + new vcr tapes + crappy vcr. After much tinkering I finally got it to input from my main tv and output to my small tv and record straight from the monitor output as opposed to recording by plugging the GC right into the recorder's inputs. When trying to record that way you get too much lag as the signal is passed through the recorder.

The next problem was getting the videos to my computer in a usable format. The downside to not buying a capture card was that I was left without video editing software. I tried roxio (already installed on my comp) and while it did read the VOB format it wasn't meant for much more than drag+drop and burn to disc. It didn't even output in a video format. I decided to try windows movie maker, but WMM doesn't accept VOB. I finally found a program that converted VOB to avi/mpeg so I gave it a trial run. It captured everything perfect but since it was a demo I only got 1/3 of the total video. I went ahead and dropped the $30 to buy the program and am now waiting for the serial# to come through email.

In the meantime I played around with WMM with my partial clip and I have to say I'm pretty pleased for a free program. It looks like it can do about 90% of what I need... only thing I don't like is that you can't simply add in sections of text, they're all treated as 'titles' that have to be faded in/out

So I'm thinking for a lot of sections (my movie needs text, believe me- couple pages worth) I'll just make an image of the text with photoshop and import it as an image, so that I don't have to have it fade in/out

This brings me to my only real question thus far- when making custom images, what resolution should they be at? I intend for this video to pretty much only be seen at places like youtube and whatever.. but in the event that the video gets blown up I at least want the text to be readable. If I make the text images oversize will they look jaggy when placed in the movie? I'll play with it tomorrow when I get up.

 

[SSJ4Kazuki]

AFRO-NINJA! Sweeet! Reccomend more people like Tom Fulp and Luis to the site!

Don't forget to abuse the rep system!

 

[Afro_Ninja]

heh, didn't expect to be recognized outside of my NG habitat : )

Anyway holy ****, the hurdles I've had to go through to get this stuff to my computer.. apparently windows explorer is terrible at recognizing/reading udf disc files. Every time I tried to pull them off they either wouldn't be there or would be erroneous. So I got iso buster which extracted the ones I needed. Then I could run my converter on the isobuster files and get them to avi for WMM to use.

That's the quick story though. This took me about all day to get working. But the good news is that I'm finally capturing the video I need and it's in good quality.

My first vid is going to be a "combo vid" of sorts but with a humorous take. Nothing too fancy yet cause I don't have an AR

 

[T0MMY]

Actually, I know who you are. And I'm pretty sure you know who I am as well.
I remember years ago when you mentioned Smash Bros, and I was like, hey, I'm pretty good. Well, I've gotten better. I even made a Flash movie of a Pichu combo video called Chain Lightning, check it out some time.

 

[nealdt]

Check out 3rd West's videos. In no particular order:

Flight of the Dinosaur (my favorite video ever)
Professional
Tunak Tunak Smash
Hide and Sheik
Pwnality
SSBB Parody
Fox on a Trampoline
SuperPro

See DaBearX's youtube profile for links.

Also check out The Ship of Fools' videos, including Flame of Bowser II and Shineanigans. They're a bunch of old fogeys so you might not get some of the old smash jokes, but they're creative and fun.

Hmm... am I missing anything...