Anime London Blog

It’s been awhile since my friend and mylsef have traded gifts from our culture. Surprisingly it seems we both have the same problem of finding soveniers from our respective countries that isn’t Made in China.

It might surprise alot of anime fans out there that Japanese are just as interested in our shows and culture as we are about ours. They see anime 24-7 on 3 to 4 speciality networks as well as regular broadcasts. It can be boring for them.

What is hard for me is finding what is truely Canadian or interseting to send back. Maybe those out there can leave a comment on what is truly Canadian and small (and legal) to send via Canada Post.

Any way, I’ll be posting more blogs on the package contents later on.

With 80 plus productions of animes, there has to be some croppers. Well Kaghime is one of them. See what our members thought of this twisted take on Lewis Carrol’s works in our review section.

Kagihime review

It took all week and many a late night but the final masquerade skit is posted on YouTube. My apologies for those skits I missed while changing batteries and tapes in the dark. It has been a learning experience.

Now comes the fun part of incorporating YouTube videos into this site. I hope to have things done soon…. I hope.

The too much is over 2 hours of video from this year’s Anime North masquerade. Even if I make room by getting rid of past cons, I don’t think that 27 gigs of raw video will fit no matter how much I trimmed or compress.

To handle this year’s masquerade videos, I’m trimming it down to the bare skit and titling each entry that I manage to capture. Unfortunely, not every skit was recorded due to changing of battery or tapes. I will be posting the masquerade, skit by skit to YouTube this week.

Feel free to subscribe, share or embed into your own website if it is your entry. I will be embeding the videos into a special page after I get things encoded and uploaded. To see AnimeLondon selection of videos on You Tube click on link below.

Anime London on YouTube

Started editing the masquerade videos. I’ve posted the Junior or Young Fan entries on YouTube first. Sadly I missed the first entry, Shippo, who was too quick at walking across the stage for me to capture in time.

I will get around to posting the videos here once I get thing editted. For now you can see how the video will turn out with titling the credits as oppose to having the MC’s comments.

Junior Masquerade at Anime North on YouTube

From an opening for a presentation I had to do today in front of a group of people…

“Today, the digital medium has become ‘The Media’. Leaving the movie, record, television and print industries reeling in it’s wake. For the internet, ordinary people have become the ‘new’ content providers. I have decided to step into this new medium.”

I proceeded to show all the equipment I had aquired over the years to create this digital medium. Various digital cameras, digital camcorder, card readers, portable DVD player, as well as other accessories.

I also talked how the technology has helped in able to record an event an show to someone else later. I also talked about taking family photos and burning them onto mini 8cm CDs. I was able to send out copies to rest of the family in their Christmas cards. Of course, I showed the group some of the clips of Anime North Masquerade, which I’m still in the process of editing.

I also started that buying top of the line for new technology is not necessary since the first time you have something new has it’s own ‘learning curve‘ to it. Also the accessories like more batteries, tapes, memory, upgrades needed to run said technology and of course taxes run about a third to a half of your total outlay. Also you can research consumer reports to find out which are lemons.

Also on the other foot, buying something too old has it problems of finding accessories down the road.

The key is knowing buying into digital will be a learning curve and also a risk. Like my sister, their computer hard drive crashed. Taking with it all the pictures she took. Knowing that digital is not safe media by any means having a way to backup your pictures and videos. Anything can breakdown or be lost or stolen.

The new age of digital is a risk but a worthwhile journey if taken in steps.

…and they thought I was going to take only about just anime.

Well first meeting after Anime North. SInce it was a long distance between meetings. It was fun to add some selected clips of rough masquerade I quickly burned onto DVD for this meeting.

I brought in some ice cream cones for the meeting only to find the freezer had frozen over because the door was left slightly open. ARGH! I quickly bashed and chiselled out some space else the cones would melt.

I might have to replace my portable DVD player as it continues to show signs it’s not playing stuff as well as it once did. Sigh.

Still you can read our review of The Melancoly of Haruhi Suzumiya in our reviews section. Both on the WWW or on WAP2 enabled cellphones.

It took up 27 gigs of drive space but the last of camcorder video footage from this year’s Anime North has been transferred. After I backup the raw video, I’ll will go over it all an trimmed down the video to it’s final format.

I’m alittle disappointed in the quality. I have alot more to learn until next year. I tried to conserve battery power on the first battery which only cut off some skits. Lucky I just let the tape run on early on in the taping. Rather than try to capture the MC in the video, I just centered on the stage and captured his introductions on audio. I’ll titled the video clips to cover the introductions. As stated before I’ll be looking at just screen captures of the walk-on Walk-off entries to conserve webspace as well as tie-in those entries who I already have pictures of taken during the day.
But for now it’s stack of DVDr to backup the files.

I’ve started transferring the video from my Samsung miniDV camcorder. It has gone quite well and I’ve transferred raw footage from tape 2 and tape 3. Over 14 GIG of drive space of raw footage which will take 4 DVDr to backup. This doesn’t even include tape 1.

A 60 minutes tape translates into about 13 gig of files.

Unfortunely a few things I have found out. Some entries were loss in the transitions switching tapes. Tape 2 has entries 48 to 88. Tape 3 has Entries 91 and 92 with closing remarks of MC.

The other is the autofocus periodicly refocused during an act and sometimes the lights washed out some people.

Preliminary viewing I might be only posting a screen capture of some of the walk-on, walk-off entries. I’ll be trimming the other to bare essentials and use titling to convey the MC intros to safe webspace.

Next after backing up tape 2 & 3 to DVDr is raw encode tape 1 then back it up. I will trim the footage to cut overlap in footage then begin the process of trimming , titling and encoding for web. Select skits will be posted to YouTube.

With everyone else posting stuff from Anime North on YouTube, I figure I joined the fun. The first video is of course, the hilarious Kick Start by Andrew Ragazzo and Colin Quinsland.

I’ll be getting at sending out the requests for pictures tonight.

Once I get done the masquerade videos, I continue to post more stuff from Anime London archives. Heck maybe even a cosplay AMV, if I have time.