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Information

• Member: Jnzk
• Studio: Arctic Tribe
• Title: She-Man and the Masters of the Azuverse
• Premiered: 2005-08-03
• Categories:
  • Comedy
  • Parody
  • Fun
• Song:
  • TV Theme He-Man And The Masters Of The Universe
• Anime:
  • Azumanga Daioh (TV)
• Participation:
  • Connichi 2005 AMV Exposition, Connichi 2005 AMV Exposition (2005-09-16)
  • Anime Weekend Atlanta 11, AWA 2005 AMV *EXPOSITION* (2005-09-23)
  • Manifest 2005, Manifest 2005 (2005-09-24)
  • Ani-Magic 2005 AMV Contest, Ani-Magic 2005 AMV Contest (2005-09-30)
  • Anime USA 2005, Anime USA 2005 (2005-11-18)
• Comments: ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Best of Show & Fan Favourite at Manifest 2005
  Winner of Comedy category at Anime USA 2005
  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  
  After finishing my latest AMV I was totally fed up with slow drama. I definitely wanted to do comedy next, but it's always been hard for me to come up with funny ideas. Luckily I had this one audio clip left over from my possible AMV Hell 3 projects: the He-Man theme song!
  
  During my first years in school all the cool kids had He-Man toys. I wasn't cool so I didn't. To this day I haven't watched a whole episode of it, although I now skimmed through pieces from here and there for research purposes. The show sucks big time, but you have to admit the theme is quite catchy in all its 80s cheesiness.
  
  The concept of the video was built around Maya as Cringer, the mighty battle cat. Naturally I then had to make Sakaki He-Man. Yes, I know she's female, but there are a couple of rather "manly" shots of her. Assigning the rest of the roles was really fun too. Originally I was going to cast Osaka as Orko, but then I found the perfect Osaka Sorceress clip and had to use Christmas Oto-san instead. He is the mascot of the series anyway. Kimura as the evil Skeletor is another casting I consider hilarious. ^^
  
  I always want to try something new with each video. This time the blue backgrounds for credits and Man-at-Arms' powerballs provided the reason to learn the basic use of particleIllusion. I hadn't needed it before, but now it was just the right program for the task. It can do some surprisingly cool stuff.
  
  There were a few technical problems. First of all, I didn't have DVD-quality audio for the project when I started editing, so I had to edit with a WAV converted from MP3. He-Man Vol. 1 I had ordered from the summer sale of Play.com arrived one day after I had finished the video. It took a while to line up the ripped audio with the version I had been using for editing, but with the help of Audacity I managed. I thought about using the unmodified 192kbps DD 2.0 audio to get maximum quality, but decided that it would have been too much hassle.
  
  A more serious problem arised when I noticed that Vegas 6.0b couldn't properly import the 23.976 fps AVIs I had made in After Effects. There were shifted frames and jerky motion. That meant I had to re-time everything and re-render to PNG sequences. Fortunately it wasn't more than 1001 still images. I strongly suspect if I had edited in 24 fps timebase I wouldn't have had to go through this. My regular source footage was probably also fux0red, but at least it isn't noticeable. The guys over at Creative Cow forums claimed that the issue was caused by other applications not being as exact with the framerate as Vegas. I'm not sure if I should believe that.
  
  If you think the audio sounds a little high pitched, you're probably right. The DVD I ripped the song from was sped up PAL. I was going to get the US version, but the information I got from He-Man.Org forums made me change my mind. Apparently, years ago the company that owns the rights to He-Man decided that there was no market outside Europe. So they converted all their masters to PAL and threw the originals away. ;_; The producers of the R1 DVDs tried to correct the pitch, but the results weren't very good and they decided to keep it as it was. Thus both European and American releases have the same speedup. I didn't want to try correcting the audio, if even professionals couldn't get it right.
  
  I tried to match the original opening whenever I could. If you're not familiar with He-Man and want to see the unbutchered intro, you can stream it here. Please ignore the last line about the evil masters of the universe. That version of the audio never aired.
  
  Playback: ffdshow & MatroskaSplitter or VLC.