Great stuff!
Whew... what a lot of work! (...I say, having recently completed a 20-minute video culled from about 2 hours of footage shot during a 1-week Costa Rica vacation. That took me quite a bit of time, and except for adding Titles and a few fancy transitions and a musical soundtrack, I didn't do all that much hi-tech stuff on the project.)
I found especially impressive the dancing scenes, where you got the dancers to be moving in time with your musical beat. (or DID you do that? I remember reading that the brain tends to see synchronizations between audio/visual rhythmic events even if they're not "really" in synch. So I'm curious... did you in fact align the dancer's movements with your musical beat, or is my brain doing that for you?)
Anyway, great work...
Ernie

(see my "fuller" reply already posted).

But BTW... you may already have noticed this, but zipping a wmv file doesn't buy you much. The difference between the zipped and unzipped versions is only about 200KBytes, out of over 18Megabytes (a space-savings of about 1.1 percent)
Ernie

Thanks for the replies :) Yeah, it was over in the Philippines. Around Manila, Baguio, the Mountain Province area, 100 islands etc. The fireworks were all on new years eve there.

The reason I zipped it was because wmv files start streaming when you click on them. But the file size was too big for that, especially for anyone on a slow connection. So having it in a zip means it can only be downloaded.

The first dance section took about a day, but not the whole day. They were dancing to something a fair bit faster. Madison Avenue, if you've heard of that group? So I worked out what the tempo of that was, the bar length of when they were dancing, and then stretched it. It kind of worked, except they weren't dancing in time properly to begin with! So I just chopped it all according to arm movement and so on.

The last dance part with the girls took quite a while aswell. I didn't shoot enough footage to fill 4 bars, so I had to chop that aswell and extend it by using the same chops more than once.

The sound fx on there are all from the video's audio tracks. That took ages. I'd got through the track, chop it wherever there was a peak and then stretch those parts the length between drum hits. Sometimes adjusting the velocity aswell.

Looks cool, sounds great!

Wow, even the boss likes it :)

If anyone's interested, I've uploaded an Mp3 of it with just the drums, bass and fx. So you can hear what Vegas does to sounds when they're stretched too far.

The address is: http://www.avene.org/Avene - Hold On - Drums, Bass & FX.mp3

Great editing and it looks great compressed! Can you share the settings you used to compress it to WM8?

I assume you used the wm8eutil utility to do it. I'm curious as to what your bitrate, framerate, buffer, keyframe, and quality settings were. I wish I could make my compressed stuff look as good as that.

Thanks!

Sure. I had the file in the same folder as the encoder. It was just D drive actually. So I just typed D:/ in the dos prompt to find the location. Then I typed in:

wm8eutil -input source.avi -output destination.wmv -v_mode 3 -v_bitrate 520000 -v_width 400 -v_height 320

That's all. Just change the 'source' and 'destination' filenames.

There are a couple of little glitches in the file as it playsback, so I might redo it sometime. I may even increase the audio bit rate as it messed with the sound of the hi hats. To do this, you just need to type something like: -a_setting 128_44_2 at the end of the line. The 128 is the bit rate. So it could be changed to 96, 48 or lower. The sample rate could be changed also to 48, 32, 24 etc.

Avene,
Was your video clip captured as progressive scan or interlaced?
If it was interlaced, what options did you use to deinterlaced it?
Thanks.