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99% - GX Season 2 Opening: “Ambitions->Dashed Hopes” ft. Earlier Napoleon (WIP)

poor chronos

Alright, finally finished this scene up! After *checks notes* nearly three weeks of editing, lol.  So, following up on the first WIP with Pharaoh crawling onto Chronos’s desk, here’s the next scene I’ve managed to get textless and then translated–and it was a doozy.  

Doing it for the V1 of this scene wasn’t too bad; once I replicated the design of the placard’s translation as edited in the Pharaoh scene over the course of the 8-9 frames it’s onscreen for, it was just a matter of repainting Chronos in Photoshop to wipe out the name as it slides in, then masking out Chronos in Sony Vegas in order to recreate the fade from the chair to his deck behind him–this after I borrowed a deck shot from elsewhere in the OP to get the color background over the name, then made a proxy for Limiter Removal and Antique Gear Drill to cover up the name in those spots.  Then I added in the name translation I made early on and recreated the slide-in to finish the clip.  You can see the end result in action in Gifs #2 and #3!

Now, getting the V2 scene textless was the harder task–mainly on account of having to deal with both the lyrics and the name, but also because for some reason, as they did with the Pharaoh scene, they cropped the shot for the V2 so I couldn’t just reuse some of the edits I’d just made.  

First, once I redid the placard translation, I added an extra crossout, and then once in Vegas had to manipulate the table foreground to cover up the lyrics; I also masked in Chronos’s fingers on the placard to restore some lost detail.  Then, I worked with the 30 frames of Chronos moping to repaint him and his fingers, but for the frames where the name was starting to come in and the deck fade started, I only focused on repainting Chronos–this was because I later went in and masked Chronos himself out because I was recreating the chair-to-deck fade.  To do this fade, I had to repaint the chair and window over Chronos so he wasn’t in the shot, and then I had to recreate Chronos’s deck, which involved creating proxies for each card shown and replacing them, while also adding in the empty background space next to Limiter Removal; the only issue was there was one Spell behind Chronos that I couldn’t make out to Antique Gear’s right (the Wikia claims it might’ve been Antique Gear Tank but he doesn’t use it until episode 69, and the top-left part of the art we can see in V1 doesn’t match up), so I put a second Antique Gear Drill there.  Likewise, I couldn’t tell what Earth Antique Gear was to Magnet Circle LV2′s left, so I put a second Antique Gear Golem there–both cards are barely visible as Chronos covers them up.  I also did try to make the proxies as close to Series 4 format (the card layout at the time) as I could with the template I’d downloaded, but I didn’t get it perfectly.  Once that fade was recreated, I masked Chronos out as I noted above, added the name translation I’d created early on for V2, copied over the masking keyframes, and the translated version was all done!

Finally, since I want to release a lyric-textless version of the V2 that we never got, I kept many of the frame edits I made for the full textless video, but masked in the Japanese footage to keep the JP name slide-in; the only issue was residual kana from the lyrics showing up in a few spots near the bottom of the name box, so I just took those frames into Photoshop and cleaned them up, reinserted them, and got the JP textless version finished! You can see the end results in Gifs #4-6 (4: JP textless; 5: translated; 6: full textless)!

Photos 7 and 8 show two stills to show off the coverup I did on the name in V1, while the last compilation photo shows it off on V2 with what’s probably my favorite Chronos frame there haha.

I also added a gif of the Napoleon name scene at the end since I noticed I hadn’t shown it off yet; it was probably easier than these two since I only had to focus on repainting Chronos’s torso, lol.

Overall, I’m happy with how well this finally came out! Now that I’ve done the two hardest edits in the OP, I’ll backtrack and work on translating the names starting with Judai, which should be a bit more of a walk in the park.