Culture Japan / VividBlaze Piano Melodies Series

Hey everyone! I would like to present my Culture Japan / VividBlaze Piano Melodies Series, the 21st video I made as part of my PMS video project on YouTube. This time I played the basic melodies from Culture Japan, Danny Choo's TV series about Japanese Culture. This video as already been out for about a week and a half and the positive reception I'm getting from it is more than I expected. I was actually surprised that even VividBlaze themselves commented on my video and liked my Coolmikeol Facebook page. I feel very accomplished that all my effort to make this video has reached the eyes and ears of the people who created the music that I do for my Piano Melodies Series video project.

Some background on my Piano Melodies Series:

Started in 2009 while playing and experimenting on playing piano while taking a basic piano class for GE requirements in college, I found that with my skill for playing by ear and love for music, anime songs included, I decided to record myself playing the basic melodies of songs that I felt like playing when I had time to. Ever since then, the reception from viewers has been very positive and with that as motivation, I decided to make these piano videos into a series a videos I now call my Piano Melodies Series which compile music from a related series into one video for others to watch and hopefully like and learn from. I know that I'm not very good at piano, but I enjoy playing it for fun and as a stress reliever from everyday life. I hope to run this series as long as I have fans, time, and ideas for future piano videos to make.

My YouTube Channel: Coolmikeol
Piano Melodies Series playlist: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5758FAB02056C6EF

This video was created using Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5, my first time using such a higher end video editing software. For my previous Piano Melodies Series videos, I used the simple default Windows editing software Windows Movie Maker. I wanted to make this PMS video unique from the ones I've made before, I wanted to add the opening of Culture Japan to play parallel to me playing the melody of "Sukirai". To make sure there was no chance of copyright infringement, I e-mailed the director himself of Culture Japan aka Danny Choo to ask for permission to use the opening sequence of Culture Japan that I received from a Torrent that was shared on Facebook by Danny himself. I got the permission and onward went with the editing.

As mentioned before, this was my first time using Adobe Premiere Pro, so it took a while to figure out how it worked. As I've worked with other lower end video editing softwares before, I knew the basics at least for how the interface worked in Premiere, but still there was some things that took time to figure out, the main thing was input and output of video resolutions for maximum quality. Unfortunately since my piano videos had a mere resolution of only 640x480, it was hard to make a decent video to post on YouTube. I always try to upload on the 5th of every month for my Piano Melodies Series videos, but due to the technical difficulties of figuring out how to output good quality with the small resolution videos I had, I had to upload a day late to the 6th of January.

In the end I had a PMS video that I felt was the best I could make with the time span and resources I had to edit it. In the future I'll need to use my Canon Rebel T3 for better resolution videos than what I used before, my now broken Canon Powershot SD1100 IS. The whole process for making this video was a learning experience that I believe helps me to build skills for the future.

Visit my Facebook page (Coolmikeolntwk) for updates regarding the projects I'm doing which include my PMS videos, Let's Play videos, and other news.

Also visit my blog @ Topic "Otaku" for my posts about my local J-Pop events and anime reviews.