[!! V.3 RELEASED !!] DDRMAX-Extreme Videos Recreation Project 2013-2022

There are 243/627 official videos (and 40 custom ones) available for download.




The next update, 3.1 [release date unknown for now] will have these videos:

fire5, lava1, snow4, text22

Updates for beads2, disco2, ribbon1, star3, tunnel1, tunnel4, virus1, wheel7, wheel8

This is a project I've been running for 9 years. The goal is simple: To remake all 627 of the weird, but charming background videos used during DDRMAX, DDRMAX2, Euromix2, EXTREME, and FUSION in HD. Or at least as many as possible.

These are animations I, and so many other people like, but they are all trapped in low quality, dated resolutions of 304x176 with a lot of JPEG artifacts. As of now, many artificial intelligence upscalers have came out, but they don't always fix the videos.

The only real solution to get sharp 1920x1080s copies would be to manually replicate all of them from the ground up... and try to get them to match as closely as possible. This is the crazy role I've taken on. Since 2013, making these been teaching me a lot of graphic designing principles, and I've also learned what the programs I use excel at, or their weaknesses/limitations, and how to combine their advantages to get the best results.

This in and of itself is a crazy feat... but there's EVEN MORE I add on top of it. I don't just remake the animations in 1920x1080. I actually DOUBLE their framerate to a whopping 60fps (...for MOST of them) and extend their visible frame, making them extremely flexible for all sorts of StepMania themes.


Requests backlog




More details;

The programs I mainly use...

Anime Studio Pro 9.0: A 2D animation program with limited 3D capabilities. This is what I use for cartoony, or most of the 2D videos.

Blender 2.67: An open source 3D animation program that has way more features than I would ever need. This handles pretty much anything that's 3D and it has insane compositing capabilities. I guess you could call this the flagship program of this project.

Paint.NET: A picture drawing/editing software that, despite being simple, has proved to be more useful than one would think.

Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD 11.0: A video editing software. I use this for some animation, effects, and to encode all of the videos. So technically it's used for all of the videos, but it only actually contributed to about a third of them, content wise.

There are also a few other miscellaneous programs that contributed, mostly from other people's contributions such as PhotoImpact, Adobe Illustrator, and GAIA-CG AI.

I have two versions of the videos. 800x600 .avis, for older computer/StepMania versions, and 1920x1080 .mp4s, for newer computers/StepMania versions. The .avis are specifically designed to be perfectly compatible with beware's 2013 video pack. All of the framerates, names, and cuts are copied exactly, except for two videos which have a doubled (ferriswheel1) or halved (lines4) framerate, both of which still have the exact duration as their original counterparts.

The .avis are encoded with the Xvid MPEG-4 Codec. They use the Profile @ Level MPEG4 SP @ L0, the "Single pass" encoding type, and the target quantizer of 5.00.

The .mp4s are rendered with Vegas Movie Studio's MainConcept AVC/AAC codec. The bit rates vary from 50,000,000 to 15,000,000. One of my goals with the next big release, 4.0, WAY in the future, is to streamline them more and reduce bigger bitrates on videos.

Accuracy cannot be guaranteed, some of the videos are really hard, if not impossible to get just right. I genuinely try as much as I can, though, I hope you enjoy it!


Feel free to use these movies, but please give credit. And let me know if you are, since I'm always interested to see my stuff passed around. These can be in your own StepMania builds, in your own edited video sequences, even in the backgrounds for videos that have nothing to do with DDR.

Really, my only rule is that you shouldn't use these in any commercial projects. Don't use them to generate money: Not only did I spend hundreds of hours on these, but the last thing I want is to get into a legal mess with Konami.

Special thanks to beware, AeronPeryton, and pkgingo for the official videos. Also thanks to Scrap Rabbit, silverdragon756, Air12567, midone, Mike280, TikalFan9000, and flashgear for a bunch of other help on the project and upscales/fonts that helped some of the videos be as good as they are.

Do you have previews? I want to see what they look like before downloading.

I put a video together with most of them. It will be uploaded soon enough.

Very nice. I like them a lot!

Haha, thanks. The one I'm most proud of is virus1.

I wasn't sure if you would be back. I am rooting for you to continue to innovate Stepmania.

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Thanks. The videos are fully compatible. I did a brief test with Extreme's SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW (the only script that can be made ATM) and they work.

I like it. But, are those compatible with Stepmania 5?

I don't know. I don't have Stepmania 5, I've always been used to 3.9.

2018: Yes, they are. Don't worry.

I remember when I had Stepmania 4, when I had the beware 2005 videos, the background videos glitched (they were fuzzy) and after one full loop, they stopped working altogether.



Here is an example of a BG movie made with blender, disco1. All you need to do is learn how to do these two tutorials and everything you need to know to use blender falls into place. The image sequence texture feature is the key to creating the CGI DDRMAX2 movies.

I haven't posted anything for a while, but I wasn't standing still (for most of the days, anyway). I have now completed one full BGscript, STAY, since Kaliedoscope5 and Rotation3 are newly introduced in V.1.1. Here is a video of the 5 videos the song uses in action in StepMania (with beware's extreme simulation).




Pack V.1.1 has been released. Download it here. It's not so many videos, only 13, but at least it's something.

There are 10 new videos. Circle2, Circle8, Heart3, Kaliedoscope5, Kangaroo1, Rotation3, Star1, Text2, Text30, ad Wheel6.

There are also 3 more videos, Kaliedoscope12, Pentagon1, and Text12. If you downloaded V.1, please replace those with the new ones. Animation errors are fixed (Kaliedoscope12 looks so much better now).

Any reverse counterparts or subclips in beware's pack are included, of course.

I have a bunch of work in progress movies right now, and I want at least 1/3rd/half of these to be in V.1.2.
Here's what I know on the top of my head;

Cube3; This is the light-up cubes.

Cube10-Text21-Cube6-Text19a; The aquamarine cubes movie.

Cube12; This one was supposed to be in the pack, but due to "reflection" glitches, it is not. I didn't have time to re-render it, so it didn't make it, but it surely will in V.1.2

Disco1 (Blender); The disco thingy with kissable firework... thingies. It's an interesting one.

Disco2; The turntable gears.

Fabric1-Kaliedoscope8 (Blender); I'm improving the texture on these movies.

Kaliedoscope10 (Blender); The hexagon prism kaliedoscope.

Kaliedoscope11 (Blender); The rotating kaleidoscope cylinders.

Kaliedoscope13 (Blender); The rotating kaleidoscope rings.

Letters1; Letters that change rapidly.

Light2; The light cube related to cube3. Halfway there.

Light11-Circle10-Light10; Light tunnel.

Pills3 (Blender); The blue wavy striped pills. I need to improve the texture and add the remaining pill groups.

Spikes1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12; More spikes movies. These ones fall into place after you get the two rotations done, and at least half of these should be in the next pack.

Spiral1; The glowing spirals.

Square4; The blue blocks.

Square5; Long movie, colorful squares.

Text9; Infamous incorrect grammar text "are you enjoy?".

Text11; The purple "ORIGINAL STEP" text.

Text31; Rings8 with the text "Do you feel dizzy?". I'm still figuring out a way to get the text to work.

Tunnel1 (Blender); Pink pixel bubbles.

Tunnel2 (Blender); The void tunnel. The texture isn't being mapped properly and I can't see what it really looks like. :/

TV1; The dancing TVs.

Wheel2; Gears, related to Timer1. I made, as an easter egg, the gears as a pattern of a T-Shirt of an anthropomorphic Shinx character. But that background is still an open issue.

Fabric2 is deprecated. I made it because of an annoyance with Fabric1, that didn't smoothly loop (example: IT'S RAINING MEN), so I created Fabric2, a version of Fabric1 that smoothly loops (320 frames, the black lines rotate 1440 degrees while the texture pingpongs), but it's causing confusion. If I did this with Fabric1, Fabric1r wouldn't work correctly and more confusion would be caused, so Fabric2 is done with. Fabric1 will be a pingpong movie (in V.1.2, of course) and will be similar in natue to tunnel2. I am still including Fabric2 in the pack, though, but it should be avoided entirely.

My main goal, since they are my personal favorites, is to make all 87 of the CGI DDRMAX2 movies in the DDRMAX2 licenses. They personally have potential to them, it's such a shame Konami prefers supernova dancers and dance stages, and other "more DDR" stuff than these. :/ But yeah, it will be an accomplishment if I get all, but of course I won't stop until I get all 600, unless I get bored of it.

Anyway, I have 61 more to go, along with some fixes to ones I'm not pleased with (lecoughTunnel5...). I posted a .txt file stating how I could make those, but some are very hard (example: kaliedoscope14, spiral2, ribbon2, fireworks4, etc.).

Download it here. I want 5-10 of these movies to be in pack V.1.2. It also covers some easter eggs.

I've downloaded another compressor that seems to compress videos (slightly) more efficiently.

I've ran text13 (2.87 MB... no. just no.) through it, and it's so much better, at 1.74 MB. That's smaller than the official text13.

I'm currently experimenting with other videos with steep sizes, and, if I'm convinced the new compressor is better, I will release BETA V.2 early. The former compressor was Xvid MPEG-4 Codec, the latter is DivX 6.9.2 Codec.

Edit: Not very good. The contrast is lossy. :/ That won't work.

Edit: Another issue; I ran kaliedoscope8 through it and I can't get it to render at 32.323. It's as if there is a limit... It can only be at 30 fps, but I can't do this because it would create the same problem that make videos like amoeba4 and ribbon2 look wrong (dropped frames), and, to respect beware, I want this pack to be fully compatible with his 2013/2005 pack, and rendering videos at the full 80/160/320 frames at 30fps would break compatibility. DivX 6.9.2 is a no go.

After many renders with some videos, I've determined that around 90% of movies made with Blender (Kaliedoscope12, Pills3, Rotation1, Virus1, etc.) are going to be at least 1 MB if I want the quality of videos to be good (no fuzzyness, good contrast, etc.). There are probably (estimated) 50 movies in the Max2 License era that will be made in Blender, so it shouldn't be much of a burden.

With that said, Pack V.1.2 will be out next saturday (November 23rd and not 20, November D:). I want to finish as many WIP movies as possible. I got Pills3 off the list (it's process was spread out over a month because of other movies) as well as Kaliedoscope10, which only took 9 days, and now I've backflagged Square4 and Light2 (this pesky movie is still being worked on after 45 days. Here is what I have so far (on the very top of my head);



So yeah. Also, you are free to request movies and I will see if I can make the movie in the upcoming pack version.

One more thing, and then this will be the last notification before the next release. In Pack V.2, the quality of ALL of the movies will be set to 6 (currently it is randomized, from 5 to 5.5 to 5.73 (oh yes) 6, 6.23 (my birthday), 6.66 (i went there), 7, 7.5, 8, 8.5, and so on. the maximum is 11.). So movies may become bigger significantly, unless I can find a better codec. Logically, it should be accepted the movies will be bigger since they are 700x394 in 480p, which is natural, though I DO want to get the sizes as close to beware's 2013 pack.


Yup. Turns out that the Divx 6.9.2 works after all. I was testing different codecs on virus1, and found an efficient way to use the codec. I successfully rendered virus1 with the quality of the original. At 700 KB. I rendered all of my current videos into .wmv format (which is the gift you guys will receive, since they are the full HD versions) which slightly compresses them. I'm going to re-render all of the videos at the current settings, and if I'm satisfied, pack V.2 might be released early after all. I ran a brand new video, bear3, through the compressor and that framerate restriction has been worked around.

...

Yep. I'm convinced. Cube11 has been rendered and is 751 KB, which is smaller than the original Cube11 and the Cube11 in Pack V.1. And it was rendered at 800x450. Bubble2, a ridiculously huge movie, was also ran through and is also much better. Same with text13 (some quality has been lost, though...).

I'm re-rendering all of movies in these settings, pack V.1.2 will be released December 10th.

Edit: No, I'm not impressed. I'm ASTOUNDED. I rendered Cube11 at 60fps, and this is unbelievable; You'd expect the file to be 1 MB-2 MB, but it's 836 KB! How did I not figure this out earlier? But I can't get it higher than 60 fps. Kaliedoscope8 will have dropped frames. On top of that, it's quite big at 60fps... So they are still 30fps/their original framerate. But still, I'm impressed with Divx 6.9.2 much more than I thought.

Yo, Cuzco, you think you can give a hand at iidx videos? I think that step could help you out on learning some new techniques.
I know you're trying to recreate these and all, but they feel so outdated in graphic value that it would be neat to try to move on, develop a different approach, and do what is currently being thrown out there.

Just throwing it out there. Don't eat me.
Keep it up.

To be honest, I never played IIDX, only DDR. I can ask for it for christmas to see how it plays.

The reason why I like these movies so much is because I got DDR EXTREME for christmas in 2008, and, being a child, the movies somewhat distracted me. They looked so...unique. My favorite ones were the DROP OUT FROM NONSTOP MEGAMIX movies, which led me to liking the rest of those kind of movies (the DDRMAX2 license area).

IIDX videos seem more complex, and more...visualizationy. Dunno how I could pull those ones off.

Practice practice practice...

You got time on your hands. You got inspiration.

(Update March 17th, at the bottom...)

I want to do the DDRMAX-EXTREME movies because they are more simpler (like all of the DDRMAX text movies, the EXTREME Background animation movies, etc.). It's also teaching me how to use blender for the first time.




Out of nowhere, I made this brand new visualization that I thought I'd never make for months. Kaleidoscope14. This is because I didn't include the little pixel thingys, but the visualization still looks great. I have 36 out of 87 (51 left) Max2 license movies done. Who knows when I'll get all 87 of them looking as beautiful as the originals?

So my stragedy here; Make a low quality (somewhat simplistic, only a few key areas) version of the textures, map them into blender, then slowly improve them. That's the key to making them.

My textures are known for being flat and vectorized, which makes my visualizations stand out from the originals, which have feathery and blendy textures.


Pack V.2 has been released. Download it here.

As said in an earlier post, I downloaded a new codec that I originally wasn't satisfied with, but after being impressed that 3D movies (usually the biggest with the old codec) can be rendered under 800 KB at 60fps with the original size (800x450) and 360p, which is what I aim for (maybe 480p), so all of the videos were re-rendered (with their frame-rate being adjusted accordingly, like bear3, bear4, text26, kaliedoscope8, etc.), so Pack V.2 is released early.

Some new masterpieces with Blender are introduced (Kaliedoscope8, Kaliedoscope14, Disco3, Disco4, Tunnel4, so on...), as well as a little more movies that go with others.

Ring6 is missing from the pack. I aimed for an improvement with it (I also tinkered it's "buddies", Wheel7 and Ring9 (I'm still figuring out how to get that pesky rounded sphere Star3 uses...)), which was to change the perspective, and 12 rings, not 8. But the original has 3 rings pass the camera, not 2 or 4, so I went for 240 frames. I rendered it, but it took too long and would finish slightly after I've had gone to sleep at the time. This dented the only HD copy, so I couldn't use it in the mass .wmv rendering (I standardize on rendering the .mov/image sequence to .wmv, then render the .wmv to .avi). I got very caught up in tons of movies and I wanted to squeeze one more movie in the pack after getting Tunnel4 finished, and remembered this movie, so I went for using a group layer with all 12 rings that rotates 90 degrees, which would fix the 240 frames to 160, and I rendered it, waited 2 hours, and all I got was a glitched movie with only 1 frame, so I just threw together Heart4 instead.

Here is a list of all of the work in progress movies I have (that I can recall), and I'm aiming for at least 1/3rd (preferably half) of these to be in Pack V.2.1.



I have some of the movies that haven't been worked on for over a month + the movies that have rendering issues + Tunnel5, Wheel2 (screw it, I'll make the background entirely by how I see it), Tunnel1, Smoke1, Light7, Cross2, Square4, and Square5 scheduled. First, I stayed up very late, so sleep.



It's not all of them, but I'm not in the mood to make a video with all 82 of them. Later, though.

A new note about the videos.

Since I strangely like forward videos much than pingpong ones (I prefer to use pingpong on any movie at my choice, not be limited to some rough looping ones that are forced pingpong like Amoeba1), some videos play forward instead of pingpong. There are two types of these videos. Such movies have a counterpart with a "pp" at the end (example; Kaliedoscope4pp) if you want to preserve the pingpong movies (stash the non-pingpong ones somewhere else and remove the pp from the pingpong ones).

Type 1; Kaliedoscope4, Cross2, and Candy1 are snapped to play forward at 80 (160 in 60 fps) frames. This is entirely symetrical with the original videos, so if, say, a Kaliedoscope4r was introduced in beware's pack, the non-pre-pingpong one is still symetrical with the original pre-pingpong one.

Type 2; Kaliedoscope8 is 160 (320 in 60 fps) frames long without playing pingpong. Fabric1's (the video with the same texture) raw source is as well, but is instead "Fabric2" due to confusion. Such videos should only be used for scripts that use my videos and not the official ones, because if a (example) Kaliedoscope8r was introduced, it wouldn't play pingpong in 80 frames, but rather be in similar nature of Amoeba4's usage in HYSTERIA and END OF THE CENTURY (rough transitions between forward in reverse), which would look wrong. The problem could be solved in Kaliedoscope8r was actually the second half of Kaliedoscope8, but then that would block the actual Kaliedoscope8r at 160 frames, and it would have to be under a different name, and it's very confusing, so it is preferred to use the 80 frames pingpong version for BG scripts for these videos.


I have decided to continue this project. I stopped this because I needed to focus on another animation project I have that I prioritize in the most, for the much larger fan-base on it, but right now, I don't have enough voice lines to make any scenes (I still need lines for 11 characters), so that can't happen. And I'm bored, so yeah. I will work on this every Monday and Tuesday. It's unusual, but that's how my nature is. Anyway... pack V.2.1 will be released on the 15th of May in the Jungle of Nool, in the heat of the day, in the cool of the pool.... I want to make the CGI DDRMAX2 movies for a music video for one of the DDRMAX2 licenses in this high-tech future world containing loads of 3D graphic cameos. :P



Hi guys. This is my newest masterpiece, I haven't really TRIED to go deep into the product, but I managed to pull this one off. You'll definitely be seeing it in pack V.2.1. :P So yeah, I have NEARLY all of the cyber movies down (Disco2, Disco3, Cyber1, Cyber2). Only Disco1 is left (but that one has LOTS and LOTS of complexity, and armature issies).

Just as well, I've found out something; .mp4 renders are much easier to playback and (slightly) smaller than .wmv, which is what I'm doing for HD 1920x1080 60 fps videos from now on. So I'll have to go through the pain of re-compressing each video, but once I do, I'll release the super-HD pack of videos.

This shows some serious improvement in some of the videos such as bear4.avi This release ought to keep us entertained for awhile.

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Thank you. :3 I can easily mimic those kind of 2D videos (3D ones are a bit more...noticably different). They somewhat can get boring, though... Which is why I like to try my hand at complex ones like this.



And I still didn't finish it after 6 months... c': I want my mommy...

But seriously, this is all that I have of that. You at least get to see an idea of that video.



The thing I can't get most of all are the "holes" in the bubbles. And the pixels don't have lines moving from them, they just change color flatly. Those are things I MUST get down. But other than that, the movie would look accurate. What I did for the texture was just made multiple shades of pink everywhere with like 12 changing combinations and tried as much as possible not to have any of the original 144 squares touching each other. Here's the texture itself;

Feel free to steal it if you don't want me being the most coolest one in the DDR visualizations re-making territory and want to start competition and use it as a guide for your own Tunnel1.

Only 15 colors are actually used (that change accordingly). I actually had to run the pixels as a single image, render it in Sony Vegas as a .mov file, and then put it in Anime Studio (I use it to make every single texture on these type of movies) and export a video with the .mov file x9. This texture was hugely frustrating.

Also, just for the occasion;



Lol.


Let's check up on my main goal, making these types of movies (my favorite ones).



So with that, I'm already halfway through, with 43/87. Only another half left, and then I will be satisfied. Completely. And then it will help me get more experience for making other movies, like Star3 or Ring4, so making these abstract animations REALLY help me try my hand at the animation career, for backgrounds and other stuff. (I have my own way of making animated characters, see this; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELSaw7xCi1I ) I've managed to figure out tricks for Candy1 and Kaliedoscope5, so I'll probably ALWAYS find a way to make all 87. Also, I would like to remind anyone looking at this thread; If you want a video to be in the pack sooner, you can ask for it. Let's say someone asked about circle8, and I would state how hard/easy it looks, then try to do it. For very complex movies, it may take a very long time. Otherwise, the requested movies should be in the next update. You can even request a set of movies (example; For a song) and I will attempt to fulfill the list of movies used in the song as much as possible.



My newest masterpiece. I made the texture with very VERY careful examination (especially the circle blob), then the (slightly inaccurate) wavy 70's like texture on the spheres, then I figured out the balls are really in a checkerboard pattern and not randomly placed. So making this was slightly easier than I thought. Kon's name appears on the floor because...


"Bouncing Balls" is actually a pretty nice name and makes sense, so I followed him. The balls bouncing on Kon's name represents him getting a hard time getting an AAA when this movie is reached due to the song drifting. Lol.

Anyway, Cross1 is definitely being in pack V.2.1 as well, since both textures are shared on both movies, on the background or objects.

AWESOME D:

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It is time.



I assure you guys, releasing the next pack WON'T take 5 months. It will take about 2 weeks.

So yeah, it's only 18 videos after 5 months? I'd like to remind you guys I didn't work on the pack at all during January 2014-March 2014 to enforce effort on another animation project. And I had some slight laziness. To make up for it, I inserted some more stuff; I actually decided to make 640x640 movies of all 20 textures I made (18 are official). Also, as I said, there are some movies that are longer than they are in the normal group of movies, or movies that are clipped to 80 frames looping instead of pingpong. So, accordingly, "Alternates" and "Textures" folders were placed in the pack. If you have any questions, just tell me.

So 2.1 must add to version 2. Do I need any earlier versions?

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No. V.2 is the earliest you need. As I said, V.1 and V.1.1 has 700x394, but with a new so-much-better codec, I updated every single video to be 800x450 in V.2. You do not need versions before that (unless you want to look at my earliest work).

Thought so. I have only kept version 2.

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