The Lost Youtube Video: Sonic X, minus voice acting

I just completed a heist on my own Youtube channel.

Some backstory: before Youtube existed, I cut my teeth in video editing by simply sharing videos files with friends. This was a complicated headache, because it often meant your friends had to have the same video codecs installed on their system that you encoded the video with, otherwise they wouldn't be able to play back the footage.  Nowadays I don't think most people even know what a "codec" is because we all just watch video through Youtube (or something similar).

This was a very early video editing project of mine, from probably around June 2003. The 4KIDS dub of Sonic X had just premiered on the "FoxBox" Saturday morning block, and all my friends were buzzing about the fact 4KIDS had removed the original soundtrack and replaced it with significantly more cheesy "super hero" music. It was awful!

And yet, I had some friends that didn't hate it. During a particularly heated discussion on the nature of bad dialog versus bad music, I set upon trying to prove a point that music is vitally important to the tone of a scene. The end result was the above video, where I took a famous scene from the first episode of Sonic X, and just deleted all the dialog. All that remains is music, which I personally chose.

When Youtube launched in 2005, I finally had a place to put a growing collection of videos that were taking up space on my HDD. One of those was the Sonic X "No Voice Acting" video. I also uploaded a couple other Sonic X videos, including a fan dub clip a friend of mine had made, and a contest video where I created a Toonami-style bumper for Sonic X. 

Years passed.

Possibly around 2008 or 2009, Youtube implemented its copyright strike system, allowing content creators to mark illegally uploaded content and have the offending account punished for breaking the law. And pretty quickly, TMS Entertainment, the animation studio that produced Sonic X, found my channel and issued a copyright strike for two out of three of my videos. This wasn't a Content ID, these were real, scary, dangerous copyright strikes, and I had two. One more and my channel would be terminated without remorse.

I deleted the Toonami video (even though it was safe) and the fan dub, but hesitated when it came to deleting the "No Voice Acting" video. What if, one day, some day, TMS removes that strike? Well, I'd still like the world to see that video.

I even emailed TMS about it. I sent them links. I told them what the video was for. I explained that it was just one scene; it wasn't the entire episode. It was educational, even! I made it to prove an academic point, after all. I'm covered under fair use, technically! I got a response in somewhat broken English. I don't think they knew what I was even referring to, but I got the message well enough: that video wasn't getting restored.

But still... what if? You know, eventually. Stranger things have happened.

And so, it sat in my account, a noose around my neck. Originally, Youtube accounts with copyright strikes didn't have anything serious happen to them, you just had a little thing in your account that said "Hey, you have a copyright strike." As Youtube began adding new features, those of us with strikes didn't get to use the new toys because we were stuck in time out. Videos longer than 11 minutes? Sorry pal, you have a copyright strike. 

Then, one day, the strikes just... vanished. Perhaps enough time had passed that Youtube let me off for good behavior. It had been a good 3-5 years. I got to publish long videos, I got to monetize my channel, and the rest is history.

But what about that Sonic X video? It still couldn't be viewed, and several computer upgrades later, I lost the original file (samspeed.avi). The only copy still around was the one being blocked on my Youtube channel.  

Generally speaking, Youtube doesn't even let you, the creator, touch content that has been striked. Normally, from your video list, you get a drop down menu where you can modify various elements like description, monetization, subtitles, so on and so forth. Striked videos don't get that drop down menu, and attempting to view the video in any context shows you the same thing anyone else would see:

Youtube still keeps it on their servers, of course. It's not deleted unless you delete it. Even though the video had a strike, I have the ability to contest strikes. But doing so is risky. If the copyright holder rejects my request to restore the video, it could re-strike my channel, or worse, result in me having a real, actual lawsuit on my hands. I wanted my video back, but I didn't want to destroy my channel, so I left well enough alone in the hopes that maybe, some day, the video would come back without me having to endanger myself.

Tonight, I uploaded the next episode of Better Late Than Never videogames, and lamented at a particularly ridiculous scenario. Youtube has a system where you can transcribe subtitles for your own videos by watching them in a preview window while you type. The ridiculous part is if you've scheduled a video to premiere, you can't do that -- the window where you'd preview your video to write your captions instead just shows you the countdown to the premiere. 

This is ridiculous because elsewhere in the Youtube editor interface, you can still preview an upload regardless of the video's status.

And just like that, a light bulb went off over my head. If the "Info & Settings" editor has a special video player separate from Youtube's typical player code that ignores a video's status of availability, could that maybe be used to view videos that are otherwise no longer available?

As you can see above, my Sonic X video does not have the drop down menu where I can access the "Info & Settings" editor, but maybe I could open the editor with a clean video, and then simply change the video ID in the URL bar to my Sonic X video and gain access to the editor that way...?

As you may have gathered, it worked! I can't edit the video's title, description, thumbnail, tags, or anything else, because as you can see, it's listed as "Removed" due to a copyright claim. But, most importantly, it gives me a preview window to watch this long lost video. It's right there, for the first time in a decade, or more!

So how do we get it out of there? The easiest answer would be to use Nvidia Shadowplay to record the screen as I played the video back, but that's not good enough, because we'll see a few frames of the Youtube player window when we hit the play button. I want the raw file.

We also can't necessarily throw the video URL at the "Keepvid" website, because Keepvid will see the blocked version of the page. I have to get the file myself, while logged in, through the Settings screen. 

For years, I used a Firefox plugin called "Video Download Helper." A couple years ago Firefox updated its plugin specifications and supposedly hampered Download Helper's ability to scrape pages for download links. It started complaining about needing to install a "Companion App" in order to retain its original functionality. What most don't know is that Download Helper still works perfectly fine, it just moans about this Companion App stuff if you want to grab 60fps or 1080p content via the "ADP" system. But there are usually plenty of options listed that don't require ADP.

Here's an example using my Sonic Mania Plus Competition Mode video: 

As long as you steer clear of the links marked "ADP," it'll download the file just like it always has. It may be 720p at 30fps (or worse), but that's the price you pay. Though, admittedly, Video Download Helper can be finicky in other ways, so in most scenarios, Keepvid is still preferred. But we can't do that here!

Anyway, the solution was easy enough: simply load up the editor page for the contraband video in Firefox and then use Video Download Helper to grab the underlying .mp4 file from the preview window. Roughly 10 years after it was originally lost, and over 16 years since it was originally created to begin with, this video file could be finally been recovered. 

Okay okay okay... but why was all of this worth it?

You may not think so, but this was an incredibly difficult video to make in 2003. This was the same year that the very first version of Adobe Premiere was released, and I want to stress as hard as I possibly can that this was before Youtube existed. For a 21 year old goofing around on his Mom's computer, having extremely expensive, extremely complex professional video editing software installed was near the bottom rung of my priorities at that particular point in time. 

So while a modern, professional video editor will give you a layered timeline view, where you can drag in video and audio clips and move them around to play anywhere, at any time...

Back in 2003, I was using VirtualDub. Which has none of this. At all. In any capacity whatsoever. But most importantly, it cost nothing.

VirtualDub is comparable to having a pair of scissors and using them to cut a physical reel of film. You can't drag and drop files anywhere on the timeline, you can only remove individual frames of video. It was hard to even copy and paste frames between two different instances of VirtualDub, and nearly impossible (at the time) to copy in new frames from non-VirtualDub sources. You had your video, and that one video needed to have all of your frames already in it. 

For the Sonic X video, this wasn't the worst thing. I had a copy of the complete episode (passed around from friends) so it was just a matter of going in and deleting frames, one by one. Any time anyone opened their mouth to say something, delete. Nobody needs to speak, we're just going to have music. That doesn't sound so hard, does it?

But it's only half the story. Less than half, really.

The above video is not only synchronized to the music, at certain points it has custom sound effects synchronized to the action. In addition to it being impossible to freely move sound effects and music on to a timeline layer, VirtualDub is absolutely, unquestionably not a sound editor. It has no sound editing tools at all, in any form. The best you get is the ability to import an external .wav file as your video's audio track and specify a playback offset.

But we can work with that. Can't we?

Audacity already existed by this point, and even by 2003, I think podcasts were probably starting to gain traction. But I didn't need or want Audacity, as I had my own sound editor I was comfortable with: Goldwave.

Back then, Audacity may have been easier to use, given even in 2003, I think it had our precious layered timeline view. But, again, expectations for what a person needs and wants were different in 2003, and for what I used it for, Goldwave was "good enough." (And even now, in 2019, it still continues to be good enough for some of what I do)

Goldwave may not have layers, but it does have very basic sound mixing support, the ability to fade audio in and out, and a handful of effects (low/high pass filters, speed and pitch editing, reverb, flange, etc.)

How does any of this work together? What ensued was a delicate song and dance. VirtualDub lists not only what frame you're currently viewing, but the video's time code. So I'd start chopping out frames in VirtualDub, getting a rough idea of where things were going. Then I'd open Goldwave, and start pasting in music at the time codes provided by Virtual Dub. In VirtualDub, I'd want a song to start at the 58.3 second mark, so I'd go to 58.3 seconds in Goldwave and paste the song in to start there. Then I'd save it out as a .wav file and import it in to VirtualDub and see how it worked.

But it wasn't that easy. For starters, VirtualDub keeps track of all the frames you delete. If you import a .wav file, it will skip the audio for the frames that were deleted (as if you also deleted the audio at the same time as the video frames). What this meant is that any time I made any changes to the video and wanted to see how things aligned with the audio, I had to re-save the file, close it, and then reopen it again. To avoid it turning to absolute blurry compression mush, I had to save it as a raw, uncompressed RGB AVI file. 

You probably can't tell, because the version I embedded at the top of this post is blown up to 1080p, but the original source file was a staggering 240x150 in resolution for this very reason. Fully uncompressed video is comically large. Like, we're talking a simple standard-definition 480p video, uncompressed, maybe a couple minutes long, being multiple gigabytes in size. The tiny postage stamp resolution was an attempt to mitigate that because of the way I had to put this together. And I still think this 4 minute clip ended up being 200-300mb, and we're talking about an era where I think I was on a 30gb HDD. 300mb was kind of a lot of space, especially when shared with other files.

So to break it down, moment-by-moment, here's how things would go:

• I'd chop out some frames I wanted to remove in VirtualDub, and watch the video in total silence, thinking about how it's going to feel with sound.
• I'd save this as an uncompressed video file, named something like "samspeed-a.avi"
• I'd mark down the time code for a specific point of interest and open my audio editor, Goldwave, pasting sounds and music at that specific time code (down to the decimal point). 
• I would then save that audio as something like, "samspeed-a.wav"
• Going back to VirtualDub, I would re-open a fresh copy of "samspeed-a.avi" and import "samspeed-a.wav" as an audio track. 
• I'd then preview the video and see if things lined up with the music in satisfactory way, and if they did, I'd continue happily deleting more frames, and marking down important time codes. Sometimes this even involved deleting frames from shots that didn't need to be trimmed down, just to get something special to match up with the music.
• When I was ready to update the audio, I'd save it to a separate file, this time, something like "samspeed-b.avi." 
• I'd make my changes in Goldwave based on the time codes I'd written down, also saving to a new file (samspeed-b.wav)
• If something in samspeed-b didn't line up the way I'd like, like if I deleted too many frames or whatever, I'd simply revert back to the samspeed-a version and discard all of the changes I made for -b. That meant starting over since the last time I made a major edit, but that's what had to be done. (Occasionally this meant counting out how many individual frames I'd deleted and then making sure to delete one or two fewer frames on the next go-round until I got it right).
• Slowly, frame by individual frame, the video would come together, perfectly timed to the music. As noted in the video description, it took me six hours to edit this 4 minute clip, and I get the feeling I was lowballing that estimate because I didn't want to look like a weirdo. It's possible this simple edit took me closer to 10 or 12 hours.

What that process doesn't cover are the sounds, though. I mainly used Goldwave to make new sound effects by tinkering with and merging sounds from other sources. Mixing, editing, and tinkering with one sound was a process that could take hours. Some of those sounds are "custom" edits I made just for this short, which usually meant having a collection of files open in other Goldwave sub-windows as I fiddled with mixing other sounds together to create something that sounded new (something I'd learned to do after watching a making-of special about Jurassic Park and how they made their dinosaur sounds).

Some of the sounds in particular you hear at the end are from Dragon Ball Z, specifically the Quake 3 mod known as "Bid for Power," but with my own touch added to them. I'm not sure where the sound of the wind came from, but something in me says it's from Jurassic Park: Trespasser, but I honestly don't remember.

Speaking of Dragon Ball, if you want to know the music used in this, I believe...

• The first song, as the super cars are gearing up, is a recreation of a track from the Sonic OVA by Sonic Retro user "Cinossu." In the more recent "Mr. Kingalocious" recreation, it's called "Machinery". 
• The second song, as Sonic is reminiscing, is from Bruce Faulconer's original Dragon Ball Z dub soundtrack, it's called "Buu Anticipates" from the Dragon Ball Z Buu: The Majin Sagas album.
• The third song, as Sonic races the police, is from the F-Zero X Guitar Arrange album, called "Dream Chaser." 
• The final song, as Sonic goes soaring over the city, is another Bruce Faulconer song from Dragon Ball Z, this time "Gohan Powers Up" from The Best of Dragon Ball Z: Volume 3. 

Anyway, that's the story of this dumb video I made going on 20 years ago. Thanks for reading this far, if you did. Sorry it's uploaded to Streamable, I don't dare risk getting another copyright strike anywhere else right now. Since the 240x150 file I got from Youtube is so tiny, I'll probably just upload it as its own file here on Patreon.

That post might only go up for paying donors, but this post right here will remain free because of its historic significance. It took me a decade to get this file back, it just doesn't make sense to put this behind a donation gate. 

(Original resolution MP4 is now up.)