[TUTORIAL] Good way to start off your editing.

So here's something I thought up while I had free time, which seems to be a lot now that my school closed down, and can completely do. I'm going to offer up a few tutorials to post around for people to look at to get a glimpse into how I personally prefer to start my editing process. So let's get into this shall we?


Bust out your MP3 player and have a seat, or go for a walk. Whatever sparks your creative imagination, go do it. If you get creative while getting a lecture or at school, jot down random ideas that come to your mind. Picture the scenes in your head as to how you would edit them together and the song that would roll with it. Picture the beats and craft out the idea in your mind. If you have spare time then you should definitely roll with the idea.

Got your ideas down? Great! Now we need to put the scenes together. Oh shoot, you don't have Sony Vegas/Adobe After Effects. Now how are you gonna make an AMV? Heck you don't even have clips! Well don't fret. Windows has a built in program called Windows Movie Maker and Mac has it's own movie program called iMovie. Don't have it in Vista/Windows 7? Go to msn.com and download the messenger, it'll download an entire essentials pack which you can choose what to install which comes with WMM. Hey you've got Vegas? Awesome. Clips too? Even better! Skip the next section and go down to Part Three. (Or take a peek if you don't have certain clips and want some )


The clips you're gonna want are gonna be simple to find! Well, that's what I thought. But they weren't. Luckily you have me and the rest of the AMV Maker Army. We did the scouting for you! Here's some ideas you'll want to follow to find your clips! (P.S. I've got a copy of almost everything I've posted here, so I'll always get you alternates.)

Blue Laguna: Your #1 source for Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy, and other fantasy RPG related cutscenes.
Jaryth.net: A good site to download Crisis Core cutscenes that took me forever to find.
Devil's Lair: Another great site for Devil May Cry cutscenes. Although the webmaster is a little stingy with downloads. I'll try and find an alternate source.
VDownloader: A great, free, tool to download youtube videos.
KeepHD.com: A website that lets you download videos from youtube that are HD. And they RETAIN HD quality.

Whew! Got your clips! Now let's get to combining the clips!


Now then, open up your selected video editor of choice. We're about to prepare to cook up a nice delicious AMV meal. Start sculpting your idea to life! You've got one track for audio and video for WMM users, I don't know about iMovie 'cause I don't use it. Use the track well and transitions help too! Good luck! I can't offer much advice due to WMM's lack of creative ability due to it only supposed to be used for family made movies but perhaps there's another tutorial that can help.

For those of you with Sony Vegas, here's how I like to start things off: Four tracks, two audio and two video. Why? I'll tell you. The video and audio track in the middle is for the cutscene and flow of the AMV while the first audio track is for the speech that comes with the cutscene itself so I can use it to my bidding. The lowest audio track is for the song and the top-most video track is in case I want to mask. Then I add more as I go along. Also if you want to do a watermark you should have another video track with a text track that stretches across your AMV. Make sure it has your watermark on it!

Alright now you've probably got your project done right? For WMM, go ahead and save it as a movie file and save the project first! For Vegas and After effects users, you're probably still touching up effects and trying to figure out which format to save in right? Have no fear, we of the AMV Maker Army are still here! We'd be happy to share our fast saving formats but still stupendous quality. Honestly myself? I stick with normal WMV format, and even though it's slow I usually kill every other program and leave my computer running for a while so it renders at full capacity.

So now you're done! You've got your awesome AMV, and you're willing to upload it to the world. Don't think it's so good? Don't worry! Upload it anyways. Do you know how some of us got as good as we are? By uploading and perfecting ourselves. Even though if you ask us, none of us think we're all that great. =P So go ahead! Upload it and tag it, and let's all fight against Youtube's improper calling for on audio tracks. =]