Process of putting an AMV together

[IgneousPrime]

Alright, so I get how to basic edit, how to add effects and cool stuff like that, how to encode, compress, uncompress, etc. All is good and well, but I want to ask something you don't find in guides (I think? lol). I want to ask a personal question regarding all of your guy's styles of making an AMV.

How exactly do you guy's start making an AMV? I'm really stuck as to where to begin and by asking you guys these questions, hopefully I can discover my own technique and process.

Do you begin by ripping episodes from a DVD (or downloading it, whatever floats your boat) then uncompressing them all (or using avisynth)? Then bring them all in and start finding which scenes would be good for your particular song and start cutting the episodes into pieces? Or do you do one at a time?

For the editting section, how do you begin? After you have all of the scenes you want, do you start editting it to the music, then adding the effects in later? Say I'm using Premiere Pro and After Effects for my AMV. Do you work with both simultaneously and add the effects in as your AMV progresses?

Sorry for a ton of questions, but I'm really stuck as to how to approach this Any advice or anything would be great Thanks a ton. And sorry if this is in the wrong section

[Orwell]

DVD: Rip, load up series in DGIndex. Scan meticulously while listening to the song. Load up autogenerated avisnyth script into premiere with a few tweaks for aspect ratio, frame rate, etc. Put clips down, then go back and revise the hell out of it, because there's nothing harder than getting started, for me. Harass people with beta's, ignore what they say, then put out a final copy.

Everyone has their own style, do what you want, there's no right way, so on and so forth. After Effects is just that, you do your effects there, then just export it back into premiere, if you can. Or you could be crazy and do it all in AE. As said by... zarxarx? Real men don't need to listen to the audio to make great amvs.

[IgneousPrime]

Thanks for the awesome advice, Orwell, haha. Really appreciate the quick response :O

Anyone have anymore advice? Keep em' coming XD

[Scintilla]

Or you could be crazy and do it all in AE. As said by... zarxarx? Real men don't need to listen to the audio to make great amvs.

[Zarxrax] only pussys need to heard audio when they make amvs
[Zarxrax] real men make amvs without audio
[Scintilla] So what do the real women do?
[Koopiskeva] have secks
[metro] make out with eachother?
[Koopiskeva] with
[Koopiskeva] each other

[IgneousPrime]

What if, I make an AMV with... NO AUDIO.

What does that make me?

But yeah, isn't it hard to edit in AE O.O

[Brad]

Here's my typical process:

1) Get the idea - This almost always starts out with the song for me. I hear a song and start to formulate ideas in terms of where I would cut, what types of scenes I'd use, and then I choose an anime based on that idea (or even better, I'll think of the anime as soon as I hear the song).

2) Rip source - Once I have the idea (both song and anime) I get the DVDs & CD and rip the VOBs from the DVDs and the WAV from the CD.

3) Prepare the VOBs for editing - This process breaks down into running the VOBs through DGIndex to create d2v's (if I'm using a series with multiple discs, I always make a single d2v for the entire DVD), then I make AVS scripts for each d2v. In the AVS script, I deinterlace (if the DVD isn't Progressive to start with), I crop off black borders, and I resize to square pixels (640x480 for 4:3 anime and 848x480 for 16:9 anime). The final step for me is to encode lower quality MJPEGs of that source to edit with. I bring the AVS files into VirtualDubMod and then compress them using the PICVideo Motion-JPEG codec, and usually I'll also apply a 2:1 Reduction filter to lower the resolution by half.

4) Edit the audio - This part doesn't ALWAYS happen, but quite often if I think the song is too long or just has superfluous content that I know I don't want in my video, I will bring it into Audacity and edit it down.

5) Go into Premiere and edit - I bring the WAV file and MJPEG's into Premiere and I edit my video. If I ever need frames from the full quality footage, I either bring the AVS files into VDub and get frames from there, or I will just switch out the MJPEG's for the AVS files and re-open the project in Premiere and get them that way. Then I can take those full quality frames into Photoshop or AE or whatever.

6) Export from Premiere - I switch out my MJPEG files for my AVS files and then I export to full-resolution Huffyuv, making doubly sure that it's set to No Fields for the field options.

7) Encode for distribution - Back in the day, a distro encode typically meant just MPEG-1. Then XviD became the new standard. Nowadays, I always encode to both XviD and x264 (in an MP4 container). For XviD, I bring the Huffyuv into VDub and compress from there (usually bringing the size down to around 640x360 for widescreen), and for x264, I use Zarx264GUI. If it's widescreen (almost always is) I make an AVS file that resizes the Huffyuv to 720x480, then in the GUI I check the 16:9 aspect ratio flag. Encode, and done.

8) Encode for conventions - I make my MPEG-2 encode in TMPGEnc. If it's widescreen, I always add letterboxes manually and encode with a 4:3 aspect ratio flag, since I really don't fully trust con playback to make sure it plays 16:9 flagged video correctly.

9) Upload and announce - I typically always wait to announce a video online until after it's premiered at a convention. But yeah, pretty simple process of adding the Org entry, uploading, then making an announcement thread.

[IgneousPrime]

Hot damn. Thanks a ton for that AtomX. What do you do about effects?

[Orwell]

What if, I make an AMV with... NO AUDIO.

Then... Sucks To Be Yoo.

[BasharOfTheAges]

But yeah, isn't it hard to edit in AE O.O

Quite. Though I usually bug Zarxrax for a few hours every so often when I get stuck - what make it more odd is that I really never met the guy before and it all kinda worked out anyways.

[Brad]

Hot damn. Thanks a ton for that AtomX. What do you do about effects?

Well, when I say "Go into Premiere and edit", that's kind of all-encompassing to "make the video". Now, that can often involve taking sections of the edited video into After Effects (always making sure to render it out using the AVS version of the video instead of the MJPEG) or taking frames into Photoshop to do some masking/rotoscoping. All in all though, I still generally do almost all of my work within Premiere.