How do you add anime characters into scenes from different animes?

[Dude Jumping]

I've seen some amvs where they seamlessly took elements from one anime (mainly anime characters) and brought them into scenes from different anime. Does anyone know how this is done, or have any resources or tutorial info I can look over?

[l33tmeatwad]

It's called masking and it's one of the most time consuming things in editing, there are plenty of tutorials on YouTube if you search for masking (you can add on AMV to that to get results from AMV specific editors).

[seasons]

This video is 7 years old now but it's the one that finally got me to understand how to do this. The creator does a good job of explaining it slowly, step by step. I don't know what version of After Effects they're using.



Do you edit with Premiere? Vegas? Something else?

[Kionon]

It's also called rotoscoping, and I've done my fair share of it with fairly static overlays, but doing it frame by frame to actually create full on movement is incredibly time consuming and I've never managed more than about 30 seconds of an AMV of it before giving up on it. You basically have to (or I did anyway) cut out characters from the backgrounds frame by frame and drop them in as overlays over a new background also frame by frame. The most rotoscoping I ever did, and it took me a long time, was this one. You can see the technique with Hikaru and Minmay moving past the calendar. Technically most of the video is rotoscoping, but mostly with static overlays, not frame by frame to produce characters actually moving over new backgrounds.

[tuxedomarty]

I’ve been curious about how his is done too, but being that Kionon said that it is too time consuming and difficult, I don’t think it is worth my time.

[vkamv]

The best results I’ve seen personally is masking frame by frame in photoshop using pen tool, and then even color correcting the frames in photoshop with brushes to make a more seamless incorporation into background.

Sometimes a character has weird external lighting on their body that can be reduced with a brush tool using the color setting. You can also after cutting them out, select the cutout, and contract selection by a pixel or two to create a stroke to make to look more professional.

You can stroke with different colors on different sections this way instead of applying a single stroke color around cutout.