How do YOU edit your amv's?

[lamrith]

The FAQ here has been great for learning key things on thing to do/not do in making an AMV.

There are also plenty of videos out there on how to use the various editors.

What I am curious to find out is how you do your actual hands on editing/creating, what is your creative process typically?
Things like your amv outline/concept, Do you do a full storyboard or outline of your intended amv, or just grab a piece of music and start dropping video to it? Do you hear a song and just start at it?

Material prep/collecting, trimming/cutting/clipping scenes etc. Do you use big subclips, small ones? Do you trim straight to your timeline?

What trick or tips have you picked up over the years? I know I have already noticed that how I grab my clips can affect how/when I use them in the final product and I am interested in trying to stop that from happening.

[Katranat]

Cool question!

I'm not sure I'm the best person to respond, as I feel my editing process is quite disorganised, I would also be interested in hearing how other people manage this.

For me it seems to largely depend on the type of video I am making. My creative process almost always starts when I hear a song, sometimes I'll be hit straight away with exactly what I want to do, other times I'll only get a vague idea and I have to map it all out. The worst however is sometimes I'll get half the finished product in my head and I have to fumble around in the dark for the rest.
My favourite AMV's are the ones where I can instantly start editing because I have such a clear idea of what I want. I love the feeling of instant flow out of my head. Though the ones that take planning are also rewarding, I just find them exhausting.

When it comes to actually editing, I am limited by the program I choose to use (Kdenlive), any source footage I want to use goes straight into my timeline and I scrub through and cut out any scenes I want to use from there. This often means I end up with hours of footage sitting on the end of my timeline that I go back through every time I want to find clips.

Something I do which helps with clip grabbing is, when I'm trimming episodes initially I often do it in episode order, I find it helps once I have all the clips I want to then move them around and mix them up randomly. Or have them across several video tracks, so that the closest clips in the timeline to my project might be from say episodes 1, 6 and 11. Unless of course I deliberately want the the AMV to play out in episode order.

[Zarxrax]

Start with a vague concept in my head,
Import song and anime into my editor. Anime is generally full episodes.
Drop an episode into the timeline after the song. Search through it looking for whatever I'm looking for. Move clips over onto the song area of the timeline. Delete that episode off of the timeline and drop another one on to search through.
Probably a really bad way of editing, but that's how I always did it.

[Katranat]

Start with a vague concept in my head,
Import song and anime into my editor. Anime is generally full episodes.
Drop an episode into the timeline after the song. Search through it looking for whatever I'm looking for. Move clips over onto the song area of the timeline. Delete that episode off of the timeline and drop another one on to search through.
Probably a really bad way of editing, but that's how I always did it.

This makes me feel an awful lot better about how I edit.

[Mol]

Full concepts can work but so far 1 attempt i had failed miserably. I always go for gut feeling since then l: Without music that i get inspired by there is no amv. Seems to be less dull process. My workflow ist still crap but i drop eps pull above ep scenes that are interesing or vagueally can fir to lyrics or some setting. Play around with scenes on usally filling from start to end until i am somewhat satisfied. Then along the way i add some effects eventually tranistions if i feel like being nagged by yt standard editing xd.

[Kireblue]

When I hear a song, and I think of a anime for it, I tend to listen to it a bunch of times to get a mental image of how I want key moments to play out. Often times the scenes that I envision don't actually exist, or aren't as editable as I imagined, but I at least have a outline

Then I scrub through every episode of the anime and see what scenes I actually have to work with and adjust my vision of the video to fall more in line with that. But even at this stage, there tends to be a bunch of segments that I'm uncertain of. But I try to edit the segments that I'm most confident about and use them as a test to see if the video is worth making. Because if the segments that I feel should work the best doesn't actually look that good, then there's not much hope for the rest of the video.

As I start editing those segments, and make further adjustments of my vision for the video, I start to narrow down the options for my unsure segments, and I eventually start to edit those as well. After a while, more and more segments get finished, my vision starts to become more and more clear and locked in place, and I start making more and more adjustments to things I've already edited so that they fit in with with the newer segments.

So in a nutshell, my process is to get as clear of a vision for my video as I can, work on what I'm confident about, fill in the holes as I go along, and constantly make adjustments.

[MiyaDV]

I pick whatever song highschool kids are into atm, and use the most hyped anime. Gotto use one for the current season airing TBH, generates way more clicks and search results. I try to think how the song would fit the anime, but it doesn't really matter, nobody cares they just want to hear the popular song and see their favorite anime

so I just download w/e the anime is off the streaming websites and crop out the subtitles, i usually just throw the whole episode into a vegas timeline and delete everything but the fanservice / fight scenes. no point in boring your audience with plot points or trying to make some kind of story in an amv lol like wut? I make a balance between the fanservice / fight scenes so it doesnt repetitve.

I want to get maximum engagement and reach as many people as possible so I include a fortnite intro telling them to watch the whole video for a chance to win fortnite vbucks giveaway, ofc i dont give them anything lol its to get the idiot 5 to 12 year olds to click and bring up my engagement levels and generate me ad revenue (** important tip** you gotto pithshift your audio and crop the video of your amv to bypass youtubes detection filter, then you can monetize the video).

so I'm hitting the only two relevant audiences at this point, 5-12 Y/O's by including fortnite and vbucks giveaway, and the 12 to 18 y/o's by picking the hottest anime out rn and their current fav radio song.
anybody older then that should be irrelevant to you, their tastes are stuk in their teenage years and they spend all day reminiscencing the past n shit like it was better, the only audience they'll get is other ppl their age, and most ppl their age r out living a life irl and dont have time to watch their cartoon music videos. But hey if you want zero fans go ahead and pick ur fav song and make an artistic amv lmao

So now that I've got my demographic zoned in, fortnite intro, popular song, fan service & fight scenes, I literally just spend a day editing it all together, as long as the scenes are cool scenes itll prob sync up someway or another, in this way i've built 300,000 subscribers on youtube, all with adsense enabled and affiliate marketing products.

[seasons]

I pick whatever song highschool kids are into atm, and use the most hyped anime...

You're trying way too hard here, I used to write stuff like this ten years ago and it was a huge waste of time even back then.

[Cneq]

I pick whatever song highschool kids are into atm, and use the most hyped anime. Gotto use one for the current season airing TBH, generates way more clicks and search results. I try to think how the song would fit the anime, but it doesn't really matter, nobody cares they just want to hear the popular song and see their favorite anime

so I just download w/e the anime is off the streaming websites and crop out the subtitles, i usually just throw the whole episode into a vegas timeline and delete everything but the fanservice / fight scenes. no point in boring your audience with plot points or trying to make some kind of story in an amv lol like wut? I make a balance between the fanservice / fight scenes so it doesnt repetitve.

I want to get maximum engagement and reach as many people as possible so I include a fortnite intro telling them to watch the whole video for a chance to win fortnite vbucks giveaway, ofc i dont give them anything lol its to get the idiot 5 to 12 year olds to click and bring up my engagement levels and generate me ad revenue (** important tip** you gotto pithshift your audio and crop the video of your amv to bypass youtubes detection filter, then you can monetize the video).

so I'm hitting the only two relevant audiences at this point, 5-12 Y/O's by including fortnite and vbucks giveaway, and the 12 to 18 y/o's by picking the hottest anime out rn and their current fav radio song.
anybody older then that should be irrelevant to you, their tastes are stuk in their teenage years and they spend all day reminiscencing the past n shit like it was better, the only audience they'll get is other ppl their age, and most ppl their age r out living a life irl and dont have time to watch their cartoon music videos. But hey if you want zero fans go ahead and pick ur fav song and make an artistic amv lmao

So now that I've got my demographic zoned in, fortnite intro, popular song, fan service & fight scenes, I literally just spend a day editing it all together, as long as the scenes are cool scenes itll prob sync up someway or another, in this way i've built 300,000 subscribers on youtube, all with adsense enabled and affiliate marketing products.

Quality bait

[Aymric]

Throw clips, fade/blur or twitch to a catchy song and cry - okay, serious answer now:

8/10 my video ideas are spontaneous which means I'm usually on spotify, at a coffee shop doing work (ie. my god forbidden thesis) and spotify or the likes would sometimes suggest me new songs. If I hear a new song I like a lot, most times I'm picturing some sort of music video to go along with it and I think to myself 'Wow, I really wanna edit this!' So I usually end up taking a notepad / the notepad app on my laptop/phone and write out the vague idea I have.

Then I go home, if I have time, I'll open up my software, throw the song in the timeline, edit the part that I have the most concrete ideas with first because I just need to get started with an idea then I'm kind of on a roll - and if the beginning of the song has me stuck, I'll just leave it.

Now, in terms of the whole technical aspect of it - I use markers to mark down my beats. Will I necessarily hit every beat with my clip transitions/clip changes? Not always. But it is helpful to have it there! I also use markers to indicate like general moods/aesthetics I want for each 'phase' like in a certain part of the song I'll mostly use scenic/crying people/etc. I then piece together my video, watch it obsessively over and over again before adding transitions or effects.

I don't really use transitions much anymore, at least not in the way of how you would in vegas / premiere, I almost always keyframe them by hand. I find the transition options in Vegas (haven't used it in years, disclaimer) and Premiere to be... messy, I guess or I just dont' have a lot of control over them. So I'd just key frame them by hand. Then, again, I watch it obsessively again and again until I'm sick of it, find places that I need to colour correct and do that.

I usually have another step of importing it into AE if I need to, but most of my videos don't really need it. Finally, I render my video... and again, watch it obsessively because sometimes my timeline previews will lag - and depending on how much I care about perfect presentation I either go fix or don't fix the glitches / lip flaps.

That's kind of the gist of it! I'm the kind who mostly edits in one go so... if I have a genuine idea (not one of my forbidden 30Day Challenge ones) I will sit in my chair, with my coffees and snacks until I'm done with it... oops.