The really short answer is to read the guides and stickies, but let me quote from my own
So You Want To be An Anime Music Video Editor?
Do I have source material?
In order for you to combine anime and song, you need the anime and the song.
The most practical way to acquire audio would be to rip the CD your desired audio is on. Ripping audio is the act of taking the digital information stored on a CD and placing it on your hard drive for editing. Easiest is uncompressed waveform, but an audio codec known as FLAC will also work. Remember, that for video AND audio, avoiding the loss of any quality (known as lossless) leads to the best results when you later produce a copy of your video for public viewing and distribution.
For video, you have a couple of options. You can download your footage, you can capture your footage, or you can rip your footage.
Downloading is seen as easiest for AMV beginners. Not only does the author of this guide frown on it, downloading footage is against the AnimeMusicVideos.org code of editing ethics. This bears repeating:
Using downloaded footage in AMVs is against the AnimeMusicVideos.org Code of Editing Ethics.
Now, aside from the ethical views of the community, there are practical reasons not to use downloaded footage:
First off there is the issue of finding it, especially if you are using a popular, and licensed anime. Then there is the issue of quality. You may well now have better quality than a capture card could produce, but often you have to contend with subtitles or logos, etc.
If you choose to ignore the AMV Code of Ethics, at the very least do your best to find the highest quality you can. Raws are preferable for unreleased material. If you must use fansubs, then at least crop out the subs. And please, please, please do not discuss downloaded footage, where to obtain it, how you used it, how to deal with it. The community is very much aware that it exists.
The first rule of using downloaded footage is that you don't talk about downloaded footage.
Capturing your footage is another option. For this option you need a TV capture card, or a more professional capture card like a SigmaTech, Canopis, or Pinnacle. These are no longer common, and capturing your footage, with the exception of doing so with an HD capture card off of an HD source, like a cable box equipped with HD channels, just isn't really useful or practical. This may still be necessary if you are making video game music videos and need to use cut scenes you cannot remove from the game disc, or for really old anime series that are not found on DVD but only exist on VHS, LaserDisc, VHD, BetaMax, or some other odd analog format. For the majority of individuals reading this guide, a capture card is just not useful.
Ripping is the most practical option. Ripping is the act of removing encryption from DVDs and moving the video files on them, VOBs (MPEG-2), onto a harddrive to allow for editing. It doesn't matter what the region of the DVD is, as long as your ripping software is set up correctly, it will be able to handle the removal of region coding and encryption as well as copying. In order to play DVDs, software or hardware DVD players have the ability to supply information to decode the encryption. Rippers essentially break the code and remove it. Legality in your country may differ, but in the United States of America, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has ruled that ripping alone is not grounds for copyright infringement. The steps on how to operate the two recommended ripping programs, DVD Decryptor and MacTheRipper will be included in a later section of this tutorial.
I haven't updated this in a while, so
Ripping also includes Blu-Ray discs now, not just DVDs. I have an external Blu-Ray drive I use to rip Blu-Rays I get here. I don't always buy the material I use, but I try to do so, and when I don't I usually rent from the Tsutaya across the street from my apartment. It's a video rental place here in Japan that often has a very large stock of anime going back decades. Also useful for tracking down DVDs of series that were never that popular or are from the 70s or 80s and got a DVD transfer. That way I'm still putting money into the economy and it meets my own moral standards for meeting the AMV Code of Ethics. I buy my audio from iTunes.
As for Sony Vegas, I am a Premiere user and on a Macintosh to boot, so I am not the best person to ask, but you can ask in the
Vegas forum.
Also I only use transitions in my AMVs, for the most part, been doing that for 20 years, not going to change now because the young whipper snappers like their heavy effects. BAH, I say. BAAAAH.
:)
