How to Create an AMV, Anime Music Video

Have you ever seen those videos on Youtube with your favorite song, but instead of the music video, there was a video of an animated cartoon, or something of the sort? Well, have you ever wondered how to create one of your own? More than likely, it's much easier than you would think! I'll show you right here how to make one right now in 5 easy steps!!

Step 1: Find the videos you need: First off, you need an idea, but I won't be giving you ideas in this article on AMVs, so you're out of luck. But once you have your idea ready, and you know what you want to create, you got to find the videos that have the scenes you want to use in your video. An AMV is usually a lot of anime, cartoon, movie, or TV show scenes put together, so, it's very likely that all the videos you'll be needing (unless you already have them,) will be on Youtube. Go on Youtube, find the videos you need that have the scenes in them, and bookmark the pages or write them down. Its okay if it contains more than what you need, because we'll be doing some editing later. You also need to get the song, and if you don't have the song already, find a video on Youtube that has the full song and bookmark it also.

Step 2: Get permission: If you're going to be uploading this video on Youtube, and it contains scenes from other videos on Youtube, I can almost guarantee you that it'll be taken off within the next 2 weeks. So, in order to get around Youtube's new copyright terms, send all the people from which have the videos you'll be using and ask them if you can use them in your video. Getting permission is an important step you cannot forget, or it'll prove to be fatal to the success off your video.

* You will also need to get permission for the song you will be using, and even if you used Itunes or Limewire or whatever, message someone who has the full song as one of their videos just to be on the safe side.

**If you will not be uploading this video on Youtube, and will be keeping it for non public sites, you can skip this step. Or, if you will be uploading on to another site like Youtube that doesn't have much trouble with copyright issues, you can risk this step if you like.

Step 3: Download the videos/music: Now since you've got permission, you're ready to start getting the videos ready for use. Go to http://www.dvdvideosoft.com/ and you should see a long list of free programs to download. (Don't worry, I've downloaded them all before, and there are no viruses I assure you.) There should be one called Free Youtube Download and one called Free Youtube to MP3. If you only need to download the videos, get only the Free Youtube Download, and if you need to get both the videos and the song, download them both. Simple enough? Open up the programs and it's a pretty simple program to use: Choose the Youtube URL to download from, choose where to save it, etc. Now, as you probably have figured already, download all the videos you need and the music files also.

Step 4: Editing: Unless it took a whole week for you to get all the permissions for your video, this will be by far the longest step, but f you've already well-planned out what you want your video to look like, then this will be a piece of cake. Go back to DVDVideosoft.com and there should be another program called Free Video Dub. Download it. This will allow you to cut out the parts you need to use for the video. Again, it's a pretty simple program. Choose the parts you want to cut out of the video and isolate the scene, then save it as Scene 1, 2, 3, you get the point. This will take the longest time depending on how many scenes you need. But after this comes the easy part!!

Step 5: Put it all together: Using Windows Movie Maker, all you have to do is put in the background music, and put in the videos in order. Really simple. Preview it and save it as a movie file. Then publish it!! You're done!!

***IMPORTANT TIP!! - What I would recommend doing would be opening movie maker and putting in the music and just minimizing the screen. Then when you are editing the videos to get your scenes, put them directly into Movie Maker so you can tell if you're doing it right, if you need to make it longer, shorter, etc. So combining steps 4 & 5 really help!!

And you're all set!! Watch and enjoy!!