I -love- AMVs, especially movie and commercial parodies.
I have been making them for a few years and I'd consider myself lower-intermediate.
Some people with the $$$ can buy all the professional software like Final Cut Pro and hammer out heart-stopping digital effects, but I''m not in that class of artiste myself.
You can do a LOT with Adobe Premiere and only then, add After Effects if you need to. Some software stores have student deals on Premiere for around $270. You might also need to buy a sound editor like SoundForge if you can't find a good freeware equivalent. You can do a decent anoumt of sound editing in Premiere as long as you start with a clean .wav or mp3 file. Most CD ripping tools will get you decent enough audio, unless you want to edit the music or sounds as well as fitting video clips to audio.
Most if not ALL of the other stuff you need can be gotten FREE at places like
http://www.doom9.org If you're on Windoze, nab a copy of DVD Decrypter and a copy of VirtualDub 1.5.10 or so, NOT the latest.
Get the latest XVid codec and PUH-LEEZE do NOT encode in WMV. The compression is cruddy, plus you make it needlessly hard for folk running non-MS stuff like Mac or Linux (me!) to see your work. The quality of WMV is FAR less than AVI anyways Use Xvid codec to compress to AVI as a good start. Do -NPT- use DiVX encoding past 5.05 because they insert an automatic web bug that pops up in the lower right hand corner. This means that if you have a video work in which SOME of the clips are DiVX and others are not, the web bug will pop up EVERY TIME a DiVX clip goes by. This is annoying for viewers, as you can guess.
You use Virtual dub to select video clips from the VOB files decrypted from the DVD. Edit the work in Premiere, but export UNCOMPRESSED, and finally VirtualDub again to compress. I can help you make VirtualDub obey if you PM me.
My latest AMV ideas in the cooker:
- Chobits to 'Electric Barbarella' (Duran-squared) I really didn't like Chobits, and illustrating the travails of the drippy boy using the lyrics of a song about tripping out with a cyber-blow-up doll named for a cheezy 60's/70's SF movie character should lampoon it just about right.
- A spoof trailer made up from dialogue from the movie 'The Highlander" ("there can BE only ONE!") to MAI Hime. (Further explanantion might spoil the series.)
- A WW2 project using period music such as Richard Rodgers 'Victory at Sea' to illustrate the fates of 30 - 50 Imperial Japanese Navy ships whose names we might all recognise, from destroyer Ayanami (Rei) to Katsuragi, the ill-fated Aleutian diversion with Asagiri (no Miko) and Kasumi (from X?) plus fleet oiler 'Naruto,' not to mention the loss of the Akagi (Ritsuko) at Midway - Asuka (Souryu) was also sunk there, despite Arashi ('X') doing her best to drive off the USS Nautilus - and at the end, poor ol' Hibiki (Vandread) got hauled off to the serve in the Soviet navy....
- And ONE more I'm keeping a SECRET!
What AMV(s) are you thinking of making?
- G
