Editing styles: AMV versus MMV versus Live Action

[violet_skies]

In the Fan Music Video world, there are four major types of sources that people can edit with: animated footage (anime or CG), manga, live action, and video game footage. I have just recently finished my first MMV, so I have now edited with three of the four types of sources. I wanted to chronicle my experiences working with these three different media and how they compare and contrast to each other.

People enter the video editing hobby usually due to love of a particular piece of media. While a good number of people start editing because of anime, as AMV is probably the best known acronym, the live action music videos (LAMV) are fairly popular as well. I don’t have a lot of details on the differences between these two types of editors and the editing culture surrounding the sources. I have only completed one LAMV, a fan work for Moulin Rouge, and I have plans and interest to do more.

First,  a high-level discussion about AMVs. Given that the primary readership of my blog (if any) is the AMV community thanks to Bentovid, I assume most of you have worked with anime to craft videos. I am going to use the term anime to use any piece of animated media as short hand, but for the most part, I mean all kinds of animated footage, whether from Japan or anywhere else in the world. Many people will say that anime is easiest to work with of the three sources. You have a lot of options to adjust the clip in some way, with clip speed, effects, and masking, which gives anime a lot of freedom. Clip speed for animation can usually be adjusted a fair bit, especially for scenes where there’s no people. There is a minimum speed that clips can be slowed down, and not all clips with time changes will render appropriately, but for the most part anime is very forgiving when you play it slower or faster. Video editing programs come with a broad range of effects, and effects work can really bring out the best of a video. I tend not to do effects-heavy videos, but I appreciate their additions when done well.

Masking is its own beast for editing. Masking is a way to cut out shapes to expose what is underneath. They are somewhat like turning an image into a sticker, where you are able to place whatever you have cut out on top of any background. You can also use masks to remove parts of a scene that you don’t want. With anime, if you like a certain scene, but someone is talking, you can typically mask out the mouths so that it stops moving, which avoids the dreaded lip flap (people talking when you don’t want them to). Or, if you want to have someone say the words of a song or other audio, you can mask in mouth shapes so that a character says whatever you want. There are also mask transitions, when you can use a shape to move between two scenes.

How do live action sources compare to anime? Well, the usual tool kit for editing AMVs kind of goes out the window. Some people will say that editing with live action sources is more difficult, I basically feel that it’s just different. Scene selection is very important in live action because 1. you can’t really time remap live action sources because it can look weird 2. fewer effects can be added to live action footage because it can look weird 3. Masking is really tricky, and most masking, especially mouths, can look really weird. Time remapping is a challenging piece to lose in the editor tool kit because a lot of internal sync relies heavily on the speed a clip plays. I kind of like that I can’t use effects on live action footage, because it saves me from worrying too much if I should be using effects (since I typically don’t). In my single live action edit, I have exactly one mask transition, and I only thought of it because it is also a mask transition in the movie. I just made my own mask to make it go to the scene that I wanted instead of the scene the move moves to. I think editing with live action is a good exercise in scene selection, so I highly recommend it to everyone. The different approach required to achieve good flow is definitely transferrable to AMVs.

Finally, working with manga is completely unlike the other two. You don’t time remap manga because it doesn’t move. All sync in MMVs must be constructed—there is no beat sync, no internal sync, without the MMV editor forcing it to happen. A strong grasp of effects is also highly valuable to an MMV. And masking is inarguably the most important piece of an MMV tool kit. There’s traditional masking (using the masking steps within video editing software), but there’s also chroma keying, which is turning the background to be removed a specific color so that the software can subtract it (i.e. green screen). MMV editing is HARD. You start with a jumble of images that tell a story, then you have to translate those images into motion to achieve a logical flow. Nothing moves unless you tell it to move. MMV editing is far more like animation than AMV editing.

I hope to debut my MMV on my blog later this month, and I hope to do an extensive post about the entire process for that video and my key takeaways. For now, enjoy this fun table.

Relative Importance of Various Tools to the Music Video Editing Process

Music video type	Time Remapping	Effects	Masking
AMV	+	o	o
LAMV	-	-	-
MMV	-	++	++

++ Very important

+ Important

o optional

- Not important

 (this table is completely my opinion!)