by ReViewMe Media

Created on: July 10, 2010   Last Updated: July 12, 2010

Anime Music Videos are fan videos created by anime fans.  They consist of video footage from an anime set to a music track of the creator’s choosing.  With the arrival of YouTube, Anime music videos or AMVs have become popular, much to the dismay of the music and anime industry. 

But creating anime music videos is fun, even though a lot of people do them to the same songs such as Linkin Park and Evanescence.   Anyway, you can make your own AMV but it is not a good idea to use downloaded footage from the internet, because anime distributed over the internet is not encoded to be edited, it’s encoded to be watched.  The best source for your AMVs is the DVDs themselves, so you will have to buy them yourself.  Once you have successfully ripped the source footage, you can encode it into a format that you can edit, such as Huffyuv or Lagarith or uncompressed file sizes. 

After you get all the clips you need, you’ll need either CDs or an MP3 converter so you can rip your CDs or convert iTunes files to .Wav files to use for your video.  Next you will need a video editing program.  You should buy the program yourself or use a free program.   After you set your anime clips to music you can encode it to a smaller file size to upload it online.

Uploading AMVs online is a tricky thing, because of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, AMVs are considered a legal gray area, most of the time either the music industry will send a DMCA notice to your YouTube account if you upload your video on YouTube or the Japanese Animation company or the U.S. distributor will send a DMCA notice to your YouTube account because of your AMV.

It is not recommended to host your AMVs on YouTube unless content I.D. will monetize your footage. There is a video that was uploaded for the Romeo X Juliet anime that was monetized by both Universal Music Group and Funimation Entertainment so that they would get money every time that someone viewed the video. 

Unfortunately, not all companies want to monetize AMVs and users are surprised when they get suspended due to copyright infringement, which technically, AMVs are because the footage and music is used without the permission of the owners, even if they did buy the DVDs and the CDs.

But YouTube is the main target of DMCA notices because of its widespread popularity and there are other websites that users host AMVs on that get little attention, it is recommended to post your AMVs other places besides YouTube.  Also if you do decided to post on YouTube, the anime companies that send DMCAs are Aniplex and Toei Animation.  

If you really want others to see your AMV you can either go to a website that is dedicated to AMVs, animemusicvideos.org, but they tend to be overly cricticial and are somewhat rude to new users, and you can’t upload any videos containing music from Wind-Up Records because of an incident where one of their bands was asked if they made an AMV and the website was asked to block the music. . 

A great way for others to see AMVs you create are anime conventions since they show AMVs.  You can go to a convention website and submit your AMV before the convention date, they have rules that you have to follow but it’s a great way for others to see your AMVs.

Anime Music Videos are fun to make, despite their legal gray area status; you can get started making your own if you want, but be careful where you host them online since it’s likely to get you a DMCA notice if it’s up on very popular websites.

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