so you want to make an amv?
Hello, everyone! As some of you may know, I make amvs or little video edits for BH6 from time to time. While video edits aren’t necessarily the most popular form of creating for this movie (or upcoming show…who knows??), there are still some people out there who might be interested in making videos. This tutorial is mainly for @princess-kidatheart17 but if anyone else is interested in this post, I hope it helped!
The following tutorial are just the basics to Movie Studio Platinum (a form of Sony Vegas).
So, you get the program loaded and ready and this is what it looks like. Again, MSP is pretty much the same thing is Sony Vegas or Vegas Pro. Most of the features are the same (although I have learned that my program cannot do photoshop styled masking…but that’s not a basic thing to learn lol).
First things first, you have to get a video (or sound) file onto the timeline. In order to that, the first thing you have to do is go up to the top, click Project and then click Open…
Once you click that, you should get a video folder of something like this:
All you have to do is click on one of the video clips and then press Open
And now you have the clip of your choice on a timeline! Now you can officially start editing your video! Now, splitting clips is a pretty simple task. See that little bar at the end of the movie? Move your mouse over to that and click it. You can drag it anywhere you want on the clip.
As you can see, the bar is now about halfway onto the full movie. If you have that bar just where you want it, all you have to do now is press the letter S on your keyboard and the clip will split!
Now the movie is split in two!
Clearly, if you’re editing a video no matter the size, you’re not going to want the full thing on screen. So, to get rid of a clip, all you have to do is click on it (the clip will turn from gray to blue and be bordered with yellow) and press the delete button on your keyboard.
Just like that, it’s gone!
Now, as you can tell, I’ve trimmed the remaining file a little more. Another way to do that is by putting your mouse over the beginning or end of a clip. As the box says, just drag and adjust to where you want the end of the clip to be.
You have your clip just the way you want it. Great! If this clip happens to be in the middle of the timeline, no worries! Just click on the file and drag it to the beginning of the timeline
Aaaaand now it’s where it needs to be!
Effects/FX
Alright, now let’s get into the more fun parts. I think adding effects to the clips are my favorite parts and you can pretty much add them in at any time during the editing process, but I’m going to start with the effects here. I tend to make the mistake of adding effects after I have every clip trimmed and split which isn’t always a bad thing, but if the same effect is noticeably different, that can be a problem.
The fun part is trying to figure out what effect(s) you want to use and it’s totally up to your own preference. Don’t be afraid to look around and mess with some different effects (if you don’t like it, just press Ctrl+Z to undo it).
I personally like to use Color Curves. For most of my edits, I specifically use Cool Colors. Again, whatever effect(s) you want to use is completely up to you. Once you find the effect of your liking, click down on it and drag it onto the video file.
Something like this should pop up. It won’t look the same for every effect, but most effects have ways to adjust them. This is what it looks like when you choose a color curve effect.
Because the effect wasn’t to my liking, I adjusted the bottom of the red curve. There’s little gray lines with tiny boxes at the end of them. All I did was click on that box and dragged the line down to edge of the square.
The effect is officially to my personal liking!
…but wait, I’m not done! I’ve decided that I want to add another effect! No problem! Like I said before, you can add more than one effect to a clip. Sometimes I like to mess around with Brightness and Contrast. Personally, I go for the Darker effect.
Again, another box will pop up where you can adjust the settings. As I can see on screen, the effect is just a bit too dark for me, so I’ll mess around with the settings.
It may not look like I’ve done much, but every little adjustment matters. The effect looks much more pleasing!
And now I have it the way I like it!
Transitions
In my opinion, transitions are just a little bit more tricky to manage. You have to pick which ones you like and sometimes, you have to trim them up. They might be going too slow, or you may trim them to the point where the clips transition so quickly, you don’t even notice you added a transition at all. But once you get the transition where you want it and the flow of it to the next clip looks pleasing, it’s all good!
What’s cool is that there is more than one way to make a transition. I’m going to show you the first way right now which is pretty simple. First, you’re going to need to drag that little bar to a point on the clip where you want to split it.
Now before I add the transition, I want to get rid of part of the clip that I have clicked on. Click the beginning of that clip and drag it until your satisfied with what you’ve gotten rid of.
This is what it should look like while your trimming the clip. Your mouse will look like a double-ended arrow whenever you trim clips like this.
Once you get the clip to the part where you like it, drag it back over so it’s touching the other clip. As you can see at the top, there is a blue triangle on the end of the first clip and beginning of the second. When those are connected, that means the clip will just go into the next which is what you want. Sometimes, I edit a clip that doesn’t touch another on purpose because it makes sense with the beat of a song. If you want those blue triangles to touch, make sure they are touching or else you’ll have a split second where the video is pitch black (and unfortunately, that is VERY noticeable).
Even with the triangle gone with this added transition, it’s important to have them touch nonetheless. The way I made this happen was taking the beginning of the second clip and dragging in onto the first. It creates what you see in the picture above and shows the duration. Make sure you watch back the transition to see if you like it. If it’s going by too fast or slow for your liking, adjust it until you get results that you like.
With this transition, it looks like this about midway. I actually like how that looks, but it may not be the transition you want. Gladly, there are many transitions you can choose from and you can experiment with those as well to see what you want to use. As simple as it may be, I use the Default Cross Effect transition ALL THE TIME.
As you can see, the transition I made before is gone. In order to put a transition in, click the one you want, drag it, and put your mouse between the two clips (the split). When you get it between the clips, a little white and black static looking box will show up. When you see that, drop the transition in there.
Like the effects, a box will pop up like this. Honestly, I just close these pop-ups when it comes to transitions. If you want to mess around with the settings, feel free to do so. But I just close out of this.
Now the timeline is showing the transition! Whenever you drop in a transition from the transition folder, the default duration is always 1.00
Now, I personally didn’t have a problem with how the transition turned out at 1.00, but in the event that you want to trim down a transition, All you have to do is move your mouse over to the end of the transition. Another double-ended arrow will show up, but it will also have an arch on the side (I did my best to draw it, my apologies it doesn’t look great!). Once you have it where you want it, watch over the transition and see how it looks.
This is how the video looks mid-transition. Again, you can use any transition you want. You just have to see if you like how it flows to the next clip.
Another transition I love to use is Dissolve. I think it’s best used at the very beginning or end of a video. In my opinion, having a video fade in from a black screen is the most natural, so what I’m going to do is choose Fade Through Black and drag it to the beginning of the first clip.
…again, a pop-up will happen. CLOSING THAT UP (ofc if you want to mess with it, do so!)
As the video begins the play, the first clip slowing begins to fade in. I like how it’s fading in, but not where in the clip. Sooo I’m gonna adjust it a bit!
I have clicked the end of the transition, dragged it slightly to the left and now I like where the transition is! The bar shows what’s currently on screen and the little line on the clip shows where the transition ends!
Sound
If you’ve noticed, the movie has both video and audio. But unless you want the audio to stay while music is playing, there’s a simple way to get rid of it. Click on the clip where you want to remove the audio file and press the letting U on your keyboard. Now the video and audio are un-grouped. All you have to do now is click the audio and press delete.
TADA! The audio from that clip is gone!
Now, whatever type of edit you’re making (amv, crack edit with funny audio, etc). You’re gonna want to get your audio file in. You can do this anytime during the editing process. It actually tends to be one of the first things I do, but I wanted to show the basics on effects/transitions first. Remember at the beginning how you imported the video file in the timeline? You have to do that with your audio as well.
You have to go back here, find your music folder (or w/e folder has the audio you’re looking for), click the file of your choosing and then click Open
The audio of your choosing will automatically go on the first timeline section for audio. Luckily, it will place itself at the end of the audio file you already have on that timeline. The problem is you don’t want the audio on the same timeline as the movie’s audio. Simple to fix though! Just click the file and drag it to the timeline below.
Yay! Now it’s on it’s own separate section! All you have to do now is drag it so it’s under the other files.
With the audio at the beginning of the timeline, feel free to trim it up if you feel that’s needed. You’ll get that double-ended arrow again. As you can see, audio files show when sound starts up and how it moves. The very beginning of the song I’ve chosen doesn’t start up right away, so I’ll trim it.
Make sure you play the edit from the beginning to see if you like how everything is flowing together. (Oddly enough this is just a tutorial, and I’m satisfied with how it all is).
If the sound happens to be too loud or too quiet, you can always change the volume by adjustng the volume slider on the side of the timeline. Make sure you adjust the one on top ONLY though. The bottom one will move where you hear the audio from (aka, if you move it to the left, you’ll only hear the audio in your left ear and to the right in your right ear). Keep that bottom slider where it is!
Text
I like using text! While it’s not something you do for every edit, it’s still nice to know. Every once in awhile, I’ll mess with Titles & Text, but I usually just use (Legacy) Text on edits. I mainly use text to add song lyrics or sometimes quotes from the movie. And when I decide to use text, I tend to pick Soft Shadow because it has a nice, simple shadow behind the letters.
To get text on it’s own timeline, just click and drag the text of your choosing on the timeline above the video. When you import a video, the video automatically puts itself on the third timeline. You have two other timelines above it and those can be used for text!
As always, you get a pop-up box, but this one is VERY IMPORTANT. Use that box and get the words Sample Text out of there!
You can change the font and size of the text which is great! For this edit, I randomly chose the song Demons by Imagine Dragons, so I typed the first line of the song out to the font & size of my liking.
If you look closely, there are four tabs you can click through when editing your text. I went from Edit to Placement to see if the text was in a good spot. For me, this looks great, but if you wanna move it around, click on the text that I circled and mess around a bit!
Now I’m at Properties. This tab allows you to change the color of the text or the background of the video. The first section is Text Color, so if you want to change the color, change it to the color you want! Of course, I’d suggest adjusting the color so it’s visible, not too bright, and it doesn’t blend in too much with the video behind it.
Aaaaand you can trim text too! For song lyrics, it’s best to trim the text to where the last word is spoken. Same goes for quotes that characters are saying.
And you can add transitions to text too! Text don’t have to necessarily transition at the same time as video transitions, but it’s nice to have things fade in at the same time. So, if there is text in the beginning of your video, try to have it fade in at the same time the video does. Remember; go to the transition of your choosing and drag it at the beginning of the text clip. Adjust/trim to where you want it to go.
Adding text lyrics can be a bit strenuous, but it’s worth it once you get it to look the way you want. Video transitions are important because they should have a nice, fluid flow to the next clip and text should be treated the same. If you add another text clip next the first one, it should have a transition too (I think the first example I used for transitions works pretty well for text!) And that’s how it should look like mid-transition.
Something Extra
You see these little black bars? If they don’t bother you, that’s great! But sometimes, I don’t want them to be there in my edits. I didn’t think there was a way to get rid of them for YEARS, but a long time ago, I found a tutorial that showed me how to get rid of them and I’m so glad there’s a way! Luckily, I don’t think this will be a problem with the show, but if anyone wants to make a movie edit, feel free to read this part.
Right beside the timeline, there’s this little box I have circled. Click on that!
This will open up. Now you see that little blue circle on the top-left edge of this rectangle? You’re going to want to click the edge of that (actually, you can choose any edge of the rectangle, but I just use the top-left one). Drag the edge outwards and watch the video clip on the screen until it fills up the entire screen.
look at that
IT’S ALL FILLED IN NOW (this makes me so much happier than it should)
Rendering
So, you’ve edited everything to the way you like it and your video is done now? Great! Let’s make sure of something real quick before you decide to render it.
See those little yellow triangles I have circled. Yeah so if I were to render this video right now and leave those triangles where they are, everything everything between them would only end up getting rendered. THAT’S NOT GOOD. Click on the second triangle (the one at the 00:00:01:27 mark) and drag it to the end of your video!
There! Now your entire video will be properly rendered!
To begin your rendering process, go to Project and click Render As…
You’ll get a lot of different types of files to save it under as. You don’t want to make the mistake of rendering it as an audio file. When I make a video, I want to make sure the whole thing can end up on Tumblr. So, I use a Windows Media Video (or .wmv) file which manages to keep the finished product at a low enough number for me to upload the whole thing on here. You can choose anything within the WMV area to render it with, but the one I have highlighted is the one I use.
don’t forget to name your file as well!
Last, but not least, press that Render button! All you have to do now is wait for the rendering to complete and watch your video as a final product! Upload it to Tumblr, YouTube, etc and you’re done!
And those are just the basics to know when editing a video in a Sony Vegas program! I might end up doing another one of these someday, but just in case, here are some links to some more tutorials that I have found to be very helpful!
How to make audio echo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7264MXk_BeY How to use your green screen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKk7tJV934s&t=203s (i found the beginning to be most useful to learn how to edit out a green screen so I can overlay a clip on top of another) Phone audio effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JixZ-IbueEs
Anyway, I hope my basic tutorial was good! I’m sorry it was so long, but those are just some basics to know if you’re interested in making videos! Hope this was helpful! :D