When I say video editing, you may think of, well, traditional videography: the separately filmed or animated segments of a movie or TV show being fitted together, and transitions, overlays and CG added where needed. But what I’m talking about it something arguably more insane. Just. Click these links. These videos are all art made from other art, cut together bits which turn into something more beautiful than the original product. Colloquially these are counted as AMVs and MMVs (anime and manga music videos, respectively) and although many people edit with live action TV and western cartoons, I haven’t found a more preferable name for them. Of course, I’ve seen these described as a plague on Youtube (but I’ve also heard Buzzfeed described as that so…) but a well-made edit is a really beautiful piece of art that is also, as I’ve said, insane for anyone to want to undertake and a blessing on any fandom. To showcase this, let me walk you through the process of creating something like, say, the third example.

First, you need your music. Anything will do, but you may want to cut it down because, otherwise, this is going to be even longer and more exhausting than otherwise, especially if the song is repetitive. Once that is done, you need to decide what kinds of media you want to use and gather your resources. I’ve started just collecting every fanart I like that I see so that I have things on hand when I want to suddenly edit. But if you want a specific picture that you’ve seen but don’t have, or need art that fits a certain theme from a certain fandom, you better get good at googling because it’ll probably impossible to find until you settle and decide you don’t want it anymore. Using an animated or filmed source is both easier and harder; it’s easier because you have all your content in one place and don’t have to scour the internet for it, but it’s harder because you have to comb through 200 episodes of a show to find one clip.

You’ve gathered everything and, now, since we’re making something like the third example, we’re going to animate with masking! This requires you to mask everything that you want to move so that you can move it along its joints, such as masking a forearm, upper arm, and hand so that they bend at the elbow, shoulder, and wrist respectively, and then moving them. This can create a horrifying amount of layers especially if you are masking something on a background that needs to be continuous when something moves across it. The most layers I’ve had for a single animation happens to be eight, but when you’re editing hair blowing or multiple characters in a scene it can get easily into double digits. Then you need to add any embellishments, overlays, backgrounds, text, etc, and at that point, you’ve spent three hours on this and have maybe five seconds of beauty completed, depending on the complexity.

Then of course you come back the next day, as with any art, and realize there’s actually 10,000 errors to fix before you even think about continuing, and there’s 40 more seconds to the audio selection and you’re never going to be done anyway. But because you’re the type of person who edits videos, you’re either done within the week, or a year later, no in-between. Then you render the video, which takes 12 hours and makes a file which takes up the entire space on your hard-drive, and upload it to Youtube.

There, I come along and like it, favorite it to a special folder, send it to everyone I know and print out the thumbnail to hang on my wall. Because this was secretly a really long way of saying video editors are awesome and deserve more credit and respect within a fandom. Thank you, goodnight.

(Do you want more examples? I knew it. A video for you. Oh, here’s a good one. I haven’t seen this one in a while. Amazing!)