AMV Notepad is a new feature as of version 1.3.0. It is a tool within AMV Tracker that you can use to keep track of ideas you have for creating your own AMVs. It allows you to keep notes on potential songs, anime, and concepts you might want to use in your own AMVs, as well as a number of other things to assist in tracking the progress and priority of executing these ideas. Let’s take a look at how to enter a new AMV idea, as well as how to pull up ideas you’ve already entered before.

When you click the AMV Notepad button on the home window, you’ll see this window pop up:

The buttons on the left allow you to pull up ideas you’ve already recorded to either view or edit them. The buttons on the right allow you to enter a new idea, based on either song, anime, or general concept. If you don’t have anything specific you want to categorize the idea by, you can choose “Generic entry”. The only difference between these is the physical arrangement of a few of the fields on the idea entry screen; they also differ in how they are categorized when entered into the database, which really only matters when you go to search for your ideas. Otherwise, they are identical. For this example, I will walk us through a Generic entry.

NOTE: All fields in this window are optional.

Idea Entry

Let’s look at each field:

Song(s): Type in one or more songs that you might want to use in creating this AMV.

Anime: Type in one or more anime that you might want to use in creating this AMV.

Concept description: If you’re thinking about creating an AMV based around a specific concept, rather than a definitive song/anime combination which you may not have figured out yet, use this field to describe it.

Notes: Use this field to enter any notes you might have that will help you in your formulation of the idea, or the actual execution of the project. In the example above I’m using this to pinpoint specific episodes (and even the general time range within certain episodes) that might have the kinds of scenes I’m looking for (I don’t actually know if these particular DBZ episodes would be at all relevant to a video like this, it’s just an example!). You can use this in any number of ways to plot out how to edit your video — another idea would be to make note of specific timestamps within your song that you’ll want to edit in a particular way, for example.

Deadline: Enter a date you want to have this project completed by. Useful if there’s a specific contest you want to enter and you need to make sure your video is completed in time to enter it.

Priority: A range from 1 (high priority) to 5 (low priority) that you can set depending on how important it is to you to work on this idea. Especially useful if you’re the type of person who works on multiple projects at the same time.

Idea stage:

• Not started — The idea is formulated but you haven’t begun work on it yet.
• In progress — You’ve started working on the video.
• Completed — You’ve completed work on the video.
• Abandoned — You started work on the video but decided not to finish it.
• On hold — You started work on the video but have stalled for whatever reason. You intend to finish this video at a later date.

Video progress: If you choose the “In progress” stage above, you can move the slider here to represent roughly how far along you are in the project.

Start/Finish dates: Use to track when you start and finish your project.

Related videos // Add to list: You might have certain videos that you especially like that you want to reference while working on your idea — maybe because you want to emulate a specific editing technique, or because you want to mimic the general style or mood. Or, maybe it’s just a video that uses the same anime and you want to make sure you’re not using the same scenes. Whatever your reasoning, any videos you want to associate with this idea can be added here. Clicking this button will pull up a Custom Search that you can use to hone in on specific videos:

In this case, I want the best Linkin Park action videos in my database so I can learn what they did and try to mimic it. So, I’m searching for any video that uses Linkin Park, that I rated higher than 8.0/10, which I would categorize as “action”. Executing this search pulls up this:

If need be I can view the video information by clicking the “Edit” cell; if there’s an eye in the “Watch” cell I can click it to open the local copy of the video I’m storing on my hard drive; and if there’s a globe in the “Go to URL” cell, I can click that to pull the video up in my browser. Otherwise, I would just want to add the video to the list of videos associated with this idea by clicking the “+” cell all the way to the right.

Related videos // Show list: Once you’ve added at least one video as described above, you can view those videos by clicking this button. It will pull up a window that looks exactly like the one in the screenshot above, except the column all the way to the right will have X’s, and you can click an X to remove that video from this list (doing this will not delete the video from your database).

When you’ve added all the information that is relevant, click “Submit” to add it to your ideas database.

Idea Search
After you’ve entered an idea or two, you’ll want to be able to find them later to add notes and update your progress. You have a few different options for pulling up your ideas, either by specific category (song/anime/concept, this is where it can be useful to delineate when you enter a new one), or you can pull up all your ideas. In this case, let’s pull up all the generic entries in my database, since the idea we walked through above was a generic one:

I only have two generic entries in my database, but you can see that one of them is the idea I just entered. This view shows all fields that you entered, and if you scroll all the way to the right, you’ll see another field which shows the date you originally entered the idea into the database. Any field can be sorted by clicking the column header; this can be useful when it comes to sorting videos by priority or completion %, for example. In order to view and edit the information on an idea, click the Edit cell to the left. You’ll pull up a screen that looks a lot like the original idea entry screen, with two additional items:

(1) Date idea entered: The date the idea was entered is shown in MM/DD/YYYY format. It is not able to be edited.

(2) Delete: Clicking this button will delete the idea altogether. This is not reversible, so please be careful.

Any field (besides “Date idea entered”) can be edited and updated. Any changes made will be saved when you click the “Update” button in the lower-right.