Vid - Fanlore

A vid is a fannish form of music video. Vidders take short clips of footage, generally from live-action source such as tv or movies, and arrange these clips over a song to make an argument or tell a story.

They were originally called "songtapes" or "songvids", to distinguish them from professional, MTV-style music videos, and the term was later shortened to just "vids".

The earliest vids, circa 1975, were slideshows set to music; with the advent of VCRs, vids could be made by copying footage from one tape to another. Eventually, computer video-editing software became the standard, and today vids can be made by almost anyone with a computer, using the freeware supplied by Microsoft or Apple or other software.

Distinct fannish video-making traditions have arisen separately in other fandoms. Anime fans developed anime music videos, or AMVs, made by editors (not vidders). Video gamers have also developed their own video tradition of machinima.