AMVs vs MADs

[Mister Hatt]

A lot of MADs, at least on niconico, feature custom animation and drawing by the artists too, rather than using too much existing animation. They are often light on effects and heavy on timeline manipulation; quite a few I've seen are done in an avisynth-like tool called aviutil. I do think there is a lot of overlap but for the most part, AMVs tend to be using large cuts of existing footage while MADs are more slim cuts, stills, or entirely hand drawn animation to achieve a visually different effect with the same general outcome. That and MADs seem to favour doujin music over commercial.