MyGen.co.uk

[adatti]

This tutorial will help u to make an animated avatar from a movie trailer.

Step 1: Find a movie trailer featuring a short animated scene that takes your fancy. In this tutorial I have decided to use Quicktime as my player, and get the Doom movie trailer from the Apple Trailer website. Virtually any movie player will suffice, as long as you can pause clips and advance them again keyframe-by-keyframe.

With your movie player paused at the start of the clip you want to capture, hit the 'Print Screen' key on your keyboard to save a screenshot.


Step 2: Open up Imageready, Select File > New, and press OK - the dimensions should automatically state your current screen resolution. Now Edit > Paste. Your screenshot frame will appear as a layer in your new document.

Go back to your movie player and move the film clip on by one keyframe. In Quicktime you can do this by pressing the right cursor key when the Quicktime window is selected. Whatever you do, do *NOT* move the physical position of the window. Now press Print Screen again, go into Imageready, paste again, and repeat these steps as many times as you need.


Step 3: Once you have screen-captured all the frames that you need, bring out the Crop Tool and crop the area of the video that you want to appear in your final animation. You can hold down SHIFT on your keyboard whilst you make the crop if you need it to be rectangular.

You should now have a list of layers in your layers palette, with a solitary white layer in the background. Delete this white layer. Now all you need to do is open up the animation palette (Window > Animation), click on the little arrow on the far right of the palette, and select 'Make Frames From Layers' from the drop-down menu that opens.


Step 4: Open the Optimize Palette (Window > Optimize) and set your Format to GIF. Now all you have to do is select File > Save Optimized As, and save your file.



Hope this helped!

-ABHINAV
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[diamondandy]

hehe might be a bit complex for the average user but good guide anyways...
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[adatti]

[Ding A Ling]

One Problem......Your avatar can only be up to 6 KB.
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[Zoozoo]

That doesnt mean it has to be on this site! And people do want it just for other stuff. I think tis a very good tutorial.

[Kyle m]

me too, allready know about the technique, but a stunnin g job at explaining. TOP NOTCH!
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I AM NOT A MOD

[luv2dostuf]

the print screen doesn't always work for me though.

[adatti]

what kind of media player are u using?
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[luv2dostuf]

well, it didn't work in either my real media player, windows media player, or quicktime. But if I import a small clip into flash it works *shrugs* so i guess I'll stick with that.

[x13igDudex12]

Here is an easy one:

Download the video and find a Video to Avi converter. Then find an AVI to Gif converter (i use Microsoft Gif Animator and it works good) then just deleate and stuff untill you get perfect. It might be big but you can figure something out. Some small video cameras will work perfect because it doesnt take that many frames. The video i took and converted for my main picture is onle about 12-15 frames repeated.
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[scooton]

you can also use

http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html

it's got a built in gif converter plus conversion between basically every common file type. Plus it's free

[The Riot]

thank you
great tutorial
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MySpace.com/Tofer

[broken.record]

how do you move keyframes one by one on windows media player?

[adatti]

[broken.record]

so you can only do it in quicktime? what about dix player...'cause i've tried to do it in quicktime but it won't work