movie avatars help

[Gabby]

Anyone else find this thread really depressing?

[Teallaura]

Well, I got as far as getting snapshots with Power DVD (thanks Dee Dee! ) and stringing them together in Win Movie Maker. No idea how to resize them and the duration is wrong.

it's a start.

[Dee Dee Warren]

With animation shop it is easy and you can usually pick that up cheaply on ebay. If I ever find a good alternative for the Mac for that program I would give you mine, but I have been unsuccessful thus far. Power DVD is great - I don't yet have a Mac alternative for that yet, but I had several licenses so I was more than happy to give you one.

[Teallaura]

I am wondering about he thing JP posted - eh, I'll get it eventually. At least I'm making progress!

[Johnny MacManky]

Well, I got as far as getting snapshots with Power DVD (thanks Dee Dee! ) and stringing them together in Win Movie Maker. No idea how to resize them and the duration is wrong.

it's a start.

Go GiMP!

[Teallaura]

I managed to resize it the hard way. Now I can't save it in any format but .WMV (Well, I could but none of the others are on Tweb's list of file types that will upload).

[Teallaura]

Go GiMP!

Okay, smarty kilt, I got that - now what?

[Johnny MacManky]

I posted a tutorial thang on what you're trying to do here

I think you said you've already collected the stills, if so then you've done all the hard work. If you get stuck, PM me. I'll leven talk you thru', step by step.

[Teallaura]

Thanks!


This means I have to work, doesn't it?

[Johnny MacManky]

Thanks!


This means I have to work, doesn't it?

...but, if I can work out how it's done....

[Teallaura]

You should give yourself more credit...

It'll just be a while - my schedule is stuffed...

[Zimri]

<snip>
METHOD 1

Here's how I usually go about it. To do it this way, you'll need virtualdub, which is a free piece of software used to edit .avi movie files, and animation shop. There's a verion of animation shop available for free here. There's a great free tutorial on using virtualdub here.

Start with an avi clip (if you don't have an avi version of the clip you want to use, see below). Open it in virtualdub, and cut out everything you don't want (i.e. most of the movie). Do that by selecting it and deleting it. Save the resulting short clip as a new file.

If you want to do it at this stage, you can also use the video filters in virtualdub to resize the clip to make it the right size for an avatar (or you can do this later in animation shop). You can also use the "null transform" filter in virtualdub to crop the clip to make it the right shape to make the most of the 213x120 proportions of the new avatars.

OK, now you have an avi clip that looks exactly like you want your new avatar to look. Now it's easy. Open this new clip in Animation shop. You will be given the option of how many fames to import (choose all), and you will be given the option of the sample rate. By "sample rate" I mean, for example, choosing to include one frame for every 3 frames int he original. If you choose to importing one frame for every one frame of the original, the file will be larger. If you only, say, import one frame for every 3 frames fo the original, your file will be smaller, which can be very helpful, although it will be more choppy. But not too choppy. This is the option I usuall yuse.

OK, when it opens it will basically look like a flim strip. It will be a sequence of images, like on a celluloid film. If you haven't yet resized it to make it the right size for TWeb, you can do that under the "Edit" menu. But if you didn't crop it in Virtualdub to give it the right proportions and the image proportions are different from the 213x120 proportions, this will result in a stretched image.

Now you can just save it as a .gif. When you save, Animation shop will give you some quality options. I use 128 colours, as this makes the file fairly small while keeping a decent quality.

And that's it! You now have an avatar. If the file is too large even though it's only 128 colours, then you have to open it in animation shop and remove some more frames, until it's small enough.

Thank you so much! I already had virtual dub, but after a day of trying to make up an avatar, I at last succeeded after looking at this post.