Making Animations for Use in Custom Graphics

This tutorial will teach you how to make a custom animated clip of your favorite movie or You Tube video to be used in making custom graphics such as icons, buttons and banners.

The first thing you need to do is either have your desired video clip already saved on your computer or opened up in the internet. If you don't have your video saved on your computer, don't worry, because there are ways that you can save a video.

The first way is (if the video is off of You Tube) to use an online You Tube converter. All you have to do is enter the You Tube video's HTML into the box, choose what file type you want (I personally save as an .avi) and it will convert the video and then give you a link to download it to your computer. A couple of good online You Tube converters to try are http://www.vixy.net, http://www.mediaconverter.org, http://www.vconversion.com. My personal favorite is http://www.vixy.net.

You can also download Real Player (or it may already be on your computer) and then download any video off of any site. It takes like half the time of the video to download, so it's pretty fast. Keep in mind that Real Player is only compatible with Internet Explorer or Firefox 2 and lower. Real Player downloads the videos as .flv files. But they still work for making animations.

After you have your video saved, you should download the Free Video to .jpg Converter at http://www.dvdvideosoft.com/products/dvd/Free-Video-to-JPG-Converter.htm. Once you download and install that, open up your saved video in the software. Make sure that you have the "every frame" button checked first, then fast forward the clip to the beginning of the part of the movie you want to use. Once the clip is there, press the little half triangle button on the left at the bottom middle of the window. Then, at the end of the part that you want, click the right half triangle. By doing this, you make a selection of the section of the video that you

Okay, so if everything is going the way it should, you should have your clip selected and be ready to get the frames from the animation. Once again, make sure that you have "every frame" selected (this makes it so that your animation will run smoothly) and click "save" to get the frames. It shows the output folder for your frames on the top right corner of the screen. You can change it to whatever folder destination you choose.

Now you will need to open Animation Shop.
You can get Animation Shop at http://www.corel.com if you do not already have it.
Once you are in Animation Shop go to File > Animation Wizard > check "Same size as the first frame" ; Next > Opaque; Next > click "Next" until you get to the page with a big white box in it. Then press "Add Image", go to the folder that your animation frames were saved in, select all using [Ctrl+A] and click next. All the frames should have been put into an animation. To view what the animation looks like in action go to View > Animation.

From here, you can play around with the animation to get it exactly how you want it. You can delete some frames if you need to, change up the animation speed by selecting all and then going to Animation > Frame Properties, and moving the slider up or down to make the animation slower or faster. The lower it is the faster the animation will play. You can resize the animation it by going to Animation > Resize Animation and putting in the dimensions you want for your final product. I generally am doing this for an icon, so I make them about 115 pixels by 115 pixels.

Once you have everything just as it needs to be, go to File > Save As, keep pressing next, and save it.
Now you can open the animation in Adobe Imageready & edit it into an icon.