Step By Step | Avatar Guide!

PARTA - Introduction
PARTB - Conversion of MOV to AVI
PARTC - Animation Shop 3
PARTD - Animated Avatar Guide
PARTE - Tips And Tricks (Updated!)
PARTF - Alternate Ways to make your animated avatar
PARTG - Acknowledgements

PART A

Read this First if the movie or video file you want to edit is a MOV (Quicktime format).
The software used to create this GIF avatars is Animation Shop 3, and it currently only supports avi and mpeg files.
So what you want to do is convert this files to Avi Format. Here are the instructions.

PART B

To Convert MOV to AVI.
1) Convert your MOV files to Avi, use RAD VIDEO TOOLS.
2) Execute Rad Video Tools, load up your MOV file and then convert it to Avi.
3) Save your Avi.

Notes: Using RAD to convert your MOV to Avi. When converted, your Avi will not have any audio. You will get a warning that audio will not be included in the conversion when you use RAD.
Since you are doing an avatar only, you obviously won't need audio. But if you are in it for the full conversion, use TMPGENC.

PART C

Animation Shop 3.
Now, you need to get Animation Shop 3 and crack it to make it Full. Here are the instructions.
1) Download Animation Shop 3.
2) Install Animation SHop 3
3) Use this Sig2Dat to download the crack.
File:Animation_Shop_3-04.zip
Length:23109 Bytes,23KB
UUHash:=Eiwv0zHHZ3pQYuigcEUhhbql//8=

4) OK to Crack, UNZIP put the EXE into the Animation Shop 3 folder. Double-Click and Crack!
5) Weee, I full working version of AS3.

PART D

Animated Avatar Tutorial.
Finally, you have reached the tutorial section of this guide . Ok go through this steps carefully to make your animated avatar.

1) Execute Animation Shop 3.
2) Run the Animation Wizard by clicking on a button located just below "File".
3) OK, now check "As defined here:", then pick the resolution of your animated avatar. Put 64x64 which is the right size to be used on the Kazaa Lite forums. OK, 64x64 is a default if you want to display everything as you see on the movie. Or you could pick a larger resolution now, then crop the parts of the video that you selected to 64x64.
You would want to do this if you want a "better view" of the object featured in the movie, that you want in your avatar.
4) Hit Next.
5) Now you can pick either Opaque or Transparent, in my opinion, it doesn't really matter. If you pick opaque you can choose a number of colors.
__________
|__________| <---- Blank Space that can be opaque or transparent.
| |
|Animation |
|is here |
|__________|
|__________| <---- Blank Space that can be opaque or transparent.
6) Hit Next.
7) This is what I do, although you can explore later.
Check "Centered in the Frame" and check "With the Canvas Color".
Check "Scale Frames to Fit".
8) Here you can pick whether the image repeats itself over and over again or whether it just plays a user-defined number of times.
OK under the "Frame Display Rate", I usually put 3, because it seems to work well for me as it plays the animation at the same rate as how you see it in your video.
9) Hit Next.
10) Click "Add Image" and then locate your Avi or Mpeg file on your C: drive.
11) Under the "Range of Frames" to import, select Frames.
Pick your selected number of frames. EG. 100-200. OKay, now leave the rest of the options and hit next.
12) Now you should see your selection of frames.
13) If this is what you want, save as GIF image using the SAVE function.
14) You got your animated avatar !! Look through the Tips and Tricks FAQ below for additional editing information. Should solve some of your questions too.

PART E

Tips and Tricks.

So far I only got one, PM me to contribute.

a) Getting your selection of frames without having to delete them one-by-one.

In your selection of frames, look at each image and you should see EG, "F:1,D:3". F is the frame ID and D is the frame rate. For this situation, just pay attention to the "F:1".
Take note of the F number for the start of the frames till the end of the frames for the animation you want in your avatar.

Example Below.

From Frame: 250, To Frame: 350
You have a total of 100 frames selected, and they are listed 1-100. Letsay you only want frames 35-70 out of this 100 frames and you do not want to cut them out one by one,

Do a simple arithmathic calculation.
250+35=285 & 250+70=320

Now run through animation wizard again, now instead of putting 250-350 as your selected frames, put from frame 285 to frame 320 instead, and you get ur selected set of frames .

1) For advance window users, we are very familiar with using hot keys like Ctrl+C instead of right-click with mouse and select Copy. Similarly, when we want to select Frame 1, 3, 15, 19, etc , its much easier to press and hold Ctrl key and select the desired frames and press the Del key instead of using the menu method. Likewise with selecting continuous frames by press & hold Shift key when selecting frames.

2) To zoom-in specific area of the frame, we can first do a file conversion with RAD Video Tool. First we use VirtualDub to obtain the frame size, eg 592 x 320. With the frame size in mind, we can proceed to estimate the area of interest, say its estimated to be 160 x 160 located somewhere bottom left of the screen. During conversion, fill in 160 (width and height in Cropping parameters), and say 50 Left and 120 Top (est. values). Run the conversion and from the result, adjust the values according (trial and error method).

Note 1: if we're converting from a film, it'll be easier to cut the film into short clip to work with. Again, we can use RAD Video Tool for the cutting process (without audio, if audio is on, it will took 5 to 10 times longer to convert).

Note 2: for zooming purpose, if the area of interest is not constant, say a man walking slowly from left to right of the screen, we can do multiple clips (as mentioned in point 2) and name these clips with similar names say man01.avi, man02.avi, etc and join them up using RAD Video Tool.



But there is an easier way of deleting large, continuous ranges or frames, in a very similar method to above.

if you had Frames 1-300 and you wanted rid of frames 120-180, just click on Frame 120, move the slider to 180 and then hold down Shift, now click on Frame 180 and the whole range from 120 - 180 is highlighted blue, now just delete that range and voila! you're done.[/

PART F

An alternate way to do animated avatars using imageready and virtualdub. great way to go about doing it!! By Uzumaki626 from Animesuki forums.

How to make your own animated Gifs (ImageReady/Virtual Dub)
( A great ImageReady and VirtualDub Animated Avatar Guide )

 

any results?

 

Personally, A few.. but I'd like to keep them to myself.. I don't think the forum should have it..