Animated Avatars

[dhiire jalna]

Thank you Piyaara! And, shoot! Maybe I will just keep my cruddy pc for avatar making. Are any or some of the animation programs/software free? If they cost a fair bit, I may just go buy a pc again.

[SRKFanatic]

Yes, you need an animation program, like Animation Shop 3, Ulead GIF Animator, Adobe ImageReady.  There are others out there, these are the three I'm familiar with.

[piyaara]

 Just an update on that gifmation program...er...it didn't work.  Or, rather, the downloaded file must have been corrupted as I got one of those groovy error messages popping up.

 Doh!

 

[dhiire jalna]

*smacks forehead* um... a quick glance at my programs would have informed me that I already have Adobe ImageReady 

Time to clear out my hard drive and have a trial avatar-making session. 

One last question (Piyaara, maybe you can field this one too?)  - Would that animated jpg/gif/whatever file transfer to a mac and still 'function' (that is, be animated)? Or do I just have to upload it to photobucket and/or image ready from the pc?

Thank you all for your help!

[piyaara]

Time to clear out my hard drive and have a trial avatar-making session. 

Yes, Yes...we want to see your creations! 

One last question (Piyaara, maybe you can field this one too?)  - Would that animated jpg/gif/whatever file transfer to a mac and still 'function' (that is, be animated)? Or do I just have to upload it to photobucket and/or image ready from the pc?

No doubts about it.  All of my BMP/jpg/gifs transfered to my mac when I bought it in January this year...and worked. Hurrah!

Incidently, there is a program that allows you to run Windows on the Mac called Parallels Desktop.  I was never sure whether you had to buy a new copy of Windows to go with it but, as you can imagine, any Windows-compatable program would then work on the Mac.

[MinaiMinai]

KM Player will continuously screencap frame by frame until you tell it to stop, or until the video is done.  This way you get every single frame, so it's just like you were using the actual video.

This weekend, I ventured into the unknown (to me) territory of animated avatar making, and after hearing good things about KM Player like the comment above, I downloaded it and spent.. well let's just say, a very lengthy period of time trying to figure everything out.  Thank god for Google, that's all I can say.  When you go to make a screencap on the latest release of KM Player, it tells you it is "impossible" because of some superspeed mode setting.  All you have to do is change the two settings as explained on this kmplayer.com thread.

So once I got that figured ou, I first used KM Player to play my DVD and create the screencaps in batches (the frame extraction process is priceless), then I used the super-easy animation wizard feature in Jasc Animation Shop (trial version on download.com), drew a little cropping box in a perfect square around what I wanted, (it's reproduced across all the frames), resized to 100x100, did the optimization thingy, and was able to complete the whole thing in about 5 minutes!  Anyone could download these two programs and make one (with a bit of googling to figure out how )!  However, the hard part was getting it to look smooth and not jerky.  It seemed like having KM Player capture at about 15 frames per second was decent- 10 fps looked too choppy, and 20 fps caused playback problems.  And then I had Animation Shop play each frame at 9/100 of a second.  That seemed to be the magic number for me.  What are the numbers you expert avatar makers use?

The only problem I'm having is getting the video I'm capturing to play smoothly.  I'm not sure if KM Player hogs a lot of CPU resources, but while I am extracting caps live, every 5-10 seconds the playback will jerk and skip a bit, very slightly, which of course is reproduced in the flow of the caps and messes up my resulting animation!  I have tried virtually everything I could find on google... turning off other programs, antivirus scanning, tinkering with KM player settings/filters/codecs/other words I don't understand... I'm about to the point where I think I'll have to manually capture the images frame by frame myself to get a smooth result.

Anyone had this problem?  It seems that KM Player is the only free one I'm aware of that lets you create multiple screencaps all at the same time, which is what I want.  Are there others that do this?  I'm hoping to figure out how to do it because it is such a timesaver.

And last- are there any size (kilo/megabyte) limits to be used (linked to) for this forum?

Here's what I ended up with - from the Telugu movie Swarna Kamalam, and one of... Allu Arjun!
       

[SRKFanatic]

When I used KM Player, I would grab every single frame.  Yea, you end up with tons, but you get incredibly smooth animations in the end.

It's really best to try to keep your final anim size less than 1MB.  After that the file just gets too big, and some forums won't accept filesizes that big for avatars.  If you're finding that your size is too big, you can either just cut the clip shorter, or cut out every other frame and slow down the frame rate.  That gets rid of half your frames but doesn't really mess with the fluidity of the anim that much.

Those anims you've done look great BTW.

[Vinita]

Does anyone know where I can get an animated avatar of this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaWVFE8nPkI from 3:41 to 3:50?
Any and all help is appreciated.
Thanks.

[Aishwarya4eva]

When I used KM Player, I would grab every single frame.  Yea, you end up with tons, but you get incredibly smooth animations in the end.

See I've had KM Player for a while now and had installed it just because I read about its Anim making abilities, but has not been able to figure it out so I've just been using it as a media player (and it's GREAT, by the way, it has so many functions!).
?
But now I think I want to leave poor Usha alone for a little while . Yes, KMP captures shots beautifully. But what then? How do you make the images an avatar?

Does anyone know where I can get an animated avatar of this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaWVFE8nPkI from 3:41 to 3:50?
Any and all help is appreciated.
Thanks.

Also, Vinita, I was just curious so I checked out what you wanted. And good choice! That is heartbreakingly cute. Did you notify Usha? I'm sure she would deliver it to you pronto and it'll be great!

[Vinita]

Also, Vinita, I was just curious so I checked out what you wanted. And good choice! That is heartbreakingly cute. Did you notify Usha? I'm sure she would deliver it to you pronto and it'll be great!

Thanks.  No, I have not notified Usha.  How does one go about asking her to make an avatar?

[dhiire jalna]

I hope you already have a great answer to your question Aish4eva, but, in case not, here's how I go about it:

(Sorry if this is over-detailed or obvious info but it is ridiculous how long it took me to figure this out and then to streamline the process.)

1) When I screencap stuff, I wind up with a whole bunch of pics/files already named blah001, blah002, blah003 - sequentially, in other words. Which is uber-handy cause then you don't have to rename them all in numerical order (a task you can't automate) - and having them in numerical order is how ImageReady knows which order the pics go in when creating the actual animation.

2) In order to get the avi to a nice 100x100, you have to crop all those shots of the entire screen into a square (equal sides) pic and then resize it to 100x100. This makes avatars where the subject moves out of that square ridiculously laborious to create and tricky to make well. (I don't know if everyone else has this problem but all my avis are limited in size by the height of the screen - generally means that width wise, I get about a third of the screenshot. Course if you don't mind having the black bars at top and bottom of the avi, then size/how-much-of-the-screenshoot-is-in-your-avi isn't limited at all.)

I use Adobe Photoshop, and automate the cropping, resizing and even the file saving step, so all I have to do is open a bunch of the screenshots in Adobe, hit the key I assigned to the automated tasks and its done. (I manually close each pic after alteration, because having them automatically disappear makes me nervous that I screwed something up.) Because of the automation, even a longish avatar (200+ screencaps) doesn't take too long.

I (auto)save all the newly cropped, resized screencaps as jpegs, in a folder just for that avatar.

3) My set-up is kind of old and I think ImageReady doesn't exist in the current Adobe package (which I think means this step can be done in Photoshop now). But in IR (which is what I use) under the file menu there is the option for something like import folder as animation. So - just have to hit that and choose the folder of the screenshots and, miraculously, an animation appears! I will play it a few times to make sure it runs as smoothly as it can (my computer loves skipping frames when I am screencapping) and begins and ends where one wants.

 "Optimizing" the animation seems to be what makes it into a .gif, and then chose the "Save optimized as" (or whatever it says) and the avatar is finished.

[Aishwarya4eva]

^^^^ Thank you so much! I'll try it pronto and tell you how things turned out!

[Aishwarya4eva]

Yay! So I did it, but two problems.

1) I don't have Adobe Photoshop, and my Microsoft program lacks a function that crops multiple pictures

2) It's kind of hard to explain, but in some of my avatars the view is too...wide? Like, it shows the two characters entire bodies when I just want their faces.

Does anyone have a solution?

[dhiire jalna]

While I don't know exactly what either of your problems are, here are my best shots at answering them:

1) If you don't have a tool that will allow you to reapeat the same action on different pics/files, you need to have some sort of rulers running along the sides of whatever application you use to crop photos with and just remember exactly what measurements you cropped the first pic at - and do all the rest the same. Reeeeeeeaaaaally laborious.

2)It doesn't matter how large or small the square you crop the screencap to is, so long as it is has equal sides. That way, when you reduce the size, you can get the 100X100 size pic. (Though the size isn't hugely specific - if you are off by a couple pixels and wind up with pics that are all 96x100 it doesn't matter - so long as ALL the pics are the same size.)

I'm sorry, though I don't think it did, I really hope that helped.

[Mily]

I seriously need to learn how to make these.  I get tired of requesting them from people.

[Aishwarya4eva]

Okay, I'm sooo frustrated and am about to give up.

I've tried Jasc Animation Shop by extracting frames from KMPlayer, but my pictures always end up squished and narrow. And sometimes the avatar is way too fast. Even when I try to specify the picture size as 100x100 in KMPlayer the images are still skewed.

So then, I thought I found what I was looking for with Video Avatar which is really easy to use, I actually think a lot of avatar makers here make it, but the avatar is not ever smooth. Even after I fiddled and experimented with it for hours I just could not make a smooth avatar. I don't know I'm doing wrong but there has to be an easier way to make these things. It's so frustrating!

[spellstone]

No experience with Video Avatar, but last time I played with animated avatars I used VirtualDub to cutout the video piece and save it as a series of frames, then IrfanView which is a great pic viewer, but is equally great in batch pic processing and can resize, crop, and convert any number of pictures all in one pass.
Both are free.
Cannot remember what was the software for the last crucial step of assembling the gif file... Ulead Animator, I think, and something went wrong there, too.
Of course there's Gimp, the free analog of Photoshop, that supposedly can do all three, but I didnt try it out (yet?)

But if the biggest problem is the crop/resize, then IrfanView is the thing.

Exercises..

Spoiler (hover to show)

    

[mala]

Has anyone been able to use GIFsoup.com or gickr.com to successfully make animated gifs from youtube videos?  These two sites kept coming up when I googled up the problem.  Everyone was saying it was simple and easy to use - all you had to do was enter in the url of the youtube video.  But I just wasn't able to get them to work.

[Aishwarya4eva]

I think it's easier if you just download the youtube videos and extract the frames from there. It's easier to find a program to do so as well. You can PM me if you want any suggestions.

[Dolce~oro]

Ok, we need more avatar makers on this forum 

BTW this is my current avatar making configuration, if anyone is interested.

I have three programs for frame capturing, each with pros and cons:
VLC - the crappiest because it freezes all the time and it doesn't capture automatically, but also the one that will work on any computer with any file.
or
KMPlayer - which extracts frames automatically but only works on my new laptop, and it also has some bugs, for ex. I can't go back 30 seconds because it freezes; actually scrolling back and forth on a DVD is generally a problem with this one. It works wonderfully with downloaded files of any kind though.
or
Virtual Dub - I like this one because you can isolate exactly the beginning and the end of your frame extraction, so you never end up with extra frames. Con: it only works with avi files, no DVDs, and no DivX files 

Anyways, after getting the frames as jpegs, I crop them with jpegcrops, a wonderful free little program

Then I use Jasc Animation Shop to animate. I would love to use something else though, so if there are any other ones you guys use (other than Photoshop which I don't have at home), I'd love to know about them. I just got GIMP so once I figure out how to use it, I will probably be able to convert the jpegs into any format supported by the animation program. Jasc seems to not be very compatible with Explorer. Whenever I look at my avis in Explorer they show a lot slower than in Firefox. 

Hope this helps someone... someday... 

[Aishwarya4eva]

^^^ I use Jasc right now and it works like a charm. Do you have many problems with Jasc, because I love it?

And yayyyy you're using KMPlayer now! That's been my go-to player for EVERYTHING for three years now. I've only used a DVD to extract frames once and I hated it, so, yes, I really only use video files now because it works like a dream. But here's a tip for KMPlayer:

Extract the video with Video Capture from the DVD, it'll give you a video file and voila! Instant frame captures with ease!

And listen to the girl...jpegcrops is A-mazing.

[Dolce~oro]

Extract the video with Video Capture from the DVD, it'll give you a video file and voila! Instant frame captures with ease!

Yup, that's what I've been doing. But good to know it's a bug and not just something that didn't work on my computer, gives me hope that maybe they'll fix it on a future version.

Jasc is awesome, unless you use Internet Explorer. Whenever I access the forum from work, our avas look annoyingly slow. So it must be something that's not compatible there, since that happens with both yours and my avatars, and no one else's... 

[Aishwarya4eva]

^^^^ Oooh I was not aware of that. I thought me and the rest of the world was using Firefox.