Video animation help.

[RangerWickett]

I made the attached video with what seemed to be too much work. All I wanted was to take an image I'd created, spiral across it, and end on the woman's face, with the occasional text showing up. However, I ended up having to create the frames individually in photoshop. The program I used was Windows Movie Maker, generously free thanks to my alma mater's multimedia center.

Any advice to make this smoother in the future would be much appreciated. Even just pointing me in the direction of a nice tutorial would be great.

 

[RangerWickett]

Ah, ENWorld doesn't like wmv's apparently. Zip it is, then.

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

Hmmm.... Well, I'm not sure how much help I'll be, since my experience is with higher end software. What you did there should be very simple, but it depends on whether your editing program can handle the basics of what's required.

I would use a program like Adobe After Effects, which would allow you to designate a path for the background image (spinning, spiralling, moving from side to side, whatever). For a simple movement like this, you would only have to designate a starting point, an ending point, and the time taken to move from A to B - the program would extrapolate all the intervening frames. Add more waypoints on the timeline, and you can make it slow down, speed up, move left, then right, etc. Very fast, although rendering time might be a bear.

How many lower end programs can do the same thing? I couldn't tell you. Flash might support that kind of thing, but I have no experience with Flash. My experience is in broadcast-quality video.

 

[RangerWickett]

Thank you. I'll look into whether my school has After Effects. I know they get great cheap deals on Photoshop and the like (well, relatively cheap, at least).