Okay so you've gotten the hang of making animated gifs using Adobe ImageReady. Now you're ready to take your work to the next level. This tutorial will cover adding clean text effects with Windows Movie Maker, changing the speed of the animation, selecting multiple frames, and general tips which will improve your overall skill with ImageReady. Note: This tutorial is not meant to be used as a standalone ImageReady tutorial. If you've made it this far with IR, then it's assumed you've read

Kambodianboi's Avi to Gif Tutorial

and

My ImageReady Basics Tutorial

If you haven't, read those, play with ImageReady, and come back when you feel you're ready. Do not Proceed without reading those two guides!!!

Guide:

Part I- Adding Text With Windows Movie Maker

1. Once you've got your clip trimmed down, and you're ready to add text, use the timeline or the player to navigate to the part of the clip you want to add text to.

2. Click Tools-->Titles and Credits from the top menu.



3. Click Add Text on the Select Clip.



4. Enter the text you wish to add in the box.



5. After you input the desired text, click change font and color.



6. From this menu, you'll be able to pick the font, size, color, and position of your text.



7. Once you select the desired settings, click change title animation. There are several animation effects to choose from, you can preview the selected animation in the preview window.



8. When you're done, click "Done Add Title to Movie."



9. Repeat as necessary until you've added all the desired text, then save your video file. Remember to save it as a dv avi file, so ImageReady will be able to read it without any problems.

Part II- ImageReady Tips and Tricks

A. Once your animation is loaded into ImageReady, crop it down to remove any extraneous or black areas.

1. Click the crop button.



2. Once you see the square icon with the slash through it, left click to the bottom left of your image, beginning at the area you want crop. While holding left click, outline the area you want to crop. You'll see a box around the area you highlighted, this area shows you what will be left after cropping the image. Once you have the desired area ready to crop, let go of left click.



3. The cursor will turn into an arrow at this point. Double click anywhere in the crop window and the image will be cropped as specified.



4. Sit Tight while it crops, this might take a minute or two depending on how many frames are present in your animation.



B. Highlight Multiple Frames

1. Click in the Animation Window. Click on the frame you want to highlight and hold left click. While holding left click, hold shift. Either use the slider or move the mouse left or right to the group of frames you wish to highlight. When you have the desired group of frames highlighted, release shift and left click.



2. Once you have the desired frames selected, you can delete them or change the frame delay. This is particularly useful if the clip you're using clip that has a number of consecutive frames you wish to delete. Remember the trash can icon is used to delete the desired frame(s).

C. Changing the Frame Delay

The Frame Delay determines how long each frame will be displayed, in hundreths of seconds. For example, the default delay is .03 seconds or 3/100's of a second. This is much too fast. I find a good general frame delay is .2 or 2/10's of a second. Note: Depending on which browser you're using, the same animation will be displayed at different speeds. Animations tend to move much faster in FireFox than Internet Explorer. Even if the animation looks good to you, you need to remember that a lot of people use alternative browsers, so what looks good in IE may not in FireFox, and vice versa.

1. Highlight the frames for which you wish to change the delay.

2. Click the down arrow icon next to one of the highlighted frames.



3. This will bring up the frame delay menu. You can pick from one of the presets, or click on the other box at the bottom of the menu and manually input a delay time. Once you select the frame delay for the highlighted frames, it may take a minute for each frame to be adjusted, depending on the number of frames selected.



Part III- General Tips and Tricks

1. Delete extraneous frames. Even when hosting images remotely (i.e. ImageShack or PhotoBucket) you're generally limited to around 1MB for the max size of a sig. Delete any unecessary frames. Sometimes this is easier said than done. It's much easier if the frames are consecutive. You may have to delete several small series of frames to compress your image to 1MB and preserve an acceptable level of quality.

2. Watch previews multiple times. Preview your animation multiple times. You'll be surprised at how quickly you'll get adept at picking out imperfections or extraneous frames.

3. Master taking out every nth frame. In my previous ImageReady tutorial I covered taking out every nth frame. This is done from the initial load screen when you open your avi file. This reduces the overall frame count without impacting the quality of the animation, if done properly. If you take out too few, you'll be left with 300-400 frames, which is difficult to compress with any level of quality, even for myself. Take out too many frames any you'll be left with an animation which is jerky, and doesn't look natural. Don't be too perfect here, just get it so it looks reasonably smooth. I find every 4th frame is a good number to reduce frame count and preserve quality.

4. Be patient. You're not going to create award winning gifs over night. I myself am not very patient. It took 100's of hours playing with ImageReady to reach my current skill level. There's still a lot of room for improvment.

Here's the finished product:

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nice!!!!!! going to be very helpful for alot of people well done ls

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[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]

Thank you. We definitely saw a lot animations start popping up after my last IR tut, as well as Kam's.

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