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In forums and blogs all over the world there are people who use movie clips and animations as avatars.  Done correctly, they are pleasing to the eye, and draw attention towards your posts.  But done incorrectly they are distracting, annoying to people viewing webpages, and can really suck bandwidth.  This tutorial details the simplest way to create animated avatars from movie clips.  We can't help you pick the best subject for your creations, unfortunately, but we can definitely give a few handy hints to keep the file sizes down.
 

Step 1: Find a movie trailer featuring a short animated scene that takes your fancy.  In this tutorial I have decided to use Quicktime as my player, and get the Doom movie trailer from the Apple Trailer website. Virtually any movie player will suffice, as long as you can pause clips and advance them again keyframe-by-keyframe. With your movie player paused at the start of the clip you want to capture, hit the 'Print Screen' key on your keyboard to save a screenshot.

Step 2: Open up Imageready, Select File > New, and press OK - the dimensions should automatically state your current screen resolution.  Now Edit > Paste.   Your screenshot frame will appear as a layer in your new document. Go back to your movie player and move the film clip on by one keyframe.  In Quicktime you can do this by pressing the right cursor key when the Quicktime window is selected.  Whatever you do, do *NOT* move the physical position of the window.   Now press Print Screen again, go into Imageready, paste again, and repeat these steps as many times as you need.

Step 3:  Once you have screen-captured all the frames that you need, bring out the Crop Tool and crop the area of the video that you want to appear in your final animation.   You can hold down SHIFT on your keyboard whilst you make the crop if you need it to be rectangular. You should now have a list of layers in your layers palette, with a solitary white layer in the background.  Delete this white layer.   Now all you need to do is open up the animation palette (Window > Animation), click on the little arrow on the far right of the palette, and select 'Make Frames From Layers' from the drop-down menu that opens.

Step 4: Open the Optimize Palette (Window > Optimize) and set your Format to GIF.   Now all you have to do is select File > Save Optimized As, and save your file. Optimization Rules: Animated .GIFs are essentially just a collection of images which play in succession, as is the case with most video files.  This roughly means that as the number of frames doubles, so does the file size.  To keep a reasonable limit on the final animation bloat, you can either reduce the number of frames, or reduce the quality of each frame that you use.  The technique for the former suggestion is obvious - just be more selective in the animation frames that you choose.  To alter the latter, you can drop the number of colors in your GIF, or just keep the physical size of the animation down to a minimum. Remember when creating your animated .GIF that most forums have distinct file and dimension size limits on avatars, so don't go too overboard, and always aim for the best possible compromise between glorious detail and file density.  Have fun, and I look forward to seeing your creations gracing the BioRUST Forums real soon! :)

- Tutorial written by Man1c M0g

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