Animation using Photoshop layers

[Doug Nelson]

I have a Photoshop file and want to end up with an animation of one or more layers moving relative to the others. I'd like to end up with an endless loop with sound. Ideas on the easiest way to accomplish this?

I suspect Flash might be involved, but I'm open to other ideas.

[Kraellin]

there used to be a ton of .gif animation programs on the net. i havent looked recently, but these were the old standard for animation and fairly simple to work with. flash is great but much harder to work with, a much higher learning curve and usually takes a much more expensive program, like macromedia flash mx.

paint shop pro comes with Animation Shop 3. this is a .gif animation program and is the one i use for my small animations. it's fairly simple, has a few extra features like page curl and does the job relatively easily, particularly if you have psp. the two have hooks into each other. so, i can just export ALL my frames from psp directly into an animation framer and i'm good to go.

flash is great and i wouldnt want to steer you completely away from it. one of the big differences with flash is that you can draw an object and animate its movement without having to draw another cell. with .gif you have to draw each cell. so, it's a big time saver with flash not having to draw each cell.

and, i hadnt thought of this before, but you might be able to do what you want with a slide show type program like photo story 3 from microsoft or one of the others. these tend to have pretty pronounced steps between each cell/slide, but most of them can reduce that time step. just how much would be the question.

and with flash or a slide show type, you can also add music if you want. not sure the .gif ones could. animation shop 3 cant.

craig

[Janet Petty]

I don't know about adding sound, but you can animate within Photoshop itself by going to the window menu and choosing animate. When finished, export it to Image ready and save as a flash document NOT gif.

As for adding sound, again, I apologize because I don't know how to do that.

As for slideshow programs, etc., I use ProShow Gold. Very user friendly and easy to work with.

Then there is always PowerPoint, which lets you add animated gifs and sound. But that is slow, has huge file sizes, and is well...PowerPoint.

Hope that gives you another avenue to explore.

Janet

[Jerryb]

Originally Posted by Doug Nelson

I have a Photoshop file and want to end up with an animation of one or more layers moving relative to the others. I'd like to end up with an endless loop with sound. Ideas on the easiest way to accomplish this?

I suspect Flash might be involved, but I'm open to other ideas.

hi,
I don't know how your going to use the project ie; on webpage or as greeting Ecard or a stand alone file for a presentation... and lot of time knowing this background info let you know what options there are avail... and best course of action!

First as far as animate gif. The standard does not allow for sound!! simple as that... however if this project is going to be used in a webpage well you can setup your webpage to play the sound/music you want... to go along with the animated gif..

another possiblity is creating a slide show/movie file. Here you can put in your animation and whatever other graphics or clips and add sound/music and then create either a avi or mpg file ... however a avi and mpg file is finite... you won't get looping...
note: you can convert a avi to a animated gif... but again no sound in the gif..

for animated gif creation I use both ulead gif creator and gifcon from alchemy.. ulead is oneof the best and gifcon very good but a lot more user friendly than Ulead... and there several others out there..

[Doug Nelson]

Can AfterEffects make endless loops?

[Racc Iria]

Originally Posted by Doug Nelson

Can AfterEffects make endless loops?

It depends on what you mean by endless loops.

You can position and keyframe things so that it forms a seamless loop, but the actual media will only be one loop in length. Then, it's up to the playback mechanism to take care of repeating it.

For instance, if you make a loopable Quicktime movie in AE, it'll probably only be 1 loop (once through) long, but you can set the player to loop endlessly. The same with Windows Media Player. However, if you save your loopable sequence as an animated gif from AE, there is a checkbox to enable looping, but as JerryB said, no sound in an animated gif. I did not see a way to save it as Flash or Shockwave from AE, but there may be plugins to do it.

--Racc

[goose443]

ImageReady will do endless loops but will not handle sound. Animating in ImageReady is actually quite easy and best of all, it comes with Photoshop.

[stosh7]

Russel Brown has a tdetailed utorial on animation. You can get the basic idea from:

http://av.adobe.com/russellbrown/ExportedKnockoutSM.mov

check it out.

Stosh

[i.ilievski]

I will go with flash... save all your layers in separate png(24) files... so they will preserve their transparency ... then in flash U cane use those png files to do ehateever you want... sound endells loop, you can even make it to be interactive....

[chrishoggy]

If you are on CS2 everything is there for the animation. Animating layers, tweening etc, and exporting as flash via Image ready.
Bit of a tutorial below
http://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bi...2_2/index.html

Then add your sound track with any of the freeware swf editors

[marthav]

Open your layered file in Photoshop (CS2). At the bottom of the tool box click on "jump to Image Ready". In Image Ready open the animation pallet, Window>animation.

Click the visability icons on your layers to determine what will show in your first frame. Click the "new layers" icon to add another frame and change the view either by clicking the visability of the layers or moving selection with move tool. Continue to add more frames as above.

Click on the drop down at the bottom of each frame to select how long each frame will be viewed.

Click on the drop down at the bottom left of the animation pallet to select playing options, forever is the default.

Click the play arrow button on the bottom of the pallet to see how your animation looks. Click the stop button to make it stop

To save as a GIF file, File>Save Optimized
To save as a flash file, File>Export>Macromedia Flash

[Doug Nelson]

My image size (unanimated) is 90mb and my first attempt at using Photoshop's builtin animation resulted in locking up my entire system (I had to reboot). This was for a 10 second test with about 6 frames per second (final will be several minutes).

The animation is really just layers sliding over each other, so I wonder if there's not a way to input the beginning and ending point of each layer and how long I want it to take?

[marthav]

If you can make the animation more simple by creating 2 frames and "tweening" them. Select both frames. Select one and then shift click the other. then click the tweening icon at the bottom of the pallet. It looks like OOOOO (sort of). then you can choose how many frames you want added inbetween the first and last

if you want to save it as macromedia flash you have to do it in image ready

[tived]

Originally Posted by Doug Nelson

My image size (unanimated) is 90mb and my first attempt at using Photoshop's builtin animation resulted in locking up my entire system (I had to reboot). This was for a 10 second test with about 6 frames per second (final will be several minutes).

The animation is really just layers sliding over each other, so I wonder if there's not a way to input the beginning and ending point of each layer and how long I want it to take?

Hello Doug,

how many layers are you using here, it sounds to me like you are using too high dpi for your images, as this isn't print but screen display, you only need 72 dpi and your resulution couldn't be that great, well unless you are on a 9mbpixel screen ;-))

I was going to suggest Russell Browns site too, but someone beat me to it

good luck

Henrik