How to create animations in PowerPoint, ImageReady and Photoshop

Motley flickering of banners, "live" pictures, avatars and other multimedia chips on the pages of many sites can not but cause the inquisitive "user" to learn how to create animations. But the World Wide Web was so tenacious that many users, adhering to it, sometimes forget or even not know about all the features of their own computer and rarely look (if they look at all) into the Microsoft Office folder on the Start menu. But there, in addition to such high-profile and popular services as Word, Excel, Outlook, etc., there is a really powerful (as the name implies) PowerPoint application.

Animation in PowerPoint

This program is famous for its rich arsenal of easy-to-use but effective tools for creating presentations, and about these features of the application "a lot of songs are stacked," but it's much less likely to talk about how to create an animation in Powerpoint. The fact is that this function is just for reviving presentations, and besides, there are a lot of services on the web where you can quickly and easily "concoct" an animated picture. Nevertheless, PowerPoint's abilities in this regard, bribing with its simplicity and effects, are worthy of attention, especially since there are ways to save the animation (not presentation!), Despite the fact that the application does not.

The easiest way to explain how to create animations, using the training scheme "do as I do." To demonstrate the principal features of the program it will be enough to create a primitive animation by rolling a kolobok, whose role we will offer to play one of the standard application shapes.

Open PowerPoint and if you are greeted with the inscription "First slide", click in the workspace and create a cover page for the future animation (the first slide), creating a title on the "Home" page and then going to the "Design" page for background design. Here you can select one of the suggested themes, adjust colors, fonts and effects, select "Background Styles" or refuse to display the background image included in the selected theme by checking the "Hide background images" checkbox. If you click the diagonal arrow to the right of "Background", the "Background Format" window opens, where you can select the fill type, texture or image. Just do not press the "Apply to all" button if we want the animation frames to have a different background.

Just above the first slide, click on the small triangle on the "Create Slide" button and select "Blank", then apply the background as described above.

Next "Insert"> "Shapes"> Smile face "Smile", click on the work area and transform the shape to the desired size. Go to the page "Home", you can repaint the kolobok ("Fill"), contour and add the effect. Now specifically about how to create animations, step by step.

Set the figure at the beginning of the movement to the "start" position, right-click on the "Slides" tab on the right and select "Duplicate Slide", then move the "kolobok" slightly in the direction of motion, slightly scrolling it clockwise. This will be the first phase of the complete cycle of the movement of the object. Then duplicate again, but already a copy, move the figure to the next phase of the movement with rotation and so on. From the number of takes and the step of the bias will depend on whether the "kolobok" will roll smoothly and smoothly or "tear claws" away from the grandmother, jumping and twitching like a bitten off fox.

Go to the "Animation" page and select the transition speed between frames, selecting "Automatically after" and setting the time (in seconds). If less than a second, you need to insert a comma after the right pair of zeros and enter the desired value.

If you click the "Customize animation" button, the right panel will open to the right, where you can add an effect to the object by selecting it and selecting the display mode.

When you have finished "shooting a clip", go to the "Slide Show" page and to view the "From the beginning" button.

Now the file can be "saved" in one of the formats available in PowerPoint, including the gif extension, but in the latter case it will be just a set of static images, and we are interested in how to create a gif animation. Exit from the situation to the ridiculous is simple - you can use converter programs, for example, "Powerpoint PPT to AVI GIF Converter". This tool easily converts .PPTX files into GIF and AVI formats.

If you have Camtasia Studio installed to capture an image from the screen, especially if it is included as an add-in in your application package, the problem of creating gif animation is resolved by itself. However, despite the mass and variety of effects in Powerpoint, the creative possibilities here are somewhat limited, so many users have a natural desire to figure out how to create an animation in Photoshop.

Animation in ImageReady

Surely not everyone has switched to the latest modifications of "Photoshop" and they use "elderly" versions with the ImageReady program, which was shipped from "Photoshop" to CS3, and then was removed as a useless application, due to the inclusion of its functions in the "main "The editor. Therefore, it seems expedient to first deal with the animation in ImageReady, especially since the application can be launched directly from "Photoshop" by clicking the lowest button on the toolbar. If the image was opened in Photoshop, we'll see it in the ImageReady window and note that the interface has not changed much, but at the bottom there is an animation panel on which there is one frame with a sketch of the downloaded image, if it is single-layered. This panel can also be opened in the Window menu by selecting the line "Show Animation Panel" (Show Animation).

One layer of the image is one frame, and if there are several layers, there will be as many frames that can become a cartoon. Thus, the simplest way to create an animation is to prepare a multi-layered drawing, where each layer will contain one of the phases of a sequential transformation of an object, whether it's movement, changing shape, color, transparency, content, or something else. You can not move the object, but only change its appearance.

Having finished the work on the "script" in the layers palette, click the arrow button in the upper right corner of the panel and selecting the "Make Frames From Layers" line, turn each layer into a separate frame, where the bottom layer will be the first, And the last one is the top one.

Now you can turn on the entire volume of the button "Play animation" (Play / Stop animation) and view the result. The time delay on the screen for each frame can be changed by clicking on the small triangle next to the value in sec. It is desirable that at least some time has been specified, because the speed of scrolling "0" each browser understands in its own way.

In the list of animation scrolling modes with the name of one of them (Forever) under the first frame left, you can choose Once or Other, where the number of cycles is indicated.

Clicking in the animation panel on one of the frames created from the multi-layered drawing, we can correct it on the canvas, since in the layers panel the glazier will be opened only in this layer (but this does not mean that you can not show others, adding details if necessary To the selected frame). This feature allows you to create animations by drawing a frame by frame. Open a file, create a new frame in it (duplicate the current layer button), and draw a three in the new layer in the word panel (if Make Frames From Layers was selected). Duplicate the frame with the number, go to a new layer and close the eye of the previous layer with a three, draw a dvoechku. Duplicate the frame with a deuce, go to a new layer, close the eye to the previous one and draw a single. We set the delay time and turn on the "start time countdown".

In ImageReady, you can create animations from pre-prepared drawings by selecting File> Import from the Folder as Frames command, along which all files are distributed in layers and frames in the order in which they were merged into Folder. Therefore, in order not to shuffle frames in the animation palette, you need to number them. In addition, the result is better when all files are the same size and resolution.

The program still knows how to create intermediate animation frames, if it is offered pictures of the initial and final state of the object. To do this, there is a Tween button (Animate frame with intermediate frames), which includes the process taking into account the parameters selected in the dialog box.

Animation without layers

You can make the animation without creating any new layers at all. Let's say we have a drawing from one layer. Remove the check mark from the Make Frames From Layers command, create a new frame (a button with a duplicated the current layer), go to it and drag the object to the position (or position it) on the canvas, or change the opacity (Opacity), or add effects (effects), or choose all at once. Then click Tween, specify the number of frames, set, where necessary, checkmarks and OK. Animation is ready, you can run.

If one of the elements of the picture should be fixed, for example the background, then in the layers palette in each frame you need to open the eye and the bottom layer, in addition to one of the upper ones.

To create a GIF animation, select the Save Optimized As command from the File menu and, specifying the location, save the file, but before proceeding, go to the Optimized, 2-Up, 4-Up tabs in the upper left corner of the ImageReady main window and connect the Optimize palette ), Try to reduce the size of the GIF file.

Animation based on video files

Starting with CS3 version, in addition to animation panel and ImageReady functions, assimilated with the program, in "Photoshop" there is one more possibility for solving such problems as creating animations, but already based on video files. This function is turned on by the Video Frames to Layers command in the File> Import menu.

Choose a video file for GIF-animation, the parameters of which we will be asked to define in the opened dialog box. Here we tell the program which part of the video file to include in the processing, selecting either "From start to finish" (From Beginning To End), or "Only a selected range" (Selected range only). Then we set the number of frames to be left (Limit to every) and check the "Make Frame Animation" checkbox. To select a range, cropping elements located under the video are used.

Click OK and the image of the first frame of the future GIF-movie opens in front of us, and the original video file (or fragment) is already divided in a sequential order into layers in the layers panel and frames in the familiar navigation panel (Animation). We lose, make adjustments if necessary and save the animation by selecting the command "Save for Web ..." in the File menu and adjusting the parameters of the file to optimize it.

"Scripts" for animation

To implement such tasks, how to create gif-animation, you can use the command Load files into stack (Load files into the stack) in the menu File> Scripts. In the opened dialog box, select either the files individually, or a folder with pre-prepared images, using the "Browse (B) ..." button. You can use a video file, as in the import version, but in this case you will have to convert the video to images, but after the conversion, the files will be sequentially named, in any case, the converter program Free Video To JPG Converter does.

Further development of the script in some details depends on the version of "Photoshop", but in any case only one (first) frame will appear in the animation panel (Animation) or timeline (Timeline) in CS6. Select (with the Shift key) all the layers in the layers palette, expand the drop-down menu in the upper-right corner of the animation bar (timeline) and select Create Frame Animation (Create frames from layers). Without losing time on scrolling, again open the drop-down menu and select the command Reverse Frames, because at loading frames, as well as layers, are distributed from the last to the first. Next you need to "Select All Frames" and set the delay time for all at once. Now we lose and if everything suits, save the animation by selecting the command "Save for Web ..." in the File menu.

In the Photoshop version of "CS6", the timeline was called the time scale in the same Window menu. Here, a new command Create Video Timeline (on which the panel is really transformed into a typical timeline of the video editor), where all the frames are distributed along the tracks. In each frame with the help of key points it is possible to change a number of parameters in time, from which by default there are "Position", "Opacity" and "Style". For time-lapse animation, the time scale is transformed by the command "Create frame animation".