best way to animate?

cry0fan wrote on 4/1/2005, 3:05 PM
I am a bit of a novice at Video Vegas and have a question about animation.

I am working on a personal project. I am also grateful to those who helped me here earlier on how to scroll large amounts of text from top to bottom on a overlay over a child track for an extended period of time (for those who are interested, the solution that worked best for me was to create a still image with colored text in photoshop with a transparent background, then paste in the large block of text and save the image as .png, which is then imported into the VV project. The image size was 400 pixels wide and 3000 pix long. Then I used pan and crop on the image event, from the first keyframe (top of the image) to the last keyframe (bottom of the image), which ran for the length of the still image event. The effect worked quite well--my bottom child video track contained some basic video, and scolling over that were words, moving from bottom to top. You could see the video underneath the words and read the words at the same time.).

Now, as for my current question:

I need to have some animation in my project, in particular, moving images and arrows and boxes and such. Also, for example, bar charts, where the bars would change in magnitude over a second in time. Also, flashing text.

I know that I can do moving images using track motion: import and image into a parent track. The image can be a face for example on a solid colored background. Then I chroma key out the background. Then I could use track motion to achieve the picture-in-a-paciture effect, which should give me the face only moving over different locations in the child video track. That should work, right?

But how can I get things like changing colors in the boxes of a series of still images? Arrows moving from one box to another box in still images? Growing and shrinking bars in bar charts?

Do I need to go to flash programming? Can I?

I have found past posts here about using powerpoint animation, and then importing either video converted from the ppt files, or importing a series of still images from the ppt files. Not too much free software out there for this ( I did find 3 however: powerpointimageexporter.zip (exports a series of jpgs, I think) and ppt2swf and cp_setup.exe (a barebones capture utility; you can google them....).

powerpoint seems like a hassle. Of course, I imagine flash programming is probably even more so--as is any programming.

I would appreciate any comments or suggestions.

Thanks.

Comments

BillyBoy wrote on 4/1/2005, 3:57 PM
Sounds like what you're mostly talking about is morphing. If you already have Flash or are thinking of getting it or one of the clones, changing the colors, sizes or shapes of objects like graphs on a bar chart is a piece of cake and doesn't need to be done with "programming" ie not ActionScript. Flash works a little like Vegas in that you can add unlimited layers (similar to tracks in Vegas) and "tween" objects using keyframes. So changing the length or color of objects is easy. You can create such things in Flash, then export to Vegas to incorporate in a regular movie. Animating arrows is also simple in Flash. Click on my name above, then hit the continue button shortly after watch how the arrow animates sliding along the top pointing at the menu choices and tilting as it goes in the little introduction before you pick any tutorials.

May be more than you need. You can use Vegas to make check boxes, color them, flash the colors, etc, just set up a overlay track and use keyframing to get the animation you want. You may find using Satish's Wax or one of his eariler 3D tools simpler. You don't really need any parent/child tracks combinations to do simpler stuff like you want.
farss wrote on 4/1/2005, 4:07 PM
BBs right,
you can also use composits in Vegas to do most of this. For example, create a white arrow on a black backgound in any photo app, use that as a mask over a solid color, crossfade the solid color into another color on the same lower track. Now your arrow will change color over time. You can move your arrow using track motion and keyframes. Actually I think the Cookie Cutter has an arrow template?
It's probably a lot quicker doing this in a purpose built app, if you only need to do a few things and you might never need to do this again then I'd try doing it in Vegas rather than face another learning curve no matter how shallow that is. But if you're going to be doing this work a lot then I'd certainly be looking outside of vegas simply because of productiveity issues.
Oh and don't forget PowerPoint, most of us have it sitting on our PC as part of office and it can do some pretty neat animations. Good thing with it is if you've already got the data in a spreadsheet then creating the graphs is easy.
Bob.
cry0fan wrote on 4/1/2005, 4:27 PM
I have done a lot of programming, but not in flash. Do I need to spend any money to write a flash animation (such as I described above) that I could then mport in Vegas? I really want to do all this for free....


cry0fan wrote on 4/1/2005, 5:06 PM
After looking into flash, it looks like I would need to buy an IDE for it, so I think I am just going to try to make charts and diagrams in photoshop, and then try to do some kind of track motion thing with the parent track, so that I can get an arrow pointing to a particular part of a chart that I want to draw attention to at a particular time. I think that might work out.
BillyBoy wrote on 4/1/2005, 5:15 PM
Just so you know... If you want to get seriously into Flash, I'll coin a phrase, its dual functional. I simply mean many things can be done by dragging objects from the library (like an jpg image) and do things like morph, change color, move around the screen etc.. The real power of Flash is from ActionScript which is similar in form to JavaScripting. If you already known that, then jumping into ActionScript will be pretty simple. With ActionScript you can do literally almost anything in Flash like have one object interact with others, control others, etc..

Unless I'm' misunderstanding what you want to do, you don't really need Flash to make the animations you mentioned. You can do it really rather easy in Vegas. Between what I and Fass said, you should get the general idea.

As far as I know there are no "free" Flash like applications except for maybe some crude little knock-offs. I don't use it, think I got the name right, SWISH or something that sounds like that is a good Flash Clone that doesn't cost too much. If or not it supports scripting I don't know, sure someone else will answer I've seen it mention many times in this forum.

Cunhambebe wrote on 4/1/2005, 7:27 PM
"....how can I get things like changing colors in the boxes of a series of still images? Arrows moving from one box to another box in still images? Growing and shrinking bars in bar charts...Do I need to go to flash programming?"
- No, you can do that with Vegas.