Floating Arrow Over Scene?

jayman8190 wrote on 7/15/2004, 3:37 PM
I'm developing an instructional video wherein I need to point out some details on the screen while the video rolls. I'd like to place a colored "floating" arrow on the screen over the footage.

Can anyone help suggest a way to achieve this in Screenblast? Can I simply float a clipart arrow in the video overlay line somehow?

Thanks for any suggestions.

JayMan

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 7/15/2004, 5:08 PM
Yes you can. If it has a transparent background you can place it in the overlay track and use Pan/Crop to shrink it and move it around. If you have Movie Studio 3 then you don't even need a transparent background because you can use Chroma Key to eliminate a solid color background.

Simpler yet, consider using text. There are lots of nice arrows and pointers in the WingDings character sets. Some of those should work nicely.
jayman8190 wrote on 7/15/2004, 6:15 PM
Thanks for the reply Chienworks... I'll try your suggestions.
jayman8190 wrote on 7/15/2004, 6:21 PM
It worked! Simple! Thanks Chienworks!
whiteypants wrote on 7/28/2004, 11:21 PM
What kind of pic file will support a transparent background?... as I already tried w/ a JPG, BMP, TIF& PQD and the transparent background is turned to solid white.
Chienworks wrote on 7/29/2004, 4:51 AM
If it's more of a line-art type of image without lots of color gradation then use GIF. If it's a more complex image then TGA (Targa) is a good choice.
whiteypants wrote on 7/30/2004, 5:31 PM
Strike 5 and 6 ... Those didn't work either... I don't know what I'm doing wrong!!
Chienworks wrote on 7/30/2004, 8:48 PM
Well, you do need to set the background to transparent when saving the images. None of them will do this automatically.
fleeper wrote on 8/1/2004, 8:55 AM
I tried this technique---I made me an arrow in paint shop pro--set the background to transparant, but the arrow shows up with a white background.

What am i missing?

Fleeper
tjw wrote on 8/1/2004, 10:48 AM
In PSP8, don't use the SAVE command, use the EXPORT, GIF OPTIMIZER. It then lets you set the transparent color.
whiteypants wrote on 8/2/2004, 12:08 AM
tjw you are a pimp.. Thank you soooo much for ending my agrivation!!!
tjw wrote on 8/3/2004, 6:15 AM
Thanks. I only discovered it after many hours of frustrations trying to make tranparent GIF's and just saving them.