HOW To make mpeg into avatar

[sheriff]

I think my subject sez it all. I have this little 389k file of 2 of
penquins(mpeg). one trips the other as it walks by and crashes through the ice. Been trying to use that as my avatar. cant get it to work.
any ideas???????

[SEALTEAMTHREE]

you'd have to capture all the frames into images, and then put all of them together into an animated GIF. I don't know how you would go about doing that.

[sheriff]

Sounds like it might take some software to be able to look at the
MPEG file frame by frame??????????

[OuTpaTienT]

You avatar has got to be very small. 10k or less I believe. And it has to be in an image format like .jpg or .gif (.gif if you want it animated).

I can tell you that if you're lucky you'll be able to maybe squeeze in 5 or 6 frames of animation, if even that.

You can just pause the movie and then do a screen capture to get the frames you want. Then use a gif animating program to compile them into a .gif image.

[sheriff]

OK. I'll try that. Thanks.

Crystaldragon seems to be the leader in animated avatar making, and has said he can get 10-12 frames into an avatar. How about posting something in the Heads Up, O Minister of Avatars thread which is in the IMO Community forum (don't try and read the whole thread - it's humungous! Just post at the end... ).

The artists in that thread have helped a lot of others with avatars, as well as creating them from scratch (like mine )

Mick

[^hyd^]

If I remember correctly (which does happen sometimes!) then you won't be able to do a screen print of it, at least not if it is playing through windows media player(6.4). I've tried before and all I ever got was the player outline and a black movie section... might work if played through a different movie player though... or might just need a different utility... or maybe I just did something wrong...

I'm sure theres a video guru around here somewhere that will come along and maybe get you started...

cheers!

[Knothead]

Hey, Sheriff! Great name!
Mickwish has got the straight draw...git on over, and we'll meet ya at High Noon!

[howste]

JASC's Animation Shop can do it. It comes with Paint Shop Pro. If you can post a link to it or email it to me, I can give it a shot.

The number of frames you can get into an animated GIF depends on how much change there is from frame to frame, how many colors are used, etc. To use it as an avatar here it has to be 10000 kb or less.

[The Mushroom]

finally something i can help with (im kinda new ), ok, like others said b4 u need to get the frames u need for the gif from the movie file, -u can do this with ulead gif animator (which i use) or other gif softwares around, u open the movie file using the GIF editor and cut the frames you dont need in the avatar, and then just play with the size to see when it makes to 10KB.
if u dont wanna mess with gif editors and such u can just let me do this for you in icq (153513961)
happy2help