help the technopeasant!

[swingchickie]

how do i make an animated avatar from a piece of something i found on youtube (using a mac)? there are 500 tutorials via google, and all of them are different.

Comments

[boutell.livejournal.com]

1. Frovrate the hoovinah
2. Bingbing the noobnah
3. Eat some halvah
4. Give me $5

Honestly, I have no idea how to do that on a Mac. You need to swipe the FLV video that their Flash player is displaying, and then I imagine you want to play with iMovie, and pull some stills with that and either make a tiny animated GIF movie with iMovie (if iMovie makes animated GIFs) or use something else for the animated GIF-ization.

I found you an article on how to grab that FLV video file and save it to your hard drive (http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20070420014456930) which doesn't look terribly hard. That's just the first step, though. I can dig a little more if your more Mac-oriented friends don't know off the top of their heads, just let me know.

[boutell.livejournal.com]

1. Frovrate the hoovinah
2. Bingbing the noobnah
3. Eat some halvah
4. Give me $5

Honestly, I have no idea how to do that on a Mac. You need to swipe the FLV video that their Flash player is displaying, and then I imagine you want to play with iMovie, and pull some stills with that and either make a tiny animated GIF movie with iMovie (if iMovie makes animated GIFs) or use something else for the animated GIF-ization.

I found you an article on how to grab that FLV video file and save it to your hard drive (http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20070420014456930) which doesn't look terribly hard. That's just the first step, though. I can dig a little more if your more Mac-oriented friends don't know off the top of their heads, just let me know.

Actually, this looks less painful (http://www.apple.com/pro/tips/secretcapture.html), because you really just want a few frames here and capturing them with the screen capture keys and then pasting them into Photoshop or whatever you have to make an animated GIF shouldn't be too bad. Hopefully screen capture actually works for videos on Macs. It's dodgy in Windows.

[mrlich.livejournal.com]

*Pulls open his shirt to reveal the giant S below*

Umm... I might be of some assistance here. Whatcha need doin?

(I have a bunch of the stuff needed to do what boutell is talking about - but for the PC. I could probably do it on my side, make an animated gif for you and then you can do with it what you will. :) )

[viellen]

Oh Hai! Your resident Apple Guru here! ;)

To my knowledge, there is no one-stop neat program to do this for you. That said, it's a relatively quick process if you have the right tools (though it probably won't be quick the first time).

1. To start with, there are two options for downloading the YouTube video (I'm sure there are more than two options, but this is what I know). Tubesock is a shareware application which will do it for you. I'm not sure if it has a free trial or if you have to pay the $15 shareware fee; I've never used it. What I do is use a script that downloads the YouTube video (I put a copy of it on my website so you can download it here, password is R021. To use it just double-click and paste the YouTube URL into the dialogue box. You then need to use a utility like iSquint to convert it to a video format (i.e. mp4, mov, etc.).

2. Open iMovie HD (if you only have iMovie '08 [the one with a star for the icon], I suggest downloading the free version of iMovie HD from Apple's Support site). Create a new project and then import the video you've created. From there, drag the video clip into your timeline. Scroll to where you want the animated GIF to start, select Edit->Split Video Clip at Playhead. Delete the clipping you don't want, repeat this process to create an ending point for the clip. Now go to File->Export and export your piece as a .mov for the web.

3. Download Graphic Converter. Open your movie in Graphic Converter. Go to WIndow->Show GIF Animation. It will ask if you'd like to convert the video to a GIF animation, say yes. When it's complete, go to File->Save As and select GIF as the file type.

You're done!

[swingchickie.livejournal.com]

thanks for the tips! i did all that, and LJ went "ack! file too big!!!!" i'm going to play around and figure out how to make the file smaller. hrm.

[viellen]

Are you trying to use it as an icon? LJ has really small requirements for it. Graphic Converter should still be able to get it down to the right size though.

Ohhh...

[occhi-cinesi.livejournal.com]

So you frovrate the hoovinah first? Weird, really weird, as that seems like it would really hotley the donajeh, which we all know is not what you want to do. But to each his own.

;)

Re: Ohhh...

[boutell.livejournal.com]

Can it be you're still using Pibbleskip Deluxe 6.0? Jeebuz. It's TWO THOUSAND EIGHT!

[boutell.livejournal.com]

Most likely it can... if there's a feature in there to cut down the frame rate, and not even try to use every frame of the original, that's likely to help a lot.

[viellen]

Yes, it allows you to choose the frame rate.

LJ also has the whole "no larger than 100 pixel" rule, so the image might need to be sized down as well.

Re: Ohhh...

[occhi-cinesi.livejournal.com]

LOL, I'm using Pibbleskip Deluxe 5.9 on my Commodore 64. Yes, that's just how cool I am...


(And now I'm singing 'How Do You Frovate the HooooooViNahh?" to the baby. Damn you Boutell, I don't even know you and you're influencing my baby.)

Re: Ohhh...

[boutell.livejournal.com]

Mommas, don't let your babies grow up to frovate hoovinahs