What Is It? | Instructions | Possible Errors | Future Versions | Making Animations |
This page describes how to create animations and phases. To manipulate objects in the editor, refer to the main instructions page.
This page is divided into four main parts:
A phase is an instance in time. All of the properties of the objects in a cartoon can be set to different values in different phases. To get a better feel for this, try opening some saved files in the "Sample Files" folder; if they have more than one phase, poke around and see what the other phases look like.
The phase panel to the left of the window lets you manipulate phases. You'll notice by default there is only 1 phase. To add a phase, select "Duplicate Phase." A new phase will be created that is an exact copy of the previous phase you were looking at. To delete a phase, select "Remove Phase." To ghost a phase, double click that phase in the list of phases. When a phase is ghosted, if you go to another phase and select any object, that selected object as it appears in the ghosted phase will be lightly drawn underneath. This shows where an object is going to or coming from. The "Copy To:" popup button lets you copy the selected objects to another phase. Their state in the destination phase is replaced by how they currently appear on the screen. (The phase panel can be removed under the "Options" menu if you need the screen space. All of its features are mirrored in the "Phase" menu.)
There is always a phase selected in the list of the phases in the phase panel (or under the "Phase" menu). To traverse to another phase, click the destination phase once. A 1.5 second animation will take you from the current phase to the destination phase. This animation is just to help you preview how your phases will transition; it has nothing to do with a final animation of your cartoon.
Optional Technical Note:
Some call this type of animation tweening. Tweening means that a property has an initial value and a final value, and an animation can be made to gently blend from one value to the other. In the case of these cartoon files, this logic is extended to dozens of properties within each object. The best part about tweening is that it's mathematical: that means each property will always smoothly transition, and infintely many frames of infinitely fine detail can be created between two phases. The largest criticism of tweening is that you have no control over the path things take. For an object to move from one location to another, it will move in a straight line. If you wanted it swoop down in a large semicircle: you're out of luck. Unfortunately, the Cartoon Editor does not provide a solution to this criticism. When I get around to creating the new animation editor, I will try and address this problem. |
When you're ready to start animating, select "New Animation" from the "File" menu. The Animation Editor lets you edit individual sequences to create an animation. A sequence is a transition from one phase to another. A sequence has a beginning phase and an ending phase, both of these are adjustable with their respective popup buttons indicated in the window.
There are two ways to define the length of a sequence:
You can traverse sequences by clicking the "Previous" and "Next" buttons. Note that if there is no sequence after the current sequence, a new sequence will be created.
Once you've arranged all of your sequences in satisfactory order, you're ready to click "Export."
Having clicked "Export" in the Animation Editor, a new window will appear. Select the "Movie" tab in the new Export dialog box. Select the desired movie output format ("mov", "dv", or "avi), and click the "Export" button. You can also select an AIFF file to use as the movie's soundtrack, as well.
After initially rendering each frame, a QuickTime dialog box will appear specifying the properties of the movie format chosen. These choices offer varying levels of compression, quality, and speed controls.
For compatibility with iMovie, save your animation as digital video ("dv").
After selecting "Export" and make sure "Animated Gif" is the selected tab in the Export dialog box. Here you can adjust the colors of your gif; the key limitation to animated gifs is that they can only contain 256 colors. You're provided three options to choose your color palette:
The "Loop Forever" button runs animations as long as they are visible. If this is unchecked your animation will run once immediately after loading and never again.
"Error Diffusion" can take up to 10 times longer to render each frame. If you're using an optimized color palette, this option rarely improves image quality, and it can increase file size as compression schemes may not work as well with diffused frames.
Again, several thanks to the makers of ImageMagick for posting their color reducing algorithm online (I now have nightmares about 3D binary trees...) and to J. M. G. Elliott and Jef Poskanzer for the great Gif encoding code. See the enclosed "Read Me" file for copyright information.
Optional Technical Notes:
The GifEncoding package used (written by Poskanzer) uses Lempel-Ziv compression. Before this, a minimal-bounding routine is applied to compress frame data. To further compress file sizes, reduce the color table (usually to a power of 4 for best results). |