How to automate common animation/imaging tasks
By Dr Alex
Animating and imaging are fun but they always include some repetitive tasks as well, like processing multiple files, or doing a number of changes to individual files. Also, today audio/video/animation/image files come in a wide variety of formats – the applications you have in place are likely to support only some of them. Compatibility is just one of many reasons for converting from one format to another. For instance, you may wish to open your files as soon as possible, or place them on the web where they will occupy the minimal amount of disk space.
From time to time you will have to do at least some of the following operations:
 Convert from one video format to another, from one audio format to another, or from one image format to another
Resize your videos, change the color depth, aspect ratio, or level of compression
Change audio sample rate, mono/stereo, resolution, or level of compression
Crop or resize your images, or change their resolution
Extract audio files from video files
Extract images from video and animation files
Combine two or more video files into one big video file, or two or more audio files into one big audio file
Combine a set of still images into a video file
Merge animations with one or more sound files, and
Obtain detailed information on your audio/video files.
Processing a large number of files will drive you crazy if you have to do them one at a time. To save your time and simplify multi-step and multi-file operations, Animator Professional includes two powerful tools:
- Audio-Video Processor, and
- Image Processor.
The two processors allow you to do all of the above listed operations quickly and easily. When you use Audio-Video Processor for the first time you will find it an astonishing tool you cannot do without.
Processing files with Audio-Video Processor is an easy 3-step operation:
 Click the Add button to add the files for processing
Specify output options (presets let you do that in one go), and
Click the Do it! button.
For example, let’s say that your job is to:
- Convert 50 MPEG video files to AVI format
- Change the audio sample rate from CD quality to Radio quality (22,050)
- Change the number of channels from stereo to mono
- Change the audio resolution from 16-bit to 8-bit
- Compress the audio with a high-quality compression codec
- Change the width and height to 352 by 240 pixels
- Lower the number of colors from millions (24-bit) to 256 (8-bit) using quality color reduction
- Change the frame rate from 25 (PAL, used in Europe) to 29.95 (NTSC, used in US)
- Compress the video with a high-quality compression codec
The good news is, you can do all this in ONE SINGLE go. If you need to do the same thing again, you just save the settings as a preset.
Likewise, Image Processor allows you to change the image format, the number of colors, dithering, palette, and resize or trim/crop your images, all in ONE SINGLE go.
The list of supported audio/animation/video/image formats is huge - click here to see if your format is supported.
Putting it all together
Many animation/imaging tasks can be fully automated - multiple files and multiple changes can be processed at a click of a button. Automate your animating/imaging using the best tools on the market: it will save you time and money, and give you best-quality results.
Click here to find out more about Animator Professional.
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