How to create animations straight from your
favorite paint program

By Dr Alex

Have you already invested in Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro or another popular paint program? Their main purpose is to edit images, not to create animations. Yet, there is an easy way to turn them into great animation-producing tools! All you have to do is:

Run your paint program and launch the Animator Professional, and
Turn the Autopaste on.

From then on you do not even have to leave your paint program while producing the animation frames. Of course, if you do not have a paint program, Animator's own Photo Magic will do just fine.

How does Autopaste help you create animations?

Autopaste automatically inserts the images you place on the Clipboard into your animation. Not all the images, though, only the ones you need for the animation.
You only end up with images you want to use as animation frames: if the image on the clipboard does not match the width and height of the animation frame, it is ignored.

This allows you to keep working on your image and only copy the entire frame to the Clipboard when you need it as part of the animation. You can stay in your paint program the entire time (Animator's Photo Magic or another one of your choice) and you do not have to keep switching between applications. Move, twist, and turn your images, and add new objects to produce the animation frames.

The result is the lightning fast animation design.

After you are finished with adding frames you close your paint program, set the frame rate and other options if needed and save your design as animated gif, avi, or mpeg.

What are animations you create this way best for?

Animations you create can be used for the variety of purposes. If you wish to promote your goods and services on the Internet, putting great-looking banners takes no time. Also, your documents, web pages and applications will have an extra quality with animation in them.
Animations are there to emphasize your point and to draw viewers' attention. Animator allows you to easily add sound to your animations, which makes them handy for step-by-step instructions, show-casing your product/service, and illustrating processes.

Animations are used a lot in software development. While having large-frame 1024x768 animations take up lots of disk space and are need plenty of processing power to run, compositing still images and animations has all the benefits, while keeping the files small. You place your animation on top of the image and only animate a portion of the screen. For example, the company called Platypus Software used Animator in conjunction with this powerful technique to produce first class family/educational products Crocodile Child, Lucy's Wheel Shaped Web, and Animals of Australia. Did you know that DNA Productions used Animator in creating the "Adventures of Jimmy Neutron" a Nickelodeon TV Series and various other high-profile projects?

Click here to see the larger image
Note: The original jpeg (286KB) was produced by the Animator for CD distribution. Image is optimized for the web down to 92KB jpeg from the original 286KB jpeg with Animator's Image Processor.
The spider and the butterfly animations are seamlessly placed on top of the image background.
To see the butterfly animation, click here
To see the spider 1 animation, click here
To see the spider 2 animation, click here
To see the spider 3 animation, click here
To see the grasshopper animation (with sound), click here

Click here to see the larger image

Click here to see the birth of the crocodile child (avi with sound: 1MB)
Note: The original avi (5.5MB) was produced by the Animator for CD distribution. Video is optimized for the web down to 1MB from the original 5.5MB with Animator's Audio-Video Processor.

Putting it all together

Although the primary purpose of Photoshop, GIMP, Paint Shop Pro and other popular paint programs is not to create animations, they can be effectively used to this purpose. The benefits of this approach are:

You work with the tool you are familiar with and know how to use
You do not have to study another manual and learn another interface, and
You save time: you create animations straight from your favorite paint program without switching back and forth between applications.

Click here to find out more about Animator Professional.