MAKING OF CUSTOM, FANCY-NAME VIDEOS

May someday someone will write a program that lets you type in a word, then animate it in some fancy way, save the animation in some video formats, and finally combine a few of such videos into a longer one.  Maybe it already exists but I just don't know about it.  It may cost a lot of money or may be totally free.  I do have my own process and it only costs me the price of buying AmigaForever.


It is not a pretty process but it works for me.  To review, this is one example of the end product of my process, just a couple of names written in some fancy way:

The first step is to make the animation in PersonalPaint (PPaint), a paint program for the Amiga platform.  I run E-UAE emulator on my Mac and make use of the necessary Amiga programs and such from the AmigaForever package.  The Amiga platform is blessed to have these AnimatedFonts created just for the platform.  I think Adobe AfterEffects may have something similar, but I don't have the money for Adobe products.  The AnimatedFonts may have been created originally for the DeluxePaint program but PPaint also supports them.  PPaint takes the tedium out of using the AnimatedFonts by using ARexx, a scripting language for the Amiga, based on the standard Rexx.  You select the crown icon (rex = king), choose the proper script and fill in some parameters then execute the script.  In my case, I use only the Animate Text and the Save to GIF scripts.  The Amiga platform has its own AnimBrush animation format that most of the rest of the world doesn't care about, so to have the product used outside of the Amiga platform it's necessary to convert the animbrush files to the animgif format.  Name by name, I would write them then convert to animgif.  I find that having each frame set to 10 and the last frame set to 60 show the animation at a reasonable speed.  I also do not use Transparency so that the animation appears on a black background instead of a white one.

Animgif files are great but for my purpose I need something in a video format.  I cannot recall if I spent much time researching but my conversion tool of choice is via the web site EZGIF.com.  There are many tools to slice and dice animgif files but to me the most useful is converting them to MP4.  As soon as I click Save, the MP4 comes down with some default name.  I would go into my Downloads folder and rename the file to match the name from the animgif.

Not too long ago I finally discovered the joy of using iMovie.  It was a natural progression to try to use iMovie to compile my various MP4 into one nice movie. Alas, that's not the case.  For some reason, some MP4 wouldn't play properly.  Instead of starting from the beginning they would start somewhere in the middle and ends somewhere else near the end.  The files would play fine in VLC or QuickTimePlayer, they just don't play well within iMovie.  I also tried the free Spark Editor from Adobe, same result.  Very weird.  Luckily, I stumbled upon ClipChamp.com and it works like a charm.  The interface is very similar to iMovie, maybe it's just a standard thing.  You can even add generic music and other effects but I decided to keep things simple and only use ClipChamp to string the various MP4 files into one movie.  Exporting the movies at the lowest resolution is free and that's by me.

There you have it, quite a process but it works:

1. PersonalPaint either on a real Amiga computer or an emulator.  The nice thing with the emulator is the resulting GIFs are on the host computer.  You don't have to worry about getting them off an Amiga computer to some web-enabled machine to use the online tools mentioned.
2. EZGIF.com to convert the animgif files to MP4
3. ClipChamp.com to combine the few MP4 files into a bigger video.  I was able to combine nine video files, they are short to begin with though.