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:
- 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.
- EZGIF.com to convert the animgif files to MP4
- 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.
Last year, I discovered the joy of Google Auto Awesome, http://www.qaptainqwerty.com/2013/07/google-auto-awesome-is-awesome.html . The idea is simple enough. Take a series of photos of a scene and Goolge Photo intelligently recognizes the moving elements and the still background to cobble together a nifty animated GIF, or a mini movie. As the name suggests, the work is done automatically. It seemed to be a great idea and I made a few such "animations" but my latest attempt failed. The animGIF below was not made by Google Auto Awesome but instead was done on my Mac laptop using GIFfun. I took a series of photos, which I think show my mini-me, in CubeeCraft form, running in a circle. Admittedly the background is not constant, but it looks pretty much the same from frame to frame. Only to me, as it turned out, and not to Auto Awesome. Awesome takes its sweet time to make the anim so at first I thought it would be just a matter of time. Maybe I have too many photos and it takes time to scan them and auto-detect the animation. I took the photos one night before going to bed. The next morning, still no anim from the photos. I waited a few hours then gave up and made the animGIF with GIFfun, which I got for free off the Stone Design web site, http://www.stone.com/GIFfun/ . Thank you, Stone!
I think the uniform color of the floor may have confused Auto Awesome. I plan to take another shot at it, this time with some other objects in the foreground, colorful objects that make them look different from the floor. Stay tuned!
I love that sign on the border of Queens and Brooklyn on the Belt Parkway. It says "Leaving Brooklyn, Fuhgeddaboutit". There is another sign just like it on the Belt Parkway on the ramp to the Verrazano Bridge, but it is not accessible to pedestrian, or anyone for that matter. You just drive by that one as you head for Staten Island, unless you want to drive onto the grass and attract unwanted attention from any nearby police cruiser. The one near Queens, on the other hand, is easily reached if you don't mind the trip on bike or on foot. I visited it some time ago on bike and took some selfies with a camera, not with a smartphone as I didn't have one back then. The result was not too satisfactory. This past summer I tried to run there but it got too hot I had to stop at Canarsie Pier to get drinks and then headed back. I didn't even run all the way back, but rather get to Avenue U to get another cold drink then climbed onto a bus to get home. I don't like to spend money or gasoline while on runs, but that day I made the exception.
Recently I also made exception for really early morning runs with my running partner. J needs to put in some long miles for his marathon in February and like me he has family duties to attend to so we agree to run really early, like 6 AM. We normally meet in Marine Park or Sheepshead Bay and neither place is easily accessible by public transit. And I don't want to run there since I want to save the energy for the long run. So I drove.
For today's run, our goal was to log 15 miles total. I did mention running to the Fuhgeddaboutit sign at the Queens border, but it would overdo the goal. So we agreed to go 7.5 miles out along the Belt Parkway, which for sure would put us short of the sign, then 7.5 miles back to our cars. Still, when we got 7.5 miles done, the sign was not that far away. J was a good sport and agreed to go there anyway, we would just walk part of the way back. We lost a few minutes posing with the sign, J with a scowling face supposedly as a Brooklyn 'tude, while I had him take a few shots of me throwing my arms forward, for Google Awesome to auto-convert into an animated GIF. It was supposed to be as if I was saying "Fuhgeddaboutit" but it looks more like I was imitating swimming. I love it nonetheless and hope you do too!
