claymation program? Imageready/Flash MX?

Allright well this post doesn't really fit in this forum that well but I tried it on the Misc. forum and nobody answered so maybe someone will have an answer here. I used my digital camera to make a little claymation sequence and then edited it in Imageready but since it has 47 frames, the resulting .gif was too big to be useful for web, at least the way I saved it. How should I have saved it so I could post it on my site and people can watch it? Or could I have used Flash MX? I just didn't want to import all the picture separatly (in Imageready I used Import>Folder as Frames...) which seems neccesary in Flash. Or is there another program I can use to do this easily and save for web/audience?

Thanks

tom

Are you talking about a movieclip taken with your camera?
Or did you manually take all frames?

If it's a clip, I suggest you import the .avi to flash, it makes them flash frames by itself and compresses it probably better than anything else..

If you took them frame by frame....dunno. Maybe still import them manually into flash or something. What I'm saying is that flash has a very decent compressing / quality ratio.

An animated GIF will be WAY too big in any case with that many frames I think.

Flash does the same with animated gifs; all the images are put into individual frames. Just compile the images in IR as an animated .gif then 'port it into Flash.

I would think a program like Adobe AfterEffects would be best for something like that. I have a friend that's a computer animation major in college, and they used After Effects for their claymation project. Then you could just export that movie to a quicktime or WMV or whatever.

If it's only 47 frames though, it's probably not worth it. They had like 800 or more in theirs I think.

But an animated GIF will definitely be way too big.

Yes the GIF was too big but maybe I can open it in Imageready and do some further editing and then export it from there in a different format and make it smaller. Yes?

tom

I don't think imageready will export it as any other animated format than an animated gif. I could be wrong though.

Sorry, I meant Flash MX.


Just as an aside, its kinda weird when you export as .gif from Imageready and then open the .gif file instead of the .psd. Messes with the frames and every frame is tweened or something. Did it by accident once.

tom

http://geovid.com/Video_to_Flash_Converter/
Converts AVI to Falsh files without any quality lossless.

just pointing out... if you are making claymations i would use a program specifically made for it, to get some cool results....

Stop Motion Pro for simple animation is all you need.
also i prefer animatorDV cause you get a little more bang.
You connect your still camera or video camera to your computer, start up the software. and then u shoot a picture. then again then again take a picture. the program lets you play back in real time all the pics taken so far, so you can plan your next claymation move better. animator DV does a 'diff' or onion skin so u can see all your pics at once to see how it is moving. also there is rotoscoping where u can take a video of you doign soemthing pretend, then overlay on top of your claymation pics and play it... so u can make your clay characters match the actions of a real person if you are unsure of how a clay character should move.

If you have already made the animation and the file size is too big, export it into flash.


Hope that helps.