Adobe ImageReady
About
| Warning: WARNING: Adobe ImageReady was discontinued following CS2.... most of its features were incorporated into Adobe Photoshop CS3 or Adobe Fireworks CS3 |
Adobe ImageReady was a bitmap graphics editor for Windows and Mac OS X shipped with Adobe Photoshop from 1998 to 2007. ImageReady was designed for quick editing of web graphics and has specialized features such as animated GIF creation, image compression optimization, image slicing and rollover effects, and HTML generation.
I haven't use it much - one of the only useful features is to combine a folder full of pictures into a .swf or .mov.... and I talk about this below.
Converting Pictures into a Movie (Using ImageReady)
- Create a new folder and copy in the image sequence, plus any other pictures you want in the movie.
(eg: You may want to create a title slide of the same dimensions using Photoshop saved as its native .psd)
- Open Adobe ImageReady.
- Go: File >> Import >> Folder as frames and select your folder.
- Once the images are loaded into the Animation window, you can reorder the frames as needed.
- Select all the frames in the film strip using [Shift] click, then click on the drop arrow below any frame to set the number of seconds per frame (over the selected range).
- Once happy with the timing (click play to test) go: File >> Export >> Original Document ..., and select the format as QuickTime Movie (or leave it as a .swf if you want), then click okay.
- I recommend using compression type "H.264" (although, yes "Photo - JPEG" yields better quality).
Source: Creating Quick Time Movie in Adobe ImageReady Develop by Helen Mongan-Rallis, July 24, 2002.
Adding Layers
To create a watermark is very easy - just create the text, and it will propagate onto all frames. However, to add text, shapes etc to a subset of frames is RIDICULOUSLY cumbersome and difficult to work out!
Here is the process which I used *semi-successfully* to make a title slide:
- Select the first (bottom) layer in the Layers window, right click and untick "Propagate from frame 1".
- Select the first frame in the Animation window (the corresponding picture), then add text, shapes etc... and to add effects you can go: right click > Layer Style.
- Notice that if you drag an extra layer you've created up, it will appear on more frames before disappearing, but even when I tried copying and pasting frames (using the roll out arrow on the top-right corner of the Animation window) I effectively lost the frame.
- In theory you can use the "Uniform" buttons on the Layer window to change the position on layers, but I eventually gave up on trying to have any graphics show for a subset of frames!.... instead I'd recommend that BEFORE importing your folder of images, open any pictures you want caption for in Photoshop, add text etc, then save as a Photoshop (.psd) in the same folder.
