Animations for OSDM - Oldskool Demomaker (Tutorial)

Here is a little tutorial for OSDM. I will add it later to the OSDM Wiki as well.

Oldskool Demomaker does not support animated GIFs or any other animation/video format, but it is capable of rendering something like an animation via the work-around, which is called „Frame Animation Images“. This is basically a generic flat image in PNG, JPG or other format supported by OSDM, which contains all frames for the animation.

The only thing you have to do is tell OSDM how many frames the image contains and it will automatically slice up the image into equal size pieces, which are then shown one after another, with the speed of changing from one frame to another, depending on the value for “delay” that also needs to be specified for a frame animation image.

The Logo feature supports “Vertical Frame Animations” and the Sprites and Bounce Bobs features support “Horizontal Frame Animations”. The difference between the two is how the frames are arranged within the image; Vertical means on top of each other and horizontal means that they are arranged next to each other.

Example:
Frame animation image dimensions: 200x200 pixels, Number of frames: 2
- Vertical Frame Animation Frame Size: 200x100 pixels or
- Horizontal Frame Animation Frame Size: 100x200 pixels

Creating Frame Animations

Now, those frame animation images are hard to create by hand, because you have to be very precise. It is also virtually impossible to proper align the content within each frame to get a smooth and seamless animation sequence.

The best way to create frame animation images is by preparing all frames of the animation sequence and save them as individual images in PNG format into a separate folder on your hard disk. The file names for the images should be created by using a sequential numbering schema that they can be ordered properly; something Like “FRAME-001.PNG”, “FRAME-002.PNG” ... “FRAME-XXX.PNG” etc.

Once you have that, you can use the freeware tool „FAC – Frame Animation Creator“ for OSDM by Peace/Testaware (77 KB) to convert the set of individual images to a single image frame animation file.

• Frame Animation Creator – FAC Tool (freeware) by Peace/Testaware
  

The tool will create a single image in PNG format out of all your individual images . It also adds a suffix to the name of the output image, such as “_H99” or “_V10” etc. The “H” stands for Horizontal and the “V” for Vertical, followed by the number of frames this image contains. You will notice when you are using the finished image with such prefix in the file name, that OSDM recognizes this and automatically pre-sets the corresponding frame count parameter in the OSDM interface to the right value.

Note: I recommend for a number of different reasons that you keep your frame animation images as small in size and also in dimensions as possible. There are already restrictions build into OSDM itself when it comes to the image size of the frame animation. However, it does not restrict the dimension of an image. If an OSDM production uses an Image that exceeds the width or height of 4000 pixels, nothing of that image/animation might be shown on some machines, including my primary PC currently, which runs the 64bit version of Windows 7 Ultimate. I know from others that they don’t have this problem and animations that exceed the mentioned dimensions are still rendered on their computers, however, there is a problem for some folks out there. If you want to make your production to run properly on the most possible number of computers, don’t go over this limit.

Image Editors

Sometimes it is necessary to tweak the source images or even the final frame animation image before it can be used properly in OSDM. One example would be change the background color to back (RGB: 0, 0, 0) for transparency in OSDM for the Horizontal Sprite animations.

Using the open source image editing tool Gimp is one option and free.

•  Gimp Open Source Image Editor
  

I personally like to use the Snag-It Editor for minor image tweaks, which comes with Snag-It the Screen Capture Tool (Commercial, $50 for single user license), which I happen to own. Snag-it is also capable of making video captures of content that runs in windowed mode, which could be used to capture intros within an emulator window, if the emulator itself does not support video capture directly. DOS Box for example, which is useful to run old MS DOS intros, has a build in video capture feature and the captured video can be loaded into Virtual Dub and the frames exported from there to individual images (requires zmbv.dll codec). …more to that will follow in the subsequent paragraphs that are about the conversion from other animation formats to OSDM frame animations.

• Snag-it by TechSmith (commercial, $50 per user license)
  

Creating and Converting of Existing Animations

Not everybody is artist enough to create new animations from scratch himself for the use in your own OSDM intro production, so you probably prefer to use animations that were created by others instead.

There are a number of different sources that you could use. Some require more extra work and manual fine tuning than others. Let me provide a few typical examples that you might want to use as source.

Source: Animated GIFs

There are tons of small size animations out there created by people around the world for decades for all kinds of purposes, mostly for the use on a web site on the internet. I am referring to animated GIFs.

The animated GIF format is already very restricted in terms of the amount of colors and data the animation can have. They have to be small in size (and typically short) and only use up to 256 colors. This makes them perfect as source material for an animation in OSDM, since we also need to keep it short for the usage in our intro or demo production.

Finding Animated GIF images on the Internet; some Resources:

• http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Graphics/Web/Free/Animated_GIFs/
• http://coolclips.com/
• http://www.gifanimations.com/
• http://www.animatedgif.net/

In order to be able to create a frame animation image with FAC, the animated GIFs need to be converted to individual frame images.

Here are some tools that do exactly that.

• Animated Gif Frame Extractor (17 KB)
• IrFanView 4.25 (1.3 MB)
• IrFanView Portable Version (10 MB!)

The Animated Gif Frame Extractor is a very small and straight forward tool to convert GIF animations, but it is also slow and has problems sometimes with certain types of animated GIFs, because it does not seem to support all of the animation features that the GIF file format supports.

I actually recommend using none of the three tools that I just mentioned, but another one, which does also a lot more than just convert GIF images.

See the next paragraph for details.

Source: Videos

You might want to use a very short video sequence as animation in your demo production. This should only be a limited number of video frames, to stay within the limits of OSDM.

A good and FREE (which is also nice) tool that allows you to extract images from video frames is the open source tool Virtual Dub. It also supports animated GIFs as input files and is able to convert them to individual frame images as well. Since full motion video has many frames per second (25, 30 or even 60), a conversion just a few seconds of video would result into hundreds of individual frames.

• VirtualDub 1.9.9 (1.6-1.8 MB)

Virtual Dub Preferences for Image Exports: Set the Frame Rate for image sequences much lower, if you want to convert some full motion video to a frame animation. You might even set it as low as 1 FPS, if it makes sense.

 

Virtual Dub Image Export Settings

 

 

Source: FLASH Animations

There are folks who remade hundreds of old school intro productions from the Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga and old MS DOS PC to the Adobe/Macromedia Shockwave Flash format. Although the effects in the original production was probably accomplished via code, most of those remakes are not doing this and use pre-created animations for those effects instead. Many of them perfect for the use with OSDM.

Here are some sites where you can find those flash productions. They don’t provide links to download the flash animation in SWF format to your local machine, but as most content loaded with a web page, those flash animations are being downloaded to your web browser cache first and then executed there, so you can have a look there and copy the file to a different location on your hard disk.

There are also tools and browser plug-ins available that let you download/extract flash animation files from web pages. There are tons of options out there, but the cheapest and simplest is to look into the local temp folder as I already mentioned.

Retro-Remake web sites - Extraction from Flash Remakes of Intros/Cracktros

• Flashtro.com
• Doc Snyder’s Flash Remakes
  

Flash Resources Extractors

Use a SWF Resource Extractor/De-compiler tool to extract images from Flash files.
Probably the best tool for this kind of task is the commercial de-compiler by SourceTec, however, that one is not free, nor is it cheap.

• SWF Decompiler by SourceTec/Sothink (commercial, $80), same as Eltima Flash De-compiler

But I did a quick test with the free tool SWF Picture Extractor and it also seems to do the trick. It only extracts the images from a SWF file, but that is all we really care about in the first place.

• SWF Picture Extractor (Freeware)
  

Here are two other supposedly free SWF extraction tools that I have found on the internet, but which I have not tested myself, so I don’t know if they are any good or not:

• SWF Extractor Free
• Fortop SWF Resources Extractor Version 1.0 (supposed to be freeware)
  current SW version is only $10 though

Source: Other Frame Animations

Another not so obvious source for an animation could be frame animation images that were created by others for example. They might be ready to use, if you plan to use them in the same way the original creator intended it or used in his own production, but this might also not be the case.

For example. If you have a cool Vertical frame animation that you would like to use, but via the Sprites or Bounce Bobs features instead of the Logo, then you have a problem, because Sprites and Bounce Bobs support only Horizontal frame animations.

Since you do not have the original individual frame images, the Frame Animation Creator tool won’t help you with this. At least not without an additional intermediate step, the conversion back from the frame animation image to single frame images. Since this option is not provided by FAC nor OSDM itself, I decided to write a little tool in PureBasic that is doing just that. It slices up Vertical and also Horizontal frame animations in PNG image format.

• Vertical/Horizontal Frame Animation PNG to Frame Images Converter (78 KB)

Conclusion

Okay, that rounds up my little tutorial about the creation of animations for the Oldskool Demomaker by Peace/Testaware.

Make sure to check out the OSDM related section on my own web site for demo and intro productions that I created with the tool as well as useful resources that you might also learn to appreciate for your very own intro/demo project.

I also suggest stopping by the OSDM support portal, which has a community form, wiki and other goodies. There you can find answers to your questions, either from what is already there or by simply asking others by posting to the forum. I am hanging out there too.

And last but not least the best “bonus” of them all. I created a set at my image sharing account at Flickr.com, just for OSDM ready frame animation images, horizontal and vertical as well. There are already several hundred animations that you are free to use for your own production. I also add new ones every now and then, so coming back to revisit it once in a while does not hurt.

Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC
http://www.roysac.com/

Open Letter to YouTube/Google from an Active “You-Tuber”

Introductory Note to this Blog Post: Here is the content of the open letter that I just wrote and sent to YouTube support. I hope that they forward it to the appropriate entity at their company to have a closer look and hopefully also act on it appropriately.

The general issue is Copyright Laws that they cannot change, but the way how they deal with the situations that are a consequence of IMO insufficient laws in an environment they were not designed for and weren’t even envisioned when those laws were put in place to begin with.

The Letter:

This letter was written in response to the YouTube Account Inquiry #572435220 regarding the termination of the YouTube account “CirqueDuSoleilGuru” on December 18, 2009.

For whatever reason did your email response from January 6, 2010 to my web inquiry about the suspension of my YouTube account “CirqueDuSoleilGuru” on December 18, 2010 show up in my Gmail inbox now, several months later. I was looking for it back in January and did not find any of it. This is weird, but a separate issue.

I am pretty sure that YouTube accounts and their content that were suspended 4+ months ago cannot be reactivated and recovered anyway, so there is no urgency to the situation anymore and my comments can be classified as detailed user feedback, suggestions and complaints from a long time and very active YouTube user who operates multiple personal and professional YouTube accounts for different reasons and purposes. My initial response and not so “nice” blog post about the termination of my account can be found at this URL. It uses stronger words, but might be worth thinking about nevertheless. Several of my former 2000 channel subscribers contacted me via other means to inquire about the unexpected termination of my account that I felt the need to publish a statement myself publicly.

Background Story

The YouTube account “CirqueDuSoleilGuru” was my personal non-commercial outlet to promote and appreciate the Canadian entertainment company “Cirque du Soleil”, inform other people about activities and events that involve the Circus, review related merchandise and comment on various issues that concern the company and are of my personal interest and may also interest other fans of the Circus like me.

In addition to the YouTube channel, I maintained content in written format related to the same subject on my personal web site. The main entry page to this content would be my “Cirque du Soleil Primer Article” at http://www.roysac.com/cirque and its several dozen subsequent pages.

I have no commercial relationship with Cirque du Soleil, although my activities online were noticed and appreciated by various employees of the company, including artists, but also some of their marketing professionals. They notified me about events and other things that might of my interest without any obligations for me to follow up on that and without offering any financial reward for my efforts. However, I met their Las Vegas marketing executive in Las Vegas in person once and was given a free ticket to one of their shows that I have already seen. This was more a sign of being grateful for my support and not an attempt to pay me off or bribe me.

My YouTube channel featured over 200 videos, which could be categorized as follows.

1. Teaser and Promotional Material to Cirque du Soleil resident and touring shows as well as related merchandise, such as show recordings on DVD and similar products.
2. Behind the scene, Making of, Meet the artist kind of mini documentaries that could also be considered “promotional” in nature, although the main target audience would probably be Cirque fans like me, who are also interested in the things that go beyond their elaborate shows.
3. News footage about special activities that involve Cirque du Soleil in general. This can be a multitude of things, from Guinness Book of World Records attempts to Involvements in their Charity work in organizations such as the One Drop Foundation.
4. Original content that I created myself entirely that include product reviews and also “news type” of content or personal opinions about non-product related things.
5. Indirectly related content about Circus arts at large and also content that fall under the categories 1-3 that involve the famous and now former director of Cirque du Soleil, “Franco Dragonè”, who owns today his own company and works independent from Cirque du Soleil, but in the same field.
6. This is probably the category that is the most problematic one and with only a few exceptions all videos that were removed my YouTube in the past belonged to this one. Appearances and special performances by Cirque du Soleil outside their own productions. This includes promotional appearances on national television or special mini performances to openings of special events (such as Oscars, Grammy’s, and Olympic Games etc.). I have a special page that concerns just such performances, which is part of my Primer article series, titled “Cirque du Soleil Special Events and Performances”

I also like to add, that many but not all of the material published on my YouTube channel was edited by me prior its publication to the YouTube web site and not just a simple reproduction of existing material from other sources. Several hundreds of hours of actual work went into the 200+ videos that I published to this Channel.

Although content in the categories 1-2 is also “copyright protected” by law, so is it much less likely that the copyright owner would make a complaint about its publication and distribution free of charge, since it was produced for this purpose in the first place. Exception might be the use in an environment where the copyright owner does not want to be associated with and feels it to be inappropriate, but this is obviously not the case in my example. The owner had knowledge of it and actually appreciated my distribution and publication.

Regarding the content that falls into category 6 I have to say that I was and are aware that the content that I used was not free, but I also did not and do not feel that I was really violating any laws or caused damage or loss the owner of the intellectual property that I used for it. Now I am not a copyright lawyer myself, but after doing some self-study online, during conferences in educational sessions and personal talks to copyright lawyers I learned that the fair-use clause that I think applies to this content is not that clear and not objective applicable as I would wish it would. I only take snippets, typically 1-5 minutes out of 1-3 or more hours of copyrighted material that is only about the Cirque and virtually never about the setting and surrounding where this appearance takes place, which is however mentioned in detail as much as I know as future reference and for historic archiving purposes. It is of educational and almost news like character, where the “news” aspect might be the one that could be debated the most.

Penalty 1 and 3 are perfect examples of this. I am not a regular viewer of TV talk shows like Jay Leno’s “Tonight Show” on NBC or “Chelsea Lately”, which I never even had heard of before I learned about Cirques special appearance on it.

Penalty 1:
"Cirque du Soleil - Zumanity @ Jay Leno" formerly at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YVO0FD0RpQ
Removed due to a copyright claim by NBC Universal on 07/09/2008

Penalty 2:
"Cirque du Soleil - KA 1/9" formerly at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzisBtyhCt4
Removed due to a copyright claim by Cirque du Soleil on 06/25/2009

Note: I left this video out of this discussion, because there is a much bigger story to it, which would be too much to bring into this general debate.

Penalty 3:
"Alan Silva from Cirque du Soleil's Zumanity at Chelsea Lately" formerly at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3BMgsPwjdg
Removed due to a copyright claim by Comcast Entertainment Group on 12/18/2009

Since the laws is vague in this respect and my interest in this non-commercial, I did not and won’t file any counter suit if the copyright owner files a complaint with YouTube and is impossible to communicate with as an individual without commercial interests. I tend to make some attempts to contact the company who filed the complaint to sort out things using common sense and reasoning and come to a solution that serves our mutual interests, but that is unfortunately only accomplished successfully in very few of the cases where it happens.

I don’t mind to serve additional advertisement that benefits the owner or even change and extend the content description to include additional related information of commercial nature, including links to a target web site operated by the owner or an e-commerce site where related products can be purchased by viewers of the video.

This communication issue is something where YouTube/Google could provide some help.

YouTube would and should only act as a neutral relay of information without getting directly involved or extend on its legal responsibilities and risks. I think it would even lower the risks of YouTube, because it would show that the company is actively involved in solving conflicts that are located in a legal gray area and benefit both conflicting parties, save everybody involved time, money, bad blood and headaches and maybe even aids the formation of new partnerships along the way as a bonus.

YouTube does some of it already, but it is only a one-way street at the moment.

It offers to owners of the intellectual property already today the option to include additional ads and/or revenue share for existing ads served on Google property along with the content instead of taking it down completely, if the owner decides to do so. Examples are text ads in the format of video annotations with a link to buy the CD of the audio that is currently being heard by the viewer or extra ad units on the video detail page that promote other and maybe even related content of the copyright owner.

The Issue Today

Publishers are currently not offered anything to serve their interests and support their rights. They are treated, sorry my strong words, like dirt and 2^nd class people, whose time and energy is discarded as worthless and negligible, at the mercy of Google and large media companies to be erased without any warning at any time.

In the case of a complaint a publisher gets only very little choices and options, basically reduced to only one, which is to take legal actions themselves and better get a lawyer involved right away before anything might be done to do anything for them. Since the majority of publishers on YouTube are individuals who publish without commercial interests, this is actually very unlikely to be done. What everybody gets are rightfully first confused and then upset or even angry individuals that potentially harm not just Google’s business in the future but potentially also the business of copyright owner. All of this only because of something that probably does not harm anybody involved and most likely benefit everybody involved and may only requires some fine-tuning to make every party completely happy.

Suggested Solution

What YouTube could provide for example is the ability for a publisher to respond to a complaint via a web form, where he is able to state that he believes that the use of the copyrighted content does qualify to be exempted by a fair-use clause, which one and why. This would be non-formal and non-legally binding, entirely separated from any formal legal action the publisher could take. The publisher should also be enabled to make offers to the property owner, like the ones that I mentioned already earlier. Some of which could even be automated entirely by YouTube, such as the activation of additional Ad units on the video page or a supplemental video description block that can be maintained by the copyright owner.

Since the publisher needs to explain why he thinks fair-use might apply in his case, bogus claims could be filtered out fairly easily in most of the cases. The owner will also be forced to have a second look at the case and maybe learns about a previously missed opportunity at the same time that could be of even more benefit for him in the future. The number of actual law suits should in my opinion decrease as a consequence as well and the owner of the copyright also gets to know of the chance that a legal suit might back-fire and creates unnecessary cost for him and might even harms his business.

Google on the other hand adds another level of refinement to its system to better be able to distinguish between publishers who are in essence legitimate, but acting unfortunately in somewhat legal gray area und blatant violators of existing copyright laws that probably deserve the harsh and strict punishment exercised by YouTube in both cases today.

Along the way, you could also implement something where somebody who submits a complaint via your web complaint form gets the ability to retract this complaint, if things got resolved without any legal actions taken by any party, including the publisher. I still have a “Strike” in a different YouTube account that I manage where things got resolved directly between me and the entity who filed the complaint, even though that entity assured me that they tried to get a hold of somebody at YouTube to retract the previously filed complained that it will be removed from my account as a consequence.

See my case as an example.

A channel where over 200 videos were published over a period of 1 ½ years, with over 3.2 million views of those videos with over 5000 ratings and over 3000 user comments. The channel itself also had over 2000 subscribers. All wiped out from the face of this world, because of 3 cases where YouTube has no idea if there was potentially a law violated at all or if the publisher simply did not made the choice to engage in costly and time-consuming legal action, because of the lack of common sense to pursue this route and only option available to him at the moment.

Conclusion

Asking for 5 minutes of the alleged copyright owner’s time, who claims to own the rights and felt those rights to be violated to have a second look and option to resolve the situation in a civilized manner should not be too much in return for the preservation of hundreds of hours of time, unknown amounts of money, energy and love by the publishers and also the time spent by active members of the YouTube community who rate content, make comments, answer questions and help YouTube to rid itself of spam and illegal content.

Google cannot change current laws, which are in the case of copyright laws unfortunately ill-suited for this new environment and situation, which was not envisioned when the laws where put in place as they are to this date (which is my own personal opinion and subjective). There is work needed elsewhere. However, Google could make some more efforts to easy the tensions and reduce conflicts that result from these short comings and are also a result of their commercial services in form of a social video sharing web site called YouTube that pioneered the ways how audio-visual content of commercial as well as non-commercial nature is being consumed by millions of people around the world today and in the future.

I hope that my comments and recommendations make sense and be considered useful and realistic as I believe them to be and will make the life of everybody involved much less painful than it is today, if they should be followed through with and become implemented in the near future.

Regards,

Carsten Cumbrowski

Fresno, CA on April 8, 2010

Note: This letter will also be published publicly on my personal blog at RoySAC.com/blog.

That’s it. I hope I made sense. Comments and Feedback (also anonymously) are not only allowed but also encouraged, via the comment-form further down below.

Summary Update March 2010

Uh, the month of March 2010 is almost over and I did not write a post in the entire month.

Mhh.. I have actually a bunch of things to write about, but did not get around actually doing it. Well, I will provide some brief updates.

Megatro III Release

I released another Megatro Intro pack with my latest OSDM productions. The menu system was coded by myself again and I hope that I was also able to improve on it since Megatro II. For details and download links check out the dedicated page for this release.

Since the release of Megatro III I did create already several other productions as well. You might want to check out my OSDM homepage to check it out.

OSDM Vector Object Resources

Vector Objects for OSDM are hard to create and have more than one person already driven close to insanity. But there are some lights at the end of the tunnel, which could help until a vector object editor will be implemented into OSDM itself.

• Creation of Vector Objects Tutorial written by Wildcop (in German only, unfortunately)
• Notes to 3D Vectors (from the OSDM feature notes at the OSDM Wiki)
• VOBJ Tool V1.5beta written by me, which provides some nice features that make the work with the VOBJ data files much easier. Features like Merge of 2 VOBJ files, cloning of objects, shifting, flipping, centering, rotating etc. Also new is a Vector Object Creator for the creation of some basic vector objects, such as Spheres, Torus’, Cubes and Pyramids. The tool is a beta and has some known and still not known bugs, just as a reminder. I only made it public, because everybody agreed so far that ANY help is better than nothing at all. I wrote it in VBScript and it uses IE for the interface. I then made an Executable out of it to make it easier to use and the original .VBS script file.
• Excel 2007 Macro Worksheet – This one is also highly experimental and you can use it at your own risk. It has some nice features that make editing of vector objects easier, but also several more or less working features that can be described as “tests” on my part. I only decided to make it public, because I think that it is helpful, even in its current version, despite all its flaws and bugs and unfinished features.You must enable Macros in Excel 2007 in order to make the document work. It’s also saved with a XLSM extension for the same reason. To change the Macro security settings, click on the MS Office button in the upper left corner of Excel 2007, then click on the “Excel Options” button, which is not located on the left where you can find the “Open”, “Save” dialogs etc., but the lower right, next to the “Exit Excel” button. Select “Trust Center” from the options on the left, then “Trust Center Settings” at the lower right of the Trust Center home page. Then select “Macro Settings” on the right side again and adjust the settings in the page that opens accordingly. Yeah, Microsoft could not have buried it much deeper in Excel to make it hard to find.

Forced Blog Move/Change

Google Blogger announced that they are going to discontinue the support for FTP. That is how I operate my blog with Blogger. The files (the blog content) is hosted at my own web server and pushed by Google to via FTP to my server, if changes to the blog are made (e.g. new posts are posted or comments).

I always wanted to switch to Wordpress. Maybe its now the time to actually do it, but I am not sure yet. I might go with an alternative route that became available, such as the custom domain for blogger. The blog would be moved from RoySAC.com/blog to Blog.RoySAC.com or something like that and would reside on Google’s servers instead of mine. It should not make any difference to the look and feel of my blog, but I am still skeptical when it comes to this.

There is still some time to think about it.

Well, that’s it for now. I hope that I will be able to post something else that is new and interesting soon.

Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

http://www.roysac.com/