Hi Guys,
I've seen a few people going on about how overlays are complicated, but if you set it up right, they are very easy and produce great sequences
http://movies.lionhead.com/movie/89411 << for example hee hee
Now this tutorial requires:
- Flash
- Photoshop (with the DDS plugin)
Now not everyone has this stuff, but this is how I did it so I thought I'd share the method.
Making a Flash Animation
Now I'm assuming people know how to use flash, if not the product itself has some great tutorials, I'm no expert and I managed to make
this You have to make sure the size is 800x450px and the FPS is 12fps.
Once you've made sure of that, export the movie as a series of PNGs. To do this select File/Export Movie and then select PNG from the file type drop down.
Now we have to setup a batch process in photoshop. To do this we have record an action.
So in photoshop, go to the Actions tab shown below
Now you have to record the actions you would take to process a PNG into an overlay
To do this, press the record button...then:
- Open one of the PNGs (doesn't matter which)
- Resize it to 512x512
- Save it to the desktop as a dds file with No Mip Maps
- Close the file in photoshop
Then press stop, congratulations you've just stored an action!
Now the rest is simple, go File/Automate/Batch, then you will get this window
You will need to:
- Set the "Action:" to the action you just recorded
- Set the "Source Folder:" to where the PNGs are located
- Set the "Destination Folder:" to the overlays folder in the The Movies Install Directory
- Make sure overide save actions is checked
- Set the file naming to the same as in the image except where I have put "end" you put whatever you wanna identify it as, i.e. the intro could be overlay_intro_v00
Then press go!
It'll go thru all the PNGs you made and process them all into the overlay format, then start The Movies and it'll be ready to go.
Now I know not everyone has these bits of software, but I'm doing this so people can know how I did it and I won't have to repeat myself, hope it helps :)