Adding Transition Effects to Your Animation:

(Or, Making your Movie EVEN COOLER! :-)

Now that we have a mini-movie, let’s make it a bit fancier. Jasc allows you to add effects to your animations, at the beginning or that the end, or anywhere in between.

We’re going to first add some text to our mini-movie, using the text tool to do this. Open your .mng file, in this case, I’m opening spider2.mng. This is the animation where we added in the shoe over our spider.

Here is what our screen looks like:

We are going to move our movie to one of the frames where the shoe is over the spider, and we are going to make our spider say “Eek!” (This isn’t a transition effect, but a text effect.)

So I move my slider until I reach this frame:

I am going to put the text in F:14. (No reason for that, except I think that Eek! would look good there.)

I go to the tool bar across the top of the screen. See the tool bar under the words Zoom: 1:3? We select the text tool by clicking on the capital letter A, which is located to the right of the paint bucket.

Once you’ve clicked on this tool, then click the tool on the frame you want to add text to. In this case, I already said this would be frame 14.

Here is what you get when you do that:

You get an “Add Text” menu. In the “Enter text here” window, I typed in the word “Eek!” I changed the size of the font to 24, to make it larger.

Now, click “Okay.”

What you see is that you have a floating “Eek!” that is floating around frame 14. It moves as your move your mouse—move it to a place where you think it looks good, and click your mouse to “stick the Eek down.” ::grin::

Now your screen looks like this:

See the Eek? Now, view your animation by going to View-> Animation. Your Eek is there, however, it goes by really quickly, doesn’t it? For our “viewers” to read our text, we need to leave it on the screen a little bit longer than the rest of the frames in our movie.

So click on the white arrow tool (in the tool bar on the top of the screen) and then click on frame 14. Now, go to Animation-> Frame properties. Change the duration time of this frame from 30 to 150. Now view your animation. The text is more readable now. Play around with the frame duration number until you are happy with how this looks.

Now we are going to add a transition at the beginning of our movie. You know how movies fade in and then fade out again? This is the sort of effect we are going for.

One funny thing about Jasc, is that when you are adding a transition at the beginning, is that it will put the transition between your first and second frames. (I haven’t figured out why it does this, but I can tell you how to work around it.)

Go your first frame. Right click on this frame, and select “Duplicate selected.”

Now your movie should have two frame 1s. It will look something like this:

Select the first frame by clicking on it, using the white arrow selection tool. (In the tool bar, on the top left of the screen.)

Now go to Effects-> Insert Image Transition. A new window will open up, and it will look like this:

We aren’t going to make many changes here, but after we’re done, you can play around with the various transitions all you want, just to see what this feature can do.

What we are going to do is add a fade in effect. The “Effect” option, the pull-down menu in the center of this new window, is already set to “Fade.”

Make sure the “Show Preview” box is checked, as it is here.

Now, on the left side of this window, we want to change our “Start With” frame from “Animation Frame” to “Canvas Color.” Leave the “End With” frame alone.

When you do this, what happens? You should see a “fade in” effect, from a white screen to a view of your spider.

Here you can see your spider fading in:

You can adjust the transition length to suit your tastes. I have left mine set as shown.

Now, click “Okay” and then go to View->Animation to see the results.

What you see is that you have an extra “spider” frame at the beginning of your movie. If you look at the frames as displayed in Jasc, this is what you see:

Go to frame one, and right click. Select “delete” to get rid of this extra frame.

Now view your animation again. Better?

Let’s add in a fade out transition. Click on the last frame of your movie. Now go to Effects-> Insert Image Transition. We’re now going to fade out. The only thing you need to do differently here, is that you now need to set “Start With” to “Animation Frame” and “End With” to “Canvas Color.” It will look like this:

Select “Okay.” Then go to View-> Animation to see the results.

If you are happy with how this looks, then save the file. (I always save it in Jasc file format, which is .mng, first, then save it as a .gif or .avi.)

Now, click your browser back button to go back to the main tutorial page, or click the X if this opened in a new window.

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Content created by Annette Griessman, and may not be used without permission.

Email: agriessman@insightbb.com

Last modified on November 9, 2007.