Keith Carmichael
Forum Replies Created
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You know, I too have Acrobat but I don’t think I’ve ever even opened it.
And I just realized something about my last post–you shouldn’t shrink your file if you intend to print to PDF; just pick a print size that’s reasonable (letter or smaller) when you actually go to “print” your file. -
Wait….
What part of the video are we talking about?
Photoshop would be a good choice for creating that initial collage of all the images.
For the rest you’d want to use a program designed for effects and animation, like After Effects or conceivably Flash.
Vegas I gather is a non-linear editor. If it’s anything like Final Cut then you could use it to do most of this (pictures zooming on and off screen) but it would be a gigantic pain in the behind.
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Lucky you, Encore comes with a handful of glass layer styles–they’re right there in a folder called “Styles.” I imagine you can use them in Encore somehow to make buttons, but they are all saved as .psd so maybe PS is their intended platform.
Just open a style in photoshop. What you will see is a document that is
a–too small
b–only has a tiny square in the middle, however the square will look really cool. (Well fairly cool. These are not groundbreaking styles.)You need to get that layer into a bigger document and either use the drawing tools or shape tools to make some rectangles–(anything you paint on the style layer will also have those styles) or copy the styles to some other rectangles you already have somewhere.
To make highlights, add some adjustment layers–hue/lum/sat and levels. Then you can turn them on and off and save off as pngs for use in encore.
There are also tons of tutorials for glass buttons on the web. The easiest will be ones those created entirely with layer styles. some will even have the styles themselves available for download.
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Well, if you want to try another Adobe app, then Acrobat is the one to try!
If you want to do it in Photoshop, here is why your files are big–
Photoshop can’t actually OPEN a PDF, it can just rasterize it at a certain resolution–that’s the dialogue that comes up when you open the PDF. The resolution might be set to 300 dpi, a common default print resolution, but that’s making a file that’s way too big.
Here is what to do:
1. First make sure the image is a reasonable size. For the web, pixel dimensions of around 150 pixels wide or tall (for small images) to let’s say 1000 pixels wide and 800 pixels tall are reasonable. They should be 72 dpi.
2. You can then
a- print to PDF, which you can do if you have the Adobe PDF printer installed (which you should do, it’s very convenient)
b- save as jpeg, and set the compression quality as low as possible without making your map look terrible
c- if you do “save for web” you’ll get even more compression options–you could try a GIF with a very low color count. But really JPEG is a very good choice. -
Oh, thanks so much Julie! That’s very helpful.
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I know, right? I was thinking the two might be related. Also that that’s some crazy **** with that dude’s photoshop.
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In the add/subtract/intersect/exclude options on the right hand of the options toolbar for the path tool, “subtract” may be selected. This can cause what you’re experiencing (great for the 7% of times you want to cut holes out of things.)
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Oh, cool! Well this background is 1440 by 1008, so there you go.
Usually you can right click (ctrl-click on a mac) an image in a web browser and have the option to save it, then you can open it in photoshop and see how big it is.
In this case, ctrl-click brought up the option to “view background,” which takes you to the source page at https://www.heartland.cc/images/heartland/hccBG12.jpg, from which you can ctrl-click and save the image.
Failing that–say to get the size of an embedded flash, or an image that’s been published in different slices–you can look at the page source, or on a mac CMD-CTRL-SHIFT-4 to screen grab the image and then paste it into a new photoshop document, and you can tell its size.
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Just try it! I bet you just didn’t notice. Drag any old psd into any old fcp and double-click it.
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If everything’s working correctly, FCP brings in PSDs as SEQUENCES. (See the icon next to your psd in the browser? It should be a sequence icon, not a footage icon.) So just double-click on the psd (either in the browser or in the timeline) to open the sequence–this is where you’ll see all the layers on their own video tracks.
If that doesn’t work, then something’s gone wrong and you should just save off the layers individually and place them in a sequence yourself.