Anyone know of any (free) tools to make a nice rotating logo. Can it be done as an animated gif or does it need flash?
It can be done as either. I would recomend a gif format if there is nothing specific you need from Flash.
ImageReady is probably one of the best tools, but it’s not free - I don’t know of any free ones for this, but if one is out there I’m sure you’ll get the answer here.
however, if you can’t find a cheap .gif creator, Swish is a VERY flash-like program thats dirt cheap and could achieve the same effect…
Moving thread to Graphics and Multimedia. 
There is a simple way in photoshop’s image ready that you can do a flat roation.
Get your logo, then duplicate it a bunch of times then shrink them bit by bit from the side, you can stop there or you can duplicate the full one and flip it horozontal, then do the same
add frames to your anim acording to the number of layers and hide and un hide them acordingly
this is roughly the effect
I had a very small # of bytes to work with so it looks grainy but if you are not constrained by size you can get it looking good.
Cheers
-Mac
I have just created a rotating logo following your instructions.
What I’m trying to do is add this logo to a Final Cut pro movie.
Obviously the logo must have a transparent background because the movie will be playing behind it. is this possible ?
In what format am I supposed to save it or export it ?
Is there a tool within Final Cut that will let you rotate an imported vector image or other transparent image?
Final cut pro enables you to import any layered photoshop file (text or images) and create a 3D animation. It’s quite easy. It is already possible within FCP to create a rotating image or text but not a spinning image which is what I am trying to accomplish by preparing it in Image ready.
Save it as a gif,
you can have transparency and animation.
I saved it as a gif, but when i import it to Final Cut Pro, it has a white background.
How do i avoid this?
When you are saving it make sure that transparency is selected and choose the correct colour ( white in this case )
I don’t know what I am doing wrong but it still doesn’t work for me.
Help!!!
Need more details…possibly a step by step explanation.
Thanks.
Can you please explain the rotating trick again. please.
hm. I don’t quite understand what you want now…you say rotating stuff within FCP is easy…but thats not what you want to do?
If you send it to me i could do it, if I knew what ya needed.
It’s not the FCP part that bothers me but it’s the spinning image-ready logo.
When I import it into FCP it loses it’s transparent background.
Maybe you could export it as a series on Pngs…that would probably be more compatible with FCP.
Otherwise, you can export as a .mov, and depending on the video encoders you have installed, some could support transparency in the options. check it out
You are going about this wrong. Forget about transparent background as you are used to for the web.
Make your animation as whatever uncompressed format you can work with in FCP ( I use Premiere and .bmp sequence) probably .tiff or of course a video format as that is what you are working with.
Youd don’t want a gif or png as you lose image quality that way.
Import that into FCP and put it on a video track that is above what you want it to be overlayed onto. Kind of like layers in Photoshop.
Then (I don’t know FCP so you’ll have to find the exact “tool” yourself) you can adjust the transparency using different methods for the desired effect. I can’t recall off the top of my head but maybe luminosity (this is of course dependent on the back ground color you use) and you can adjust so the background goes away and only the logo shows.
If you are familiar with how blue screen works you’ll know what I am talking about and this will make sense.
Another method would be creating a matte (an alpha mask which defines the transparent area) this requires you make your animation and then a duplicate of it.
On the duplicate have your background white and your logo filled in black. Then when you apply your matte in FCP it will make your logo background be transparent. This is kind of like masking in photoshop.
Either one of these methods I just gave are how it’s done in video. Forget about trying to import a file with a transparent background, it just won’t work
well there you have it, from an expert in the field
Thanks, I’ll give it a try
DCS pretty much has it