Animation tools - animation

I realize this is not strictly programming related, but hopefully you will let me get away with it.
My group is trying to put together a very short (2 minutes or so) "film" about a new feature to our product. The feature is trying to solve a particular problem a lot of our customers have. We do not want to go with live action for displaying the description of the problem we are trying to solve because we feel that the production value of anything we could come up with would be incredibly low and turn off our viewers. So we would like to make an animation (basically floating clip-art that is animated moving from place to place) while we have someone narrate the problem description.
While flash seems to be a good solution I have some problems with it:
I need to capture this in a movie format like avi
It needs to be captured in 1080p, 720p and regular TV def.
Does anyone have a suggestion for a piece of software that can get me where I need to go?
Free is good, but I think I could get my boss to lay down some scratch for this.
Thanks!

For just some basic here-is-the-screen-this-is-a-slide kinda thing you could use Windows MovieMaker, free and standard.
And here you have some tips on how to create your own screen-captured-AVI file for input.

Related

What do I need to do this?

I am new to coding and wanted to get some hands on practice with a project I have in mind. Here it is:
Let's say you have blank page and on the side of a screen you have several items you can choose to draw on the blank page. For example the background can be mountains, the ocean, a forest etc. On top of that you can place a house, a church or another selectable element. Whatever you like.
It is like a picture editor where you can put together a picture with different pre-given elements. Or like in video games where you can create your own character.
What would I need to build a web application for that kind of thing?
This link should get you started but it won't be the complete answer to your question - http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2013/08/how-to-use-html5s-drag-and-drop/
Essentially, you can achieve your image dragging and dropping using similar techniques. It will require a bit of Spike work from yourself, and looking into how HTML5 can handle drag and drop. I discovered this resource fairly quickly and I think the solution you want isn't as complicated as you may think, it just requires a bit of know-how regarding drag and drop operations within HTML5 :-)
Also, there may already be some JavaScript based API's that do this sort of thing easier but I'm not too aware - I suppose starting this way could be a great introduction for you and you may wish to expand once you've done some work for it :-)
Hope this helps you and your coding journey!

create a simple (and visible!) UI slider in Unity 5

![enter image description here][1]please I need some help, this should apparently be something very simple and basic to do, but maybe I'm missing something.
I'm quite newbie to Unity3d, I had no much problem with creating a somewhat flashy 2.D scene (I mean 2D with different layers in Z level), scripts, etc. But I'm having trouble to create a "UI Slider" object: when I create it, it just shows nothing on screen. How can I make it visible? I just need to create a very simple, plain slider whose value can be controlled at runtime by means of a script.
thanks.
Well.. since you give nothing to go on, I suggest that you take a look at a tutorial for the UI:
https://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/modules/beginner/live-training-archive/using-the-ui-tools
If you have troubles after this tutorial, come back with an example of your problem to make people more willing to sacrifice their time in helping you.
Hope this is somewhat useful
Take a look at the Unity3D docs here.
http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/script-Slider.html
It should have what you are looking for.

Add an image to MKMapView (SWIFT)

I'm trying to add an image to MKMapView using SWIFT and I have ZERO coding experience. Could someone provide me with ALL the sample code necessary to do this? If there are any placeholder words (like overlay.yourimage.mapView) could you put the place where I need to add my information IN CAPS? I can't even tell the parts where I'm supposed to add my own information.
I appreciate any responses, I'm a first time poster.
Welcome to Stack Overflow.
The short answer is no.
This is not a site where people write your code for you. It's a site where you come when you have specific problems with code you've written and need help.
Be warned that MKMapView is a pretty complex framework. If you have zero programming experience it is way, way, WAAAAAAY over your head. You need to start with "Hello World" type stuff and work your way up.
Starting your programming career with trying to customize a map view is like going down a black diamond ski trail the first time you put skis on. You will fail dramatically, and won't be ready for black diamond trails (advanced APIs like map kit) until you do a lot of groundwork.
You can probably find sample code online that deals with adding an image to a map view, but it's not going to make much sense to you at this point, just like a ski instructor explaining how to get through a difficult mogul field won't make much sense to a beginning skier.

Making A Gameshow like application?

my friend is holding a charity quiz night and I was wondering if there was any software that would be good to create an application where the user can choose from two categories and then see a question from that category, then move on to the next two categories and so on.
I thought of Powerpoint or Keynotes for this but they have a very linear slideshow structure is it possible to link to different slideshow from buttons maybe like macros?
Or is there any better software out there that would be a better tool for the job? Bearing in mind it needs to be able to be shown on a projector and without internet access.
Any help would be really great as Im not sure whats the best way to go about this?
Thankyou.
You could use a series of powerpoint slides with buttons for each option. You can splice in a little bit of VBScript to have to buttons keep track of the choises a user made, so that you can present the results in the end.
However with only a trivial bit of searching you could find out that there are dozens of quiz maker applications. I'm not sure which ones are good or bad. But try this query string. To find apps like "Multiple Choise" which looks pretty much like what you are looking for.

what language/libraries an app that has a video preview window?

I want to make a simple assistant for putting together AviSynth scripts. This would be a windows desktop application that would have a "preview" screen of an avi movie, which would give you a timeline, play, fast-forward, rewind, advance and go back frame-by-frame. The program would need to know the frame number of the current frame in the player and its filename.
What language is best suited for this? I know PHP ( I understand that this is not a contender ) and am familiar with Java. My thought is that the biggest hurdle with this project will be finding a library for the video playing features. With a cursory glance, no Java video libraries jumped out at me. My next thought would be c++ for this.
The output of this program would be an AviSynth script, a plaintext file which looks like this:
AviSource("myAvi.avi")
Crop(0, 0, 320, 240)
Blur(0.1)
There are a few tool kits that can do tihs:
C#: DirectShow (DirectX)
Java: JMF
If you have Avisynth installed, the only thing you need for preview (If I understood, that's your need) is something that can decode uncompressed video. It would open like a normal file. I'm sure there are video players implemented fairly well in Java, but I don't know how much functionallity from them you need. Anyway parsing scripts is not easy - I recommend you not to try to if you don't need to.
EDIT: I'm sorry, I thought you needed a very specific app, but from what you seem to need, you don't need to code anything, use AVSP!
Please watch this video, it shows how straightforward it is. It has advanced functions such as auto-completion, (even from your own auto-loading scripts!) syntax coloring, macros, automtic importing, drag&drop (of a video, for instance - just drag it to the video and AVSP makes the loading) scrit preview with zoom and all stuff, you can use automatic or custom sliders (you can make a slider that re-writes a number on the script in real time, for instance for hue/luminosity/contrast/etc. that would be cumbersome to control via script), checkboxes & radio buttons (for boolean values, etc...), text fields that alter strings in real time, and basically anything you need... Please check it out.
Also, VirtualDubMod is OLD.
And yep, AVSP is free, both gratis and libre! =)

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