The art of copypasta
So the always-awesome karmicunderpath expressed an interest in finding out how to copy-paste pictures onto video and I said I’d hook her up with some instructions, but instead of just e-mailing them to her I decided to share them here for anyone else on my flist who might be mildly curious about how to do it and maybe make ghettorific crackvids of their own.
How to paste a picture onto a video (or at least the method I cobbled together. PLEASE TELL ME IF THERE IS A BETTER WAY, OMG)
If you actually want to try this, here are the things you’ll need:
*Adequate free space on your computer (this gets pretty messy, it would be a real bitch to do if you didn’t have much computer memory left)
*Picture-editing software
*Video-editing software
*GIF animation software
*MediaCoder or its equivalent
*Patience
1. Choose and acquire a vid and a picture.
How to download and convert YouTube videos
Personally I use DownloadHelper to save the YouTube (flv) file, then use MediaCoder to convert it into an avi file.
2. Get just the parts of the video and picture that you want to use.
I use Windows Movie Maker to trim my video because that’s what came with my computer, but if you have a less-crappy video editor you should totally use that. The trimmed video gets saved as a new wmv file which I then convert into an avi file for an upcoming step.
I use Microsoft Picture It! Photo 7.0 to cut out just what I want of the picture (usually the face or the face and head) and then save that cutout as a png file (save it in this format so the area around your image is transparent and not white).
3. Rip the audio from your trimmed video file (I do this by disabling video in MediaCoder).
STOP! At this point you should have three files:
*An avi of your trimmed video
*The audio from the above avi
*A png of your picture
You can delete the other files (the flv of the full video, the avi of the full video, and the original image file) if you haven’t already.
4. Import your trimmed video into some kind of animation software.
I use Ulead GIF Animator 5 (I actually had to buy that, but I think there are some GIF animators that you can use for free but they’ll leave a logo on your video).
Here it’s important to consider the size of your video; a large or high-quality video may crash Ulead. You should be fine if your video is around 20 or 30 seconds, but if your video is bigger than that I recommend that you a) trim it further and/or b) break it down into multiple files and import those.
5. Insert your picture and copy/paste your ass off.
In Ulead I can resize, tilt, and reposition my picture right there in the frame (this is vital for longer videos, because exporting each frame into a jpeg, modifying each of them in a photo editor, and then importing them back into Ulead is just way too much work).
This step is absolutely painstaking if you copy-paste your picture individually frame-by-frame, but it’s made considerably easier if you paste the picture onto multiple frames at the same time.
When all of your frames have been bastardized modified, save the project as a gif file.
6. Convert the gif file into an avi file using MediaCoder.
7. Create the final version of your video.
Import your shiny new crackified avi file into Windows Media Player (or whatever video editing software you’ve got) and add the audio file that I told you to make back in step 3. Then save the project as a new movie file (it will be a wmv file; if you don’t like that format, you can convert the file into an avi using MediaCoder).
STOP! At this point you’re done and you should only have one video file-the finished product (a wmv or avi, depending on preference).
Delete the previous files if you haven’t already (the non-altered trimmed avi, the audio from that avi, the png picture, the GIF, and the altered avi that you converted from the GIF, and the final wmv file if you chose to do the conversion to avi).
How to paste a picture onto a video (or at least the method I cobbled together. PLEASE TELL ME IF THERE IS A BETTER WAY, OMG)
If you actually want to try this, here are the things you’ll need:
*Adequate free space on your computer (this gets pretty messy, it would be a real bitch to do if you didn’t have much computer memory left)
*Picture-editing software
*Video-editing software
*GIF animation software
*MediaCoder or its equivalent
*Patience
1. Choose and acquire a vid and a picture.
How to download and convert YouTube videos
Personally I use DownloadHelper to save the YouTube (flv) file, then use MediaCoder to convert it into an avi file.
2. Get just the parts of the video and picture that you want to use.
I use Windows Movie Maker to trim my video because that’s what came with my computer, but if you have a less-crappy video editor you should totally use that. The trimmed video gets saved as a new wmv file which I then convert into an avi file for an upcoming step.
I use Microsoft Picture It! Photo 7.0 to cut out just what I want of the picture (usually the face or the face and head) and then save that cutout as a png file (save it in this format so the area around your image is transparent and not white).
3. Rip the audio from your trimmed video file (I do this by disabling video in MediaCoder).
STOP! At this point you should have three files:
*An avi of your trimmed video
*The audio from the above avi
*A png of your picture
You can delete the other files (the flv of the full video, the avi of the full video, and the original image file) if you haven’t already.
4. Import your trimmed video into some kind of animation software.
I use Ulead GIF Animator 5 (I actually had to buy that, but I think there are some GIF animators that you can use for free but they’ll leave a logo on your video).
Here it’s important to consider the size of your video; a large or high-quality video may crash Ulead. You should be fine if your video is around 20 or 30 seconds, but if your video is bigger than that I recommend that you a) trim it further and/or b) break it down into multiple files and import those.
5. Insert your picture and copy/paste your ass off.
In Ulead I can resize, tilt, and reposition my picture right there in the frame (this is vital for longer videos, because exporting each frame into a jpeg, modifying each of them in a photo editor, and then importing them back into Ulead is just way too much work).
This step is absolutely painstaking if you copy-paste your picture individually frame-by-frame, but it’s made considerably easier if you paste the picture onto multiple frames at the same time.
When all of your frames have been bastardized modified, save the project as a gif file.
6. Convert the gif file into an avi file using MediaCoder.
7. Create the final version of your video.
Import your shiny new crackified avi file into Windows Media Player (or whatever video editing software you’ve got) and add the audio file that I told you to make back in step 3. Then save the project as a new movie file (it will be a wmv file; if you don’t like that format, you can convert the file into an avi using MediaCoder).
STOP! At this point you’re done and you should only have one video file-the finished product (a wmv or avi, depending on preference).
Delete the previous files if you haven’t already (the non-altered trimmed avi, the audio from that avi, the png picture, the GIF, and the altered avi that you converted from the GIF, and the final wmv file if you chose to do the conversion to avi).