I’m a complete novice to video-making. I have never posted on YouTube and never made any animation of any sort, unless you count Java Applets. But I’ve had an idea for something that I’d like to make for my physics class and now I’m wondering whether its feasible without too much effort. What I envision would not need to contain any real motion, nor any 3-D graphics or anything of the sort. All that I really want is to have is text appearing on the screen and basic drawings of lines and shapes, not necessarily moving. For the sake of demonstration, the animation that I have in mind would be kind of like what’s in this video. I would also want to do a voice recording and add that to the video.
I honestly have no idea what software is needed to make something like this, so any advice would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Powerpoint, or if you want more control of the details and for more involved animations maybe something like silverlight or flash.
At a very primitive level you could use Word and take screenshots as you type. Then composite them in a video editor like Premier or virtual dub or windows movie maker.
I second power point. You can then make animated gifs if you want something more complicated and put those inside the ppt. (Powerpoint can export as a movie, for the record.)
But how do you go from PowerPoint to a video you can post on YouTube?
ETA: Hey ITR Champion, I interpreted your post as meaning that you want to post on YouTube. Is that the goal, or you just need to present it to your class?
I would like to how to go from a PowerPoint presentation to YouTube. (I do have experience with PowerPoint.) For this particular thing I have in mind, YouTube is not absolutely necessary, but I’d like to know in case I want to share this with other teachers or someone else. There’s also the question of how to incorporate a voice recording.
Apple Keynote, their competitor to PowerPoint, has a “Share -> Send to YouTube” option right on the menu.
You can assemble still images and audio into movies in Windows Movie Maker or Apple iMovie. Many DVD writing programs, such as Roxio Toast or Roxio Creator, as well as programs specifically for DVD authoring, like DVD Styler, will let you make photo slideshows.
This can include hand-drawn images placed one after another on a scanner or photographed by a camera, and kept aligned by a “pegbar”. A lot of the features on traditional animation tables relate to aligning drawings and having several drawings in a stack with light shining through them, so that you can properly draw the next drawing.
Adobe Flash was originally created to animate on the computer; even though it’s gone in a lot of different directions since then, it still has all the animation functions that it ever did, like control of the size, shape, and location of moving objects.
Flash is pretty expensive though. There is other animation software available, like ToonBoom Studio and Anime Studio.
