Movies in Signatures

This tutorial will show you how to incorporate video into a signature. We will cover some basic blending options to make the flow of your signature work for you. We will use adobe Imageready and adobe Photoshop for this.

First thing you will want to do is find a video. You need to find a video in a .mov format (quicktime format) since these are the most effective ones to use in imageready.

Go to file, open and chose your video. When you open it you will see a screen similar to the one shown below. Click "Selected Range Only" and I would suggest limiting this to every 2nd or 3rd frame to keep your file size low. Select the range of your video by progressing the slider to your beginning point, and then hold down shift and drag it to your ending point. It will highlight the selected portion in dark grey. Now you are ready to move on.

Click to enlarge

If you happened to get portions of the video you don't want, simply select the first and last layer of the portion you wish to get rid of, and hit the trash can icon shown here.

Click to enlarge

Now that your image is trimmed up, you will also notice that you have a slight delay in the image. Select the first frame of the animation, and hold shift and select the last frame of the animation. Now right click the time of the delay and a menu will pop up. Select "no delay" and you will notice your animation now runs smooth.

Click to enlarge

Now I have seen some tutorials that have said "manually go through and resize every frame now." That is a lot of work you don't need to do. Simply go to image, image size. Now you can select what size you want your image to be. I always simply adjust the height to around 150 (since most signatures are at most that tall), when you do that the width will adjust itself.

Now what I will do is jump to adobe Photoshop to integrate this into a signature. You can do this by going to file, jump to, adobe photoshop or you can simply click the jump to quickkey on your palette.

Adjust the canvas size to fit your signature size. I will be adjusting this one to 400x115. I realize this will cut a little bit out of my movie, but it will help to erase the black bars around the top and bottom of my movie. I will also be specifying which way I want to expand the canvas. You can do that by clicking a block in the canvas size menu. You will find the blocks under where you specify your size.

Now on the top layer of your image, you can add in your signature if you have it premade. I will be adding in a picture for mine and blending it by using the graduated brush eraser set to a low opacity. (if you don't know how to do that, you can find my tutorial on image blending here)

Afterwards I will be adding in text. To make it less visible though, I will set its blending options to bevel and emboss, and then turning the fill opacity down to 0.

After that, I will simply be jumping back to imageready, and then I will save this optimized. (file, save optimized)

Now you have your video signature completed.