Posts: 32
Location: Rochester, NY USA
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"All the little techniques you can place in these banners" actually fill those $29.95 books at the bookstore. But if you're willing to tackle one thing at a time, I'd be happy to help. I don't have PSP8 installed at work anymore due to a hard drive failure, so the closest I have is PSP9 and Animation Shop 3. But that should get you at least most of the way there.
Why don't we start with the flashing part of the banner. To do this, we'll create three nearly identical images in Paint Shop Pro, save them as .psp files, and bring them into Animation Shop to make our animated gif.
In Paint Shop Pro, create a new document, 468 by 60 pixels, 72 pixels per inch, raster background, 16 million colors for the color depth, and the background will be white. Set the background color to blue (0, 0, 255). This will be the color of our text. Click the Text tool.
In the Tool Options pallette, set Create As to vector, Font to Arial Black, Size to 30, stroke width to 0.0, Font Style to bold, Alignment to left, and Anti-alias to sharp. Click on the image and in the Text Entry box type Flashing Banner. Click Apply. You may have to move the text so it fits well. Click the Pan tool (the hand).
Now we'll create the second image from the first. In the menu bar click Window > Duplicate. Click the Object Selection tool (the square with the mouse pointer inside). You should see a box around the text. Move the cursor over the text until it changes to a four-headed arrow cursor. Double-click the text. In the box that pops up, click on the blue swatch under Fill. Change the color to red (255, 0, 0). Click OK in the color picker window, then click OK in the Vector Property window. Click the Pan tool.
We'll create the third image from ther second. Follow the instructions for creating the second image but set the color to green (0, 255, 0). Now you have three images: one with blue text, one with red text, and one with green text.
Click the title bar for the image with the blue text. In the menu bar, click Layers > Merge > Merge All (Flatten). Save this image as banner_blue.psp. For the file type, save it as Animation Shop (*.psp). This assures it can be opened in Animation Shop. Do the same for the second image but save it as banner_red.psp. The last one should be saved as banner_green.psp. The actual file names don't matter, but you'll need to be able to follow along in the next section so it's probably a good idea if you give them the same filenames that I did. Close Paint Shop Pro.
Now start Animation Shop. Click File > Open and open banner_blue.psp. Now click Animation > Insert Frames > From File. Click the Add File button and select banner_red.psp. click the Add File button again and select banner_green.psp. Set Insert Before to 2, so the new frames get added after the existing one. Click the View Animation button (just before the Help button in the toolbar) and watch your text change colors. Click the View Animation button again to stop the animation.
You'll probably want to make each image show for a longer period of time. Currently each one shows for 1/10 of a second, which kind of hurts the eyes. We can change how long each one shows for. Each frame can have a different duration, but we'll set them all the same for this one. Click Animation > Frame Properties. Set the Display Time to 100, so each frame shows for 100/100 second, or 1 second. (Your math teacher was right, you did need to learn your fractions.)
Let's call that good enough. Time to save it. Click File > Save. For the file type, choose CompuServe Graphics Interchange (*.gif). Enter banner.gif for the file name and click Save. Now Animation Shop will ask you for settings. The first page should be fine, so click Next. Keep clicking Next until you can click Finish. Your flashing banner is ready to use.
I hope this helps. The trick is to keep everything in the same position and change the color. You can change the actual text if you want one with 2/3/4/more messages on it. But that's the basic idea of the flashing banner.
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Always take into account what nobody would ever do in a million years, because someone will.
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