[Galaxy 3 Themes and Apps] GuestK0091:
How to port an existing bootanimation

There’s a large amount of bootanimations available on the web, but you’ll soon discover that unless their specifically made for our phones the resolution will be to big almost all the time. That means that if you want to use or share the animation you have to port it first in order to make it work on phones with a smaller resolution. Since full fluid animations of 25 FPS are over 100 frames long most of the time it would be a real pain in the neck to scale them all down one by one. I will talk about two ways to port an animation to a smaller resolution.

The easy way

The simplest way of porting an animation would be to just adjust the resolution values in the desc.txt provided in the bootanimation.zip. While this will probably work, it’s not the most accurate way of porting an animation. Since our phone is not the fastest one it is not only the resolution which might make a bootanimation unplayable, but it could also be a pretty hard task for our lower-end device to load such big images in an animation while booting.

The advanced and more accurate way

Editing every image individually would be a really hard task, but would result in a much more accurate and potentially better port. That’s why it is my recommendation to do it anyway, but that’s where Adobe Photoshop comes in! Adobe has made wonderful batch system that lets you process huge amounts of images with a click of the mouse. This is how that works:

•	Download the ‘to be ported’ bootanimation.zip and extract it.

•	Open Photoshop

•	Click ‘Window’ and check ‘Actions’ if it isn’t checked already

•	Click the ‘New’ icon at the bottom of the Actions panel and call the action ‘Scale down bootanimation’ in the window that pops up.

•	Click record.

•	Open a random frame from the animation.

•	Now select ‘Image’, ‘Image Size’ or press ‘Alt+Ctrl+I’

•	In the window that comes up change the width and height values to 240 x 400 pixels and click ‘OK’

•	Next click ‘File’, ‘Save as’ or press ‘Ctrl+Shift+S’

•	Save the image as a .png and be sure not to overwrite something as this is just the preparing of the actual resizing of hundreds of images. (It doesn’t matter where you save it, to Photoshop it only matters if you save it. The ‘save as’ settings are going to be overridden as you’ll see later)

•	Once you’ve saved the file, close the image.

•	Now click the rectangular ‘stop’ button at the bottom of the Actions panel and you’ve recorded the action!

•	Delete the just saved image from your computer as we don’t need it anymore and it could mess up the batch process.

Your action should now look something like this:

In the next part we’re going to do the actual resizing:

•	Click ‘File’, ‘Automate, ‘Batch’

•	The ‘Batch’ window should pop up.

•	Select ‘Scale down bootanimation’ as action from the dropdown menu.

•	Choose the source to be a folder and then choose the folder with images to be resized.

•	Be sure to check ‘Override Action “Open” Commands.

•	Choose the destination to be a folder as well and choose a new folder to store the resized images.

•	Be sure to check ‘Overide Action “Save As” Commands’ as well

•	For the File Naming select the ‘4 Digit Serial Number’ + ‘Extension’ as shown in the screenshot below.

•	When everything is set up like in the screenshot, hit ‘OK’ and watch the magic happen!

•	Once the operation is completed your downscaled PNG’s will be waiting for you in the folder you selected.

•	You can use this ‘action’ now every time you need to resize an animation to this resolution.

While some of you may want to use this method but don’t have Photoshop, I’ve found out about a simple plugin for The Gimp to do pre-scripted batch operations on lots of images just like Photoshop. It’s called David’s Batch Processor and you can install it from here: http://members.ozemail.com.au/~hodsond/dbp.html

Requesting a bootanimation

We are approaching the end of the tutorial; I hope you found it useful. There’s one thing I want to mention though. Even though I’ve tried to explain the most things about bootanimations it’s most likely that you didn’t become the best artist of all time because of this. If you want to have your own custom bootanimation, or want to port an existing one and don’t feel like you can do it yourself, feel free to PM me or leave a reply here, because I’m having fun making/tweaking/porting bootanimations and that way I’m also contributing a little to this forum.

The End

Thanks for taking the time to read this (or a part of this) tutorial and I really hope it helped some people. This is my first tutorial, so don’t hold back to tell me how to improve it (or change any grammatical issues). If you still have questions you can leave a reply or PM me.

Credits go to:

This great community and its developers

Nishant_713 who helped me out the first time I made a bootanimation.

Ava.tar for feedback and his bootanimation work

Despotovski01 for his cool little bootanimation.zip maker

Samsung for the Galaxy 3

Adobe for their Creative Suite and 80% discount on CS4 for students.

Useful links:

http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1234611 Bootanimation maker by despotovski01

http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1602879 Bootanimations for Galaxy 3 Index by Ava.tar

Let me know if any more links should come in this list.

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