[Galaxy 3 Themes and Apps] GuestK0091:
Making the Bootanimation.zip

You’ve now probably made your animation, either in Paint following the tutorial, or in your own way.

Samsung stores their bootanimation as bootani.qmg as mentioned above. The file is actually an archive like a .zip, and that’s exactly what we are going to make. In order for our phone to display the animation we need to make a bootanimation.zip with inside it our ‘part1’ folder we just made. A desc.txt file on the same level as the ‘part’ folders tells the phone how to play the animation:

•	It tells the phone in what resolution to play the animation, which in our case is 240 400

•	The following number is the frame rate in which the .png sequence has to be displayed, in this example it’s 25 frames per second. The human eye experiences everything above 25 frames per second as a fluid movement, so this is your minimum frame rate if this is the effect you’re after. Anything below 25 frames per second appears choppy to the eye (which could also be an effect you purposely want to achieve). I recommend 25 frames per second for fluid animations as more frames per second could cause our phone to display the animation incorrect, because it gets too much images to process at once.

•	The next two lines are the folders that are used in the animation with the number of loops and the delay between the animations in front of it. The first folder loops 1 time and doesn’t delay, the second loops 0 (=infinite) times and doesn’t have a delay either.

We have to transform all the above pieces into a bootanimation.zip. While we could do that manually I recommend using the Boot Animation Creator made by despotovski01. Download the software from the thread and install it on your computer.

•	Open the program and follow the wizard.

•	Select the ‘bootanimation’ folder with your ‘part1’ folder inside and proceed to step 2 of the wizard.

•	Now in this window, choose ‘edit’ while holding the first line selected and make it 240 in width and 400 in height.

•	Since our ‘tutorial animation’ is only 8 frames long I don’t want to go for the fluid animation, but rather the choppier one. In this case I’m making the animation go 10 FPS (Frames Per Second).

•	When you’re ready, click ‘set’

•	To actually assign the folder with images to the animation choose ‘Add a loop’

•	Choose the folder from the dropdown menu (which shouldn’t be hard, because there’s only one option)

•	Set the number of loops to 0, which makes it loop infinite, and leave the delay on 0. Press ‘Add’

•	Click next, on the next screen press ‘Save’ and save the bootanimation as ‘bootanimation.zip’ somewhere to your computer.

•	Now the bootanimation.zip is ready to be installed on your phone!

Make the package ready to be installed on your phone

If you’re going to use the bootanimation (or any future bootanimations you’ll make) for your personal use only, you can use an application like Root explorer to simply paste the bootanimation.zip in your /system/media folder. If you’re going to share the bootanimations like on the forums for example it could also be convenient to make an update.zip. An update.zip is a package with a couple of scripts and some files inside which can be flashed through Clock Work Mod Recovery and is used to get files in the internal memory of the phone, like in /system/media. CWM Recovery is integrated in most custom kernels and can be accessed by pressing both of the volume buttons and the menu button while turning on the phone.

To make an update.zip you can simply download this .zip archive open it with a decent archiver, preferably WinRAR or 7Zip and navigate to /system/media. You’ll see a bootanimation.zip placeholder inside, which you can then (without extracting the archive) replace with your own bootanimation.zip! The archive you now have is ready to be placed on your SD-card and flashed through CMW Recovery. You can rename the update.zip to whatever you want.

Making a simple GIF Animation preview

Now that you’ve made your bootanimation, you’ll probably want to present it to the forums. While posting a couple frames of the animation will give an idea to users what animation they’re going to get, it is also very useful to make an animated preview of said thing. A quick google on ‘GIF maker’ will give you several options of online GIF makers that just let you select the PNG’s you just made and make them into a neat little GIF animation. While this is a fine method I would recommend everyone who owns Adobe Photoshop to do it this way:

•	Open Photoshop

•	Double click the workspace to ‘open’, or select ‘File’ and click ‘open’

•	Navigate to the folder you stored your PNG’s in and select the first frame of your animation.

•	Now check the box with ‘Sequence’ behind it and click ‘open’

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•	Select the frames per second you want the animation to play in. Generally you want to go with 25, but I’m going with 10 as I explained above.

•	Now click ‘File’, ‘Save for Web & Devices’ or press ‘Alt+Ctrl+Shift+S’

•	In the window that popped up, select GIF from the dropdown menu, change the ‘Looping options’ to ‘Forever’ and hit save.

•	Upload your GIF to the public section of Dropbox, to Photobucket or any other online storage service to insert the image in a post!

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