Filed under: Software, Odds and ends
Star Wars TSG, because everyone wants to be George Lucas
Grubs (that's what I call Daring Fireball's John Gruber, we're cool like that) posted Star Wars TSG to his Linked List and it is a winner. And by winner I mean a small, free application that wastes far more of your time than it should, but for some reason you're not upset about all that lost time.Star Wars TSG does one thing: lets you create your very own 'Star Wars title crawl.' If you don't know your Ewoks from your Klingons you might not be aware that the opening title sequence to each Star Wars movie follows the same basic format. This is the format that Star Wars TSG allows you to create for yourself. It even outputs your creation in a number of different sizes. One word of caution: this application renders a sequence of bitmaps that you can stitch together using QuickTime (or another movie editing suite). This means that you should be careful where you point the 'Destination Folder' in the Generate section. You're going to be generating around 800 images to create your masterpiece, and something tells me you don't want them all cluttering up your desktop.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
John said 8:16AM on 1-23-2007
I thought this was going to render the thing in the program but instead it created over 2000 bitmap images. I changed the output directory to the desktop. Not a good idea. I thought it was going to save one file to the desktop but instead it saved over 2000 to the desktop and the worse part was it took 100% of my processor power and wouldn't let go. I eventually had to boot into the last backup of the system from my firewire drive and delete the files that way. I started playing with this thing kind of late right before I went to bed so I wasn't all there when I attempted this. So whatever you do don't tell it to save all your files to the desktop!
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Maddles said 8:53AM on 1-23-2007
Too late...
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Illtron said 9:31AM on 1-23-2007
I ended up with about 2800 .bmp files on my desktop. The Finder totally choked, and wouldn't work even after restarting. Luckily, the dock popped up and I just opened my terminal and did rm -f ~/Desktop *.bmp, which took care of things. Seriously, a warning from the developer would have been nice.
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Hunka said 10:27AM on 1-23-2007
Seriously...did any of you READ the post? It clearly states to not point to your desktop. Now I'm not saying the developer doesn't need to put a warning in, but the warning WAS given.
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iMatt said 11:02AM on 1-23-2007
Anyone know how to import these thousand of bitmaps into iMovie so they play like, um, a movie?
I tried to drag them in but 1) the full set overwhelmed iMovie and shut it down 2) a smaller set gave me an "out of disc space" warning and 3) a tiny subset assigned each frame a 5-second duration. That's one slow crawl!
Thanks to anyone who shares the answer to this.
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James said 12:07PM on 1-23-2007
SAVE TO A NEWLY CREATED FOLDER. In Quicktime under the FIle menu select "Open Image Sequence". Navigate to the folder and select the first image. Click OK. Select the frame rate - use the same one you selected in the SW TSG. In a minute or two Quicktime will have the movie ready to watch. Export to whatever format you need.
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fatsvernon said 12:44PM on 1-23-2007
Piece of cake. Render it, pull it into quick time (File/open image sequence) then select the first image, it'll do the rest. Then take it into iMovie and pop in the tunes. Export and voila. Check out my silly submission. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRKWGkx9-_0
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Mike said 1:16PM on 1-23-2007
I've got iMovie, but I don't have Quicktime Pro. Is there another way to render all these bitmaps?
Thanks
Mike
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ClunkClunk said 3:17PM on 1-23-2007
This little application produces surprisingly good results. My hat is off to the developers.
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Maddles said 4:57PM on 1-23-2007
@ Hunka
Yes I did read it but there is no warning for what happened to computer. It didn't only clutter the desktop (what I expected), it also sent my Finder into a CPU grabbing loop that it won't get out of even after a restart. Now I wish I'd come here first to fix the problem, Illtron up there gives a quick answer. Instead I'm just using a demo of Path Finder
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