Sprite Guide (Version 1.01y)

Written by Fluxmeister

A sprite is the name for a given collection of pixels we refer to as a character etc etc.
For the NES project I decided that I'd like megaman to play a role in the video.
I am going to take screens from an emulator and work them so I can use them
as animated footage in my video! (thus this guide was born!) This is just my way,
I am sure there are a million more... and likely better ones hehe.

This is a quick guide for using sprites from video game footage or screen shots from NES emulators.
Screens are taken from Adobe Photoshop and Premiere.

Important Note: Be sure that your images are the same resolution as you edit in! 720x480 for me. :)

Starting things off:

Capture some screens either using printscreen or a windows recorder. (Camtasia is a great piece of
windows recording software!) Why bother with a windows recorder, use this altered version of Nester to
record. Once you have a pile of screen shots, make some cuts around the sprites you wish to use.
Whenever possible use bitmaps or other lossless formats (uncompressed, huffyuv)

The above is my zoomed in shot of megaman that I 'cleaned up' for use in my video. Later I will change
the background to true GREEN (g=255) for appropriate green screening.

(the above is an example animation consisting of a whopping 3 frames)

Next you will want to make sure that all your sprites are lined up the same in each frame (if you are
going to be animating the characters). If you are simply going to use stills then just center the
sprite as well (or not well) as you please.

In the above image I created 2 seperate layers to be able to center and align each frame of animation
as megaman takes a step, blinks or otherwise. The actual psd file I used simply had a SINGLE
blue box in the middle (I just have the two together to give an idea of my method).

Layers: (in layer order from top to botom)

  1. Solid Blue bordered box. This is primarily used to make sure that the feet all line up the same.
  2. Light Blue Centering line. Regardless of not being the actual center... this aligns the character by
    comparing the location of certain pixels of each frame. (ie. megaman's foot etc.) Note that I lowered
    the opacity of this layer to make it 'transparent' and easier to use!
  3. Megaman Sprite. The bottom layer is of course megaman which is appropriately lined up to match
    with the previous frame.

This image shows how I used the 2 pixels of megaman's eye (on the left eye) to align the motion of the character.

To save this mess just simply turn off the layer visibility of the two blue layers. Be sure to save as bitmaps! If you
intend to edit in premiere you need to make this image the same as you edit with (ie. 720x480!)

This is my afterthought... "oh yeah I need to make this thing ready for green screening!" I just reopened my
bitmaps and simply 'filled' the white using the G=255 Green. Be sure that if you use the fill tool that the anti-aliased
option is OFF. Otherwise your fill will fuzz your sprite's edges! (and yes this is a cropped version of my image)

Off to Premiere!

... just in case you don't know what this looks like in premiere...

As you can see from above you have to have your 'sprites' in any of the video tracks above 1a/1b to
access the transparency settings. Also note my attempt to create the walk cycle by alternating frames
of animation. So far it seems as though each frame of animation gets 4 frames @ 29.97(30fp) within
premiere to match that of the original NES (or close to...)

Guess what? I learned something new! Green Screen doesn't make the cut. The image above is from the
Video Options... Transparency... settings. I switched it over to RGB difference with a similarity of
50 and it worked ever better! With green screen you can get extra pixels around the sprite that show bright green!
So forget Green Screen... this is an important reminder that just because something works in one situation,
it doesn't mean it works in all!

You can set the similarity value a bit higher with decent results. Though at some point you might start cutting
into the sprite itself. 65 seems to be ok for my experiments.

(note that the aspect ratio of the background image is wrong... :P not important for my example)
...and yes that's an outright screenshot from my Premiere preview.

Be sure to experiement with the transparency settings if you run into anything weird.

Happy editing people!

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