So I'm guessing that because you're here, that means you've finished all the steps needed to actually make an animated avatar, and are now interested in all the fun stuff. Well, let's start with a basic effect that can really add flair and smoothness to your avatar.

What we're going to do is fade the ends of your animation so you don't end up with a jerky start/stop point. If you've done video editing or photo slide-shows, a fade is pretty simple...usually you just have to push the right button and voila, it works. Here, it's a bit more complicated, but trust me...compared to what you've been doing, this is a BREEZE.

As you can see here, there's a bit of a jarring transition from the beginning and end of the clip. Don't let all the fading in between fool you; that was part of the trailer that snipped and has nothing to do with the file itself.

Open up your file in Imageready, and select the LAST frame of your clip.

Click for Full-Size

Once you've done that, click on the little "bouncing ball" icon at the bottom of the frame.

See it?

That's called the Tween tool. What it does is make several frames with that layer, but with each consecutive one having less opacity, so you get the appearance of it fading out.

Select the First Frame option, and while you can't see it in this image, you're going to want to tell it to add about five frames. You can do less, but it would look a bit choppy. Of course, on the flip side, you can add more, but too many frames and your file size goes waaaaaaaaay up.

When you've finished this, click "OK", and watch the magic happen!

Ain't it purdy?

Now, you will notice that it still doesn't look quite right. Sure, the ends fade together, but because it's fading to one layer and not multiple layers, Susan appears to "freeze" until the fading is finished, and then starts moving. There is a way to fix this, of course, but it's not as easy as clicking a button. It's a bit more difficult than that, but still not that hard.

Go to your file, and find the first "tweened" frame. If you're visually impaired and can't figure out which one that is, just figure out how many layers you have, and then subtract that from the number of frames you have, and you'll end up with the number of tweened frames. Or you could just figure out which is the first frame to have a little ghost frame added to it. :p

See how the first layer is "eyed"? If you click on the other tweened frames, you'll see that it's the same layer. What we want to do is change that so we basically have two animations running at once. It sounds complicated, but it really isn't.

Once you've found that first tweened frame, click on the second tweened frame and make the second layer visible.

Then just repeat the process. Third frame, third layer, fourth frame, fourth layer, and so on and so forth. Eventually you will wind up with this:

And this is what the result is:

Hooorrrrrayyyyy! You're finished! Now go give yourself a big pat on the back and go celebrate with a mint julep.

Ha ha. Just kidding.

You're not really done!

See how we end up having extra frames? The animation gets to a certain point, but then it jumps back and repeats those frames. Now why would it be doing that?

Oh yeah. We, uh, forgot that we need to get rid of those surplus frames at the front.

So go ahead and select the first five frames, or whatever equals the number of tweened frames you have...

And delete!

NOW you're finished! Isn't it pretty? And it wasn't even that hard!

So go celebrate! For real. Send me some mint ice cream, because I'm pretty much dead from all this "work". *mock faint*. You could go out and waste some money at the mall, or...

YOU COULD GO MAKE SOME MORE AVATARS! MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!