In this tutorial we'll be transferring a video clip to ImageReady using, well, just ImageReady, with no video editor in-between. It's the easiest way do to it, however, not all video files will open up in ImageReady. In my example I'll be using a .mov file, and I know some AVI's work as well. If your video won't open up in ImageReady, then it probably is an unsupported file type or has a weird codac that ImageReady can't handle and you'll have to send your clip through a video editor before you can open it in ImageReady. But that's for a different tutorial...here, we're just keeping it simple, folks.

Let's do this thing!

Okay. Open ImageReady and go to File > Open. Not that hard, right?

Choose your movie file and hit "Open". I'm going to be using the PC teaser trailer today.

If ImageReady rejects the movie file at this point, STOP. Go directly to jail, do not pass GO, do not collect $200. Uh... never mind.
You need to abandon this particular tutorial because it's not going to help you, unfortunately. Instead, go here and start from the beginning. Eventually I'll just send you back here because I'm too lazy to do the same steps twice. But it will still waste gobs of your time. I know...it's a hard life out there. *sniff*

Ahem. Sorry.

On the blessed chance that your video actually DID go through, this little puppy should pop up.

Note: If you're just joining us from the "Pre-Editing" tutorial, welcome! No need to get all scared or confused. Just follow the instructions below, although you can skip the part about trimming the clip before rendering since your clip is already trimmed. Have fun! Everyone else, just ignore this. It doesn't pertain to you.

Now, technically we could just go ahead and hit OK now, but that would be a bad idea of gigantic proportions. It would probably kill your computer, and you'd have recurring nightmares of your cursor slowly clicking the button and you screaming "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!". Yeah. Not a good idea. Have you any idea how big of a file the entire trailer would make? Eeeep!

So, obviously we need to trim the clip down quite a bit. For this tutorial, I've decided to use the clip of the Pevensies wandering around the ruins of Cair Paravel.

To accomplish this, click "Selected range only" and move your cursor to the desired starting point of the clip. Or as close as you can get without cutting any of it off, anyway. You don't need to be super precise here; you'll be able to trim the clip more accurately later on.

Now, hold down your SHIFT key, and move the cursor until the portion of the clip you want to keep is dark gray.

Since this is a pretty big clip, I've selected "Keep every 3rd frame" instead of the usual 2. This will keep the frame numbers down and to a sane amount. Depending on the length of your clip, you can opt to keep every 3rd frame, or 2nd frame, or even every frame at all. But if you pick a generous option and your computer grinds to a halt, don't say I didn't warn you.

Remember those unwanted frames at the beginning? It's time to get rid of them. To simplify the process, I like to delete the unwanted layers first and then the frames. It's easier that way, trust me.

First, I select the unwanted layers at the beginning of the clip...

And then I delete 'em. Voila!

See those empty frames? Just select those, and trash 'em. It's easy to tell which ones you don't need anymore because they're well, empty.

See? All gone!

Do the same with the end of the clip.

And there you have it! Or...maybe not. Seriously, if I tried to save this unaltered clip as a gif...remember those things I said about your computer dying a slow and untimely death? It'd happen, no joke.
So, we need to get this down to a decent size.

I went to Image > Image Size and set the width down to 200, and the height automatically adjusted. If yours doesn't, just click on the "Constrain Proportions" check box. You'll wonder how you ever lived without it.

That's it! Just go to File > Saved Optimized File and save it, and you're all done! Shout, dance, sing praises to the heavens...that is as easy as animating gets, folks. Trust me, it only gets harder. But, you just did it the easiest way possible, so rejoice! Triumph is yours.

Before I had re-sized the gif, I was watching it play through and noticed that the Pevensies running looked a bit choppy. That's probably a result of importing every third frame instead of every second. It looks fine in the smaller version, but I just wanted to give a heads up. It also runs a bit fast, but you can find out how to fix that here.Other than that, it looks great!