Now that you have mastered the art of making audioscopes, you may want to turn them into thumbnails. A thumbnail will not react the way your audioscope does. It is simply an image file. You will only be able to do this if you are on a Webtv plus unit as you will need the video capture capabitily.
It is a good idea to have your scopes on a page by themselves without any music playing. You need to set up your vcr so that it will record off of Webtv and not your television. This means you might have to switch the cables around. Record a couple seconds of each audioscope. Switch back the cables (if needed) so that it is back to taping off of the tv. Once you have the audioscope taped, it will then be an "image".
Go to the CamLoader. Once there, click on the video camera icon and a screen will pop up. Press play on your vcr. Switch the button on this screen from video to tv and select freeze when your ready. Select add picture. Name the file with .gif or .jpg as the ending. Fill out all remaining fields and continue just as you would using the transloader. Transload to your homepage.
Go to ImageMagick Studio and put in the URL of your image. (There is a camloader at ImageMagick, but for some reason it doesn't work well with Webtv.) Press view. Any time you make any changes, your image will appear. If you are not happy, you can just press your back button and correct it.
You will now need to crop your image and this is the tricky part. You will see a number in the title bar. Write this number down! Select transform at the top of the screen. In the parameter box it should say 304x232. To crop an image, you need to know that you are cropping two sides of the image at once using the + and — attributes (+?—? are left and bottom and —?+? are right and top.) If you are not familiar with cropping, there is a great explanation on how to do it in this tutorial written by Joshua-Lee. Crop it down to nothing but scope by typing in 304x232+?—? and selecting the crop button. Press your back button and change values until you are happy with the left and bottom sides. Be sure to write the number down that now appears in the title bar at the bottom of the screen. Once you have this done, scroll back up to the transform button and repeat for the right and top sides. This will be done by using your new numbers along with —?+?.
You can rest easy now because the hardest part is done. You will want to make these thumbnails as small a file size as possible for optimum loading time. Taking out some of the color will help out considerably. You are now ready to go to the colormap section. You will see 256 in the parameter field. I recommend doing any number between 2 and 25--depending on how much color is in your original scope.
If you want your file size even smaller still, take it to the ImageOptimizer later.
You now need to resize your image. Scroll to the top and click on resize. Erase the numbers that are in the parameter field. Type in whatever numbers suit your purpose. I have found that 80x80 is a small size that still allows the viewer to be able to tell what the image is. Click on scale then resize. Typing in 80x80 or any set of double numbers will give you as close to that as it can while keeping your image from being distorted.
Next go to the top and select output. Change to jpg or gif format and select single file. Click output. Your completed thumbnail will appear and you can now transload it back to your homepage by clicking on the transloader link. Better yet, take it to the ImageOptimizer now and then transload.
You can also use Photopoint. It is a little easier to crop here, but I prefer the overall results I get with ImageMagick. If you use Photopoint, do not transload your image to your homepage. Go to Photopoint and set up an account using your e-mail address. Go back to your mail and click on write. Select photo and capture the image the same way as above. Send to photos@pantellic.com.
I would like to thank Slo Mo for the idea of turning audioscopes into thumbnails.
Email: chardonnay1@webtv.net