One thing I run into somewhat frequently is content being provided to me in a Microsoft Word file with embedded images. I used to struggle with getting the highest quality version of those images back out of Word and into Photoshop. If you cut and paste into Photoshop, you often get it at the resolution it’s been scaled down to, and often, the colors are wrong or even the aspect ratio is messed up. The solution is simple and having stumbled upon it, it is going to save me plenty of time. Maybe it can save you some time too.
The Solution
File->Save as->HTML
(I know, *shudder* at the thought of Word’s HTML. But we don’t need that!)
Word generates an images folder and creates a gif and a jpeg of each image at the maximum resolution. I was able to pull full 300 dpi photos from word files with this technique with none of the image screw-ups that you get when you try copying and pasting.
It’s just that easy. Do you know of a better way to get those embedded images out of Microsoft Word? Let me know in the comments!
I forget where I got this, but I think that it’s the level of quality I’d like to see in more book trailers online:
Having Tim Curry as a narrator is probably outside of the range of what we can afford as SF/F writers, but still. Let’s go over what makes this awesome:
Tight pacing. 2 minutes long, and packed with information. If there’s a negative here, some of it is too fast. But that is preferable to too slow.
Rapid-moving, well designed motion graphics. The movement is varied. It’s not a bunch of slow zooms or pans on a graphic like many book trailers I see. Stuff comes in and leaves the view at an angle. There’s perspective. It has a coherent visual style also.
Illustrations! This is much easier when your book has illustrations already, but maybe an investment in an illustrator would increase the “stickiness” of a book trailer. It’s a visual medium, and you need some imagery to catch the eye. Simple stock photos probably aren’t good enough. And you can only use your cover so many times.
Professional narration, with the highest quality sound. So many book trailers I have seen end up sounding like they were recorded in a bathtub. PC microphones are a travesty. Studio-quality audio is not cheap. Alas.
Prominently displayed URL at the end. This isn’t a criticism of other book trailers as I usually don’t make it to the end in other ones I have watched. But I liked how it left you with a call to action (go to the website!) I don’t know how much promotion Lemony Snicket really needs for these books, but if I didn’t know about them already, this would have sent me running to the site.
My After Effects and Premiere skills are pretty rusty, but I think I’m going to try and add them back into my skillset. I have a voice actor studio I’ve done work with in Denver at the old day job, and so I think I could probably offer a decently affordable, high quality book trailer service. Youtube is the third most visited website on the web. It’s power to bring your book before a new audience is unparalleled. I’d really like to offer a service to tap into that power.
Not the best from yesterday, but I am having trouble connecting to the hotel wireless long enough to upload everything. And I’m still making some HDRs of the bay. But I really like how this one turned out. I was taking a picture of something else and heard a squawking behind me. I loved over my shoulder and this guy was giving me the evil eye.
Newport has been great. I’m sad to be leaving it for Portland today. Our feet cannot take much more in the way of walking. I am looking forward to a week of sitting in my office looking for jobs and working on freelance projects.
I’ve been working for the past several days, in between bouts of packing, on developing the new Roundbottom site design. You can check out a static HTML preview here. None of the links work, so don’t click on them, but mouse over them for fun, especially at the top. For newer readers, Roundbottom is my steampunk photography/short fiction project, centered around a steampunk naturalist and his adventures.
A couple of things to note about this new design. The flash video of the gears is still comp and needs to be purchased as well as compressed. It sits at 2 megs right now which is just way too heavy a file for something silly like that. I should be able to reduce its file size considerably once I buy the video.
I’m using, as in the first design, SiFR font replacement on the headers, and SWIFR to style the main images and the gravatar images. These are flash based technologies that are great uses of Flash. They both should degrade fairly gracefully, although the main header font is ridiculously huge without the styling.
I’ve been grabbing resources from all over the place for this one, hence the planned “design credits” page. It’ll include a link back to my portfolio site, but as well list all the free resources I used in the design and link to them.
You might notice the Foundation stuff. That’s laying the groundwork for the Roundbottom club, basically. More on that later. It’s an experiment that will sink or swim depending on a variety of things. The other thing you might notice is the Encyclopedia link. My intent is to set up a wiki page for keeping track of Roundbottom’s world, cast of characters, and so on. I am pretty sure I will open up editing of this to the fans. I’m thinking hard about ways to encourage audience participation here. I want the comment section to be a delightful place of steampunk characters not of my creation. Hence the “More Steampunk” section. We’ll see how that works.
Overall, I think I’ve vastly improved upon the old design. Cross browser compatibility should be relatively cleared up. The images can be larger and more detailed. And the design really says “clockpunk” now.
Please do let me know if you notice any major glaring errors in rendering. There are a few things that IE 6 doesn’t get right, but for the most part, it looks okay there. Obviously, more modern browsers should handle it better.
I can’t wait to get this thing up and running and to start rolling out new, fresh steamy content. I’ve got some great storylines lined up for this summer that I think you’re really going to enjoy.
One last thing! Design type folks, if you have any technical questions about how I did something or why I did something, do please ask! I’d love to talk shop on this one.
Hi! My name is Jeremiah Tolbert, but you can call me Jeremy. I am a fantasy and science fiction writer, photographer, and web designer living in Northern Colorado. I am currently starting a new job and cannot take freelance work at this time. Drop me a line if you have any questions or comments. I love hearing from new people and I now have a lot more time to chat.
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I forget where I got this, but I think that it’s the level of quality I’d like to see in more book trailers online:
Having Tim Curry as a narrator is probably outside of the range of what we can afford as SF/F writers, but still. Let’s go over what makes this awesome:
