FAQ

To record audio:

1. There are four tabs on the top of the camera view area. Click the microphone tab (second from the left). A screen with two bars will show up. The top bar represents the sound level and the lower bar represents the current state of recording. Underneath these two bars there are two other icons: a record button and an audio import button.
2. Click the record button (on the left, with a big red circle) and the recording bar will turn red. This means the software is recording sound.
3. To stop recording, just press the recording button again and the recorded audio will appear on the movie automatically.

To import music, click on the Audio tab (denoted as a microphone), click on the icon with a musical note and a downward pointing arrow. Select the file you wish to import, and click the “Import Audio File” button.  You can also go to File–>Import to bring an audio file into your project.

There are a couple of ways to edit your audio clip:

1. To shorten the length of an existing audio clip, hover the mouse over the end of the clip.
2. The cursor will change from an arrow to a line with a perpendicular arrow pointing inward – toward the audio clip.
3. Click and drag to change the length of the audio.

Additionally, you can lengthen a previously shortened clip using the same procedure, only by dragging to make the clip longer.  In the “Manage Timeline” section, there is an icon with a music note symbol, a picture, and a double-ended arrow. This “Fit to Audio” feature allows you with one click of the mouse adjust the frame rate of the film so that the images will last the exact length of the audio clip. In other words, the audio clip length determines how long the movie will be, and the frames will be adjusted to fit that duration.

In the free Demo version of SAM Animation, you are limited to one audio track. In the full version, you can add additional tracks of audio, so a project can have narration with background music. These tracks will appear in the timeline and can be selected and dragged to move around.

SAM Animation only works with cameras without flash memory, such as digital cameras, video cameras, and flip cameras.

SAM is designed to work with webcams and some document cameras with a USB connection.  These cameras are capable of real time video streaming.  If you are testing a camera on your computer, make sure that your computer has the correct driver software to run the camera, although we recommend webcams without drivers.

Non web-cam digital or video cameras will not work directly with SAM. However, it is possible to take pictures with a digital camera or video with a video camera and import the picture or video.  See “How to import images in SAM” for instructions.

If you do not see a live image in the right hand side of your screen upon launching SAM Animation, make sure you go through the following checklist:
1) Make sure that the camera you are using is not a video camera, flip cam, or other type of camera that stores images in flash memory.
2) Make sure that the camera is plugged in via a USB port before launching SAM Animation.
2) Make sure that no other program that uses a webcam, such as Skype, is open. Only one program that streams a webcam can be used at a time.
4) Go to the Camera menu item, select Settings from the drop-down, then select Source, and you should be able to select your camera type.

Yes, you can add text, drawings, or other simple shapes (lines, rectangles, and circles) to your image(s). First, choose a frame on which to draw. Then click the “Edit Frame” button to the left of the playhead controls. (You can also double click on the frame you want to edit). A screen with paint toolbox menu on the left side will appear. Select the icon of your choice and begin editing your frame!

When you are finished editing, press the done button (bottom right) to return to the main screen, and your edits will appear on the previously selected frame.

**Clicking the “Undo” button will remove edits you’ve made, and clicking “Revert” will clear all edits made on that image**

Once you have finished with the edits that you wish to duplicate:

1. Click on the “Set” button in the templates menu (while still in the “edit frame” function). This makes your frame the “Template”.
2. Click on another frame, then click the “Apply” button below the “Set” button to apply your edits to another frame.  Note: you can click “Apply” to as many frames as desired.

To group clips together:

1. Go to the “Manage Timeline” tab.
2. Click on the first frame you wish to group, hold down the shift key, and then click on the last frame you wish to group into the clip.
3. Click the icon with the pictures and an arrow that is going toward the film strip to group your selected images together.
4. To ungroup the clip back into individual frames, click on the icon below the one described above (the one with the arrow pointing at the pictures)

To create a new project, double click the SAM Animation icon on the desktop or find it in the “Programs” or “Applications” section of your computer.  When the program starts, it will give you two options: Create a New Project or Open a Saved Project.
Click the “Create New Project” icon.

A “save as” screen should appear to name the project.

Click the “Create Project” icon, and begin creating your animation!

If you receive a warning message upon launching SAM that recommends you to update your video card, then you can follow the steps below to update!

1) Find out who is the manufacturer of your video card by going to Control Panel –> Display Settings –> Appearance –> Advanced. Here you should see some tabs, one of which will have the name of your video card manufacturer.

2) The video cards are usually Intel, ATI Radeon (AMD), or nVidia, and each of these manufacturers have websites where it’s easy to detect and download the right driver update — and it’s all FREE!
ATI Radeon: http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/Pages/index.aspx
Intel: http://downloadcenter.intel.com/
nVidia: http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us

Once you’ve downloaded and installed the appropriate driver, you should be ready to start creating!

After installing the software and launching SAM Animation for the first time, if you receive an alert that reads:

Windows XP:
“This application has failed to start because the application configuration is incorrect. Reinstalling the application may fix this program.”

Windows Vista/7:
“The application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect. Please see the application event log for more detail.”

We will have an iPad app for beta testing in June 2012.  Please contact us if you’re interested in beta testing.

You can go to File–Export …

To save your project so you can go back to work on it later, go to File–>Save.  If you are done with your project and want to export it as a stand-alone movie file to share, go to File–>Export.  See ”Sharing Videos” to learn how to upload your video directly to the web.

By default, SAM saves your project in a “SAM Animation” folder, which is located in your “Documents” folder on a Mac or “My Documents” folder on a PC.

If you look at one of your SAM projects in your “Documents” folder, you will see that all of the data is organized into folders. The “.sam” file keeps track of where everything (images, sound clips, etc.) is located and ensures that SAM plays your video back exactly as you saved it. Think of this file as your project’s “conductor”.

The SAM project is actually the folder with the same name as the .sam file, therefore you could consider the folder as the project file if you are saving it to new locations or copying that folder to other computers.

If the project is saved often then you can just re-open the project and the pictures should be there. If you still do not see your pictures, you can look in the project folder under the sub-folder “Images” to see if your images are there.

You can re-import your pictures into your movie project using the Import feature (see “How do I import images”) . You can select multiple images to import at once, rather than having to do one at a time.

If they are not in the “Images” sub-folder, then they are gone….and we are sorry!

SAM Animation has an auto-save feature, however, it is rather infrequent relative to the number of changes and additions you will be make while creating your SAM movie. SAM autosaves roughly once every minute. Our recommendation is to save early and often to ensure you do not lose your work!

The free demo version of SAM Animation can be installed on more than one computer in a single classroom; however, if you are wanting to install on a number of computers in an entire school or district, you must upgrade to the full version here.

At this time we do not provide the functionality to support one-time installs that can push SAM Animation onto multiple computers at once; however, we hope to offer that feature in the future in the full version site license of SAM Animation.

For installations on a school’s network, we advise saving students’ project files to a local or external drive.  The reason for this recommendation is because SAM projects can become very large, directly correlated to the number of images taken and amount of audio recorded.  These large files often bog down networks, and as a result SAM projects can take a long time to open, save, and work slowly.  For more information or help regarding network installations, please Contact Us.

If you have purchased a 5-pack, 10-pack, or site license digital download, and need to install on computers without internet, you can do one of the following options:
1) Order a CD or
2) Download the file onto a USB key from a computer with internet, then use that USB key to transfer the file to each non-internet computer, entering the license code manually after each installation of the software.

For network based installations a MSI installer is included with “Building License” purchases. You can log into your account and click on the “Downloads” tab and you will see the text, “Network Installer”. Once you click on this and download, you can unzip the package and reference the MSI installer. The other files in the folder are support packages and will need to be accessible to the MSI installer when loading it for deployment.

Currently the MSI does not support license deployment and the best way to approach license distribution to all computers on your network is via a config file located in the folder where the application is installed. Once SAM Animation is installed, there is a app_config.ini.example file located in the programs installation folder. You can fill out the fields in this file following the directions in the file. Once you have made all of your edits you can save the file as “app_config.ini”. Please reference examples below. Should you need further assistance please drop us a line at support@icreatetoeducate.com.

Typical Configuration File

Keywords:
%current_user% = Replaces with currently logged in user.

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<ApplicationConfig>
    <License>
        <key>0g760b72-0d4g41ec-cd99b83e-cf90a149-533f4843</key>
        <organization>icreate-a9j23</organization>
        <email>info@icreatetoeducate.com</email>
    </License>
<!-- If you have a generic path for each user you can place it here and
SAM will auto replace %current_user% with the currently logged in user (path must exist)-->
    <workspaces>
    <workspace user="%current_user%">C:\Users\%current_user%\SAMWSpace</workspace>
    </workspaces>
</ApplicationConfig>

Conditional Configuration File

Keywords:
%current_user% = Replaces with currently logged in user.
%default% = Replaces with “My Documents” folder of currently logged in user. Note that if %default% is used the folder “SAMWorkspace” is appended to the path and auto created if it doesn’t exist.

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<ApplicationConfig>
    <License>
        <key>0g760b72-0d4g41ec-cd99b83e-cf90a149-533f4843</key>
        <organization>icreate-a9j23</organization>
        <email>info@icreatetoeducate.com</email>
    </License>
<!-- If you want to check if a path exist and use a path based on redirection rules you can use the syntax below. SAM will check if the path exist for the "try" attribute and if valid it will use the value in between-->
    <workspaces>
    <ifpathexist user="%current_user%" try="C:\Users\%current_user%\Documents\samwspace">%default%</ifpathexist>
    </workspaces>
</ApplicationConfig>

In the current version of SAM Animation, you can share your videos directly to YouTube, the iCreate gallery, and VoiceThread galleries. If you would like to share via other channels, you can first save your SAM Animation project as a Quicktime video (via the Share menu item) and then separately — outside of SAM — upload that movie file to the channel of your choice!

The whole process should take about 5 minutes and then you can plug in the webcam and start animating!

Yes.  We do not install webcam-specific software, so you need to check with the manufacturer of your webcam to determine if additional software needs to be installed.  However, we actually recommend webcams that do not require additional software.

You will need Windows XP or 7 with Quicktime 7.1 or higher and a graphics card with OpenGL 1.2 support.  Note SAM Animation does run intermittently on Vista as well, but we do not guarantee ideal functionality.  In addition, we recommend at minimum 512 MB of RAM.

You will need 10.4 or higher with Quicktime 7.1 or higher.

Unfortunately, SAM Animation does not work on Linux machines.  Sorry for any inconvenience!

To take a picture in SAM, either click on the button with an image of a camera on it under the live camera feed window or press the space bar on your keyboard.

Click on the “Import” button (shown as a down arrow) in the upper left corner of the screen or go to File–>Import.  Locate the image that you would like to add to your project.  If you would like to import more than one image at once hold the shift key down to select all.  Click open and you will see the images imported as new frames on the timeline.

To change the frame rate find the “fps” (frames per second) box located beneath the movie playback controls.  Use the text box entry, or the slider to change the fps of your animation (Remember: the higher the frames per second, the faster your movie will play).

Onion-skinning is a way to see two frames at once. One frame represents an image already captured in the timeline, and the other represents the picture you are about to take. One image will be partially transparent; this is the image you have already captured. The onion-skinning feature can be used to align objects in your animation from frame to frame.
The onion-skinning button is located just under the camera view window (i.e., the live image you see from the webcam). You can also turn onion-skinning on and off by clicking once on the camera view window in the software.

Time-lapse is a function that allows the user to select an interval and a duration that instructs the software to take pictures automatically. For example, you can set time lapse up such that SAM will take a picture every 10 minutes for 4 hours, giving you 24 pictures.  To use time-lapse:

1. Click on the “Time-lapse” tab (the one with the clock).
2. Once in the time-lapse display, you will see two sliding tabs on the timeline below the image.  The blue tab (on the top) is the interval tab. You can slide it back and forth to change the amount of time between each picture. The red tab (on the bottom) is the duration tab. You can slide it back and forth to change the total length of time you want it to take pictures.
3. Use the “time to begin” function at the bottom of the time lapse display to indicate when you want the picture taking to begin.
4. Once the picture taking begins, the timer at the bottom will tell you how much time until the next picture. There is also a count of how many “snaps” have already been taken out of the total number of images.