Ok, so I got my image ready in Photoshop and saved it as a .psd, and placed it in Illustrator. See how the image below has a border around it? That’s important. You need to have closed path shapes of course when you vectorize an image, and Illustrator interprets full bleed images as open shapes, so making a ‘border’ from the background layer in Photoshop is an important step. Then I used Object > Live Trace > Make and Convert to Live Paint:

After you do this, make sure you release the paint group. (Object > Live Paint > Release).

The next problem: losing details. Or so it seemed. The trunk of the tree ended up on top of the shadow marks, and I couldn’t find those for a while. So I sent the trunk to the back of the group and turned it into another color so I could see the smaller paths on top:

What you’re seeing here is the next step. I selected all the small shapes on top of the trunk, then the trunk, and used Pathfinder to cut out the smaller path shapes from the trunk shape. You could just make them the same color as the background if you wanted to, but I wanted the most design process flexibility, so I made them as a cut-out.

Here’s one of the concept revisions I used this image for:

Here are a couple videos Jenny Schmid and I made using Flash (she has a fantastic flash website by the way).

Tips: It’s good to start in Flash by making your file 720×480 and 29.97 frames per second (that’s the frame rate of video). I usually just stick to 30fps (and 60fps for any Flash for the web).

Going from vector based to raster/video based can be rough on all those nice crisp vectors. I’ve tried many codecs but the best codec seems to be Animation or Uncompressed. Yes, it takes up a lot of room (about 1GB per minute), but I wouldn’t do it any other way – it keeps compression junk out. To go to Quicktime, go to File > Export > Export Movie, then choose Quicktime for Save as Type, go ahead and hit the Save button, click on Quicktime Settings, then under Video, click on Settings, and choose Animation.

After that, the video compresses well for DVD, or web video using H264 or whatever compression you’d like to use. Don’t forget to compress the sound too! If not, the audio actually ends up taking more bandwidth than the video. I usually use AAC, 128 for the web.