Advice on logo animation

[December X]

Hey guys.

I am an inventor and designer with some cross over abilities in general design work and I was wondering whether I could get some advice from you.

I am doing an info product for inventors on the web which I hope will save inventors all round the world a lot of time and money.

In the past, whenever I have had challenges, I have often been able to complete them and my preference is always to add a new skill to myself if it is always possible.
With that in mind, I was wondering whther you could give some advice as I'm sure you'll know the answer to this.

I completed a lot of the design work for my company on Illustrator, and now I'm faced with the challenge of several animations (albeit not at all complex ones) for cut scenes in this info product I am making/filming/editing.
One of the main animations, I need to fairly rapidly spin my company logo (a basic pdf file I have) and for it to start in middle of the screen, advance as it starts spinning to front of screen, and then return to its normal position. There is 2 seconds of audio to go with it (It will be a 2 second animation) and I already have the audio.

I would love to do this myself, not just to save money, but because as an inventor and designer, it is invaluable to have these skills.
So I was wondering- do you think I could do it, and which program would you recommend using?

I don't have much worries about editing the audio in- I have to do some audio editing for my product anyway, its more the spinning and the movement forward and back. However, since it just goes forward and back I would think this is not the most complex action.

Would appreciate any info, and even if you think this is not possible, that would be good info too.

I'd love to do it myself and I'm aware there's loads of free trials on the net I could probably complete it on.

Thanks for reading and for the advice.

December X

[bigdave]

Animated GIF in photoshop will probably be your best bet.

[Boss Hog]

Failing that use flash but this does come with its problems, for example it won't work on iPad's/iPhone's and for people who don't have flash player installed (rare nowadays)

[linziloop]

Personally I would go download the trial of C4D, import my logo as a vector (saved as Illustrator 4), put an extrude nurbs effect on it to make it 3D and then go find a tutorial on how to animate in c4D (cos I haven;t got that far with it yet), and voila! You can export this as many different file formats depending on how it will be needed in the end

[byronc]

flash will be your best bet - i think gifs in photshop wil be quite limiting - espeically if you want co-ordinated sound etc

[NeedForBleed]

I'd echo the above. Either Photoshop animation (or Imageready if you're using an older version i.e CS2 & before) for a basic animation. Or Flash which can be a bit tedious, although there is a program called Flash Catalist which apparently makes it easier for dummies like me, and could actually be ideal for such a project of this calibre.
Thinking about it though, you could cleverly animate your transition with rollover states and then trigger the sounds, depending on how you're constructing the web page (dreamweaver, textpad or other application), but that's another kettle of pish.

[Tony Hardy]

I'd do it in After Effects. Easiest package to use for this kind of thing. Motion graphics software at it's best. That or the C4D option.