Moho Forum

What do you guys and gals use to make animated GIF's? I use Animation Shop 3 to process AS6 seperate frame export, but I have the feeling it's somewhat limited, especially when rendering and trying to make the best possible pallette for the max 256 colours in an animated GIF.

Well, one can use easily Image Ready and create the GIF there...
If you don’t own Photoshop or any Creative Suite... but Photoshop Elements...?

Import your images on separate layers into Photoshop Elements...
Go to File / Save for Web / optimize for GIF / check the Animation and Loop button /
Click the Preview button / hit OK and open your exported GIF with your browser...

Otherwise use the Gimp...
http://www.gimp.org/

Regards
Nolan

Nolan Scott wrote:If you don’t own Photoshop or any Creative Suite... but Photoshop Elements...?

No creative suite here (I'm an amateur animator). Do the frames have to be imported one by one in Elements? My last project (only just an avatar design for this forum) already had more then 40 frames.

The Gimp may be another alternative I'll investigate

Animation Shop (used to be part of the Paint Shop pro distribution) works kind of comfortabel (batch import), only the optimization in the output stage is limited.

Thanks for your advice,

http://www.gamani.com/

GIF Movie Gear. Insanely great!

Sometimes in conjunction with Video Mach. http://gromada.com/videomach.html

human wrote:http://www.gamani.com/
GIF Movie Gear. Insanely great!

Looks good, but I tried to import my png sequence made by AS6 and the graphics are downgraded to black and white during import. They should look like this http://www.epdisch.com/moving_wave0001.png with 8-bit greyscale palette but become http://www.epdisch.com/import.png
However with BMP it works much better.
Another problem is still that gifs play much slower in my browsers than they do in the software they're created with, but I also had that problem with Animation Shop. Does anyone know a trick? Speeding up the timing does work to some extend but it's still too slow, although it plays insanely fast in Movie Gear.

Galbatron wrote:Looks good, but I tried to import my png sequence made by AS6 and the graphics are downgraded to black and white during import.... Another problem is still that gifs play much slower in my browsers than they do in the software they're created with, but I also had that problem with Animation Shop. Does anyone know a trick? Speeding up the timing does work to some extend but it's still too slow, although it plays insanely fast in Movie Gear.

I have logged 100,000 man-years with GIF Studio ( ;={> ) and never had a problem with palettes like that.

Now, there is some difference in GIF timing between the browsers, but more importantly, you have to keep in mind how animated GIFs are handled during the downloading of the file. The browser will display each frame as it decodes it. Which means, for a big file, you will have extreme slo-mo appearance until the whole GIF loads, and then it will play at whatever is "normal" for that browser.

To deal with this, you can resize and crop the animation to a smaller size, so less data. You can also use Movie Gear to nicely reduce the color palette (unless you're using gradients, which is a no-no for animated GIF).

And you can be MUCH smarter than I have been over the past several years. Take advantage of the Optimize feature, which can reduce the data load, especially in conjunction with cropping, re-sizing, and smart reduction of the global palette.

Thank you for the tips. However I've done all that (optimizing, reducing size etc.) and the gifs it produces are quite small (below 150kb). We're talking for instance about my avatar. It's very small but keeps playing more than twice as slow as it did in GIF studio, and I can't speed it up any further... I assume loading this avatar doesn't take that long.

the gifs it produces are quite small (below 150kb).

so how are people loading animated gifs on this forum? It says the limit is 6kb and nothing I do can get mine that small and still look like something. Is everyone linking to their avatar? I made the images in photoshop, chose "save for web and devices" and the file size was too large. I rendered it in after effects but it was too large. What am I doing wrong?!?!?!?!

I think most people are linking to their avatar...I am. It avoids the 6KB limitation, allowing you to represent yourself with more than a single yellow pixel.

OK. That makes sense. I wasted a whole afternoon shrinking my logo til it looked like a blob of color on another blob of color. So now I need a website to load my gif to then link to it from here...
...
...
Umm, thanks for your help. I'm gonna go study Lua some more.

I use VideoAvatar ( www.geovid.com )