AnimGIF Know anything about it?

[leirbag28]

What software do you people use for making AnimGIFS?   both on the Amiga and PC or Mac

Does animGIF support different paletes for each frame?  can you also choose to have a single 256 color palette throughout all the frames?

What software do you use for this? can it choose the invisible color?

Is there any freeware programs that do this? On PC or Amiga.

[benJamin]

Funny, I was playing around with this the other day.

First, I used my old method (under eUAE) of making an animation in PPaint, grabbing it as an anim-brush and using the ARexx script provided to export that as a GIF.  I found this did not work with differing palettes and I had to load all the photos (was making a slideshow for my phone's screensaver) in as brushes, merge all the palettes and then create the anim-brush.  Be careful about your brush's background colour, as it will be transparent.

Then I tried doing similar using The GIMP under Linux native.  Load (or create) all of the frames you want as layers and order them from top to bottom, then save as a GIF, select the 'layers as animation' (at work, can't see actual) option and any other things that look cute and click OK.

That's it.

I assume Photoshop has a similar option to The GIMP.

There are programs out there that do other things.

For CLUT-based animations, I would recommend PPaint as the tools are more CLUT-friendly.  If working with photos, I recommend The GIMP.

And now, for the final test: did someone else respond in the time it took me to type this?


Addenda:

Just reminded myself of something:  PPaint allows you to set timings on a per-frame basis.  From memory, I could only get The GIMP to set the global frame-rate.  I guess you could knock the anim up in The GIMP and load it into PPaint to set any individual timings if pertinent.


benJamin

"Credit Average."

[trgse]

Amiga:
Commercial: ImageFX (perfect IMHO)
freeware: gifsicle

PC:
Commercial: Photoshop (buy the full, full, full version and you won't
regret it.)
freeware: (Eh, freeware on the PC?)

[leirbag28]

@beJamin

Yeah but how do you get it to have the same palette all throughout?


@trgse

ImageFX is a nightmare to use and needs an updated interface (Ugly ugly ugly)   something like Brilliance would be nice (In the past it worked similar like Brilliane, but was wayyy slow and didnt show the whole picture.  The results of ImageFX are excellent though, thats for sure.


Adobe Photoshop-another horrible interface, but definitely nicer looking than ImageFX


Nevertheless.....gotta use what I can.......I have ImageFX 3.2 or something like that......it crashes like crazy.

where can I get gifsicle?
 and where can I get Arexx scripts and plugins for that matter?

[SamuraiCrow]

PC:
Commercial: Photoshop (buy the full, full, full version and you won't
regret it.)
freeware: (Eh, freeware on the PC?)

There is a freeware alternative to Photoshop called GimpShop that uses the Photoshop interface but is based on the GIMP source code from Linux.

[trgse]

something like Brilliance would be nice

IMHO nice and brilliance is mutually exclusive

gifsicle, is available from http://amiga.sourceforge.net

[uncharted]

benJamin wrote:
Just reminded myself of something:  PPaint allows you to set timings on a per-frame basis.  From memory, I could only get The GIMP to set the global frame-rate.  I guess you could knock the anim up in The GIMP and load it into PPaint to set any individual timings if pertinent.

I believe that is the case with Photoshop as well (at least it is with Photoshop Elements)

Personally I don't think PPaint can be beat for AnimGIFs.

[JaXanim]

For the Amiga, I use WhirlGIF which is a command line routine with lots of options. I think the palette options are detailed in the manual. You can apparently select any colour as transparent, but I only managed it with white. Maybe I haven't read the manual properly. If you have a very large number of frames, the 256 character command line will fill very quickly and you run out of space. However, it will also accept an ascii term for the frame listing (I simply use 'list' following the input switch (-i), then I include a text doc called 'list' in the WhirlGIF directory. This doc is just a listing of all the frame filenames (one per line). I found WhirlGIF almost bombproof except for transparency, which is probably my fault anyway. All the animGIFs on my website were created with it (click link at bottom). Info on WhirGIF can be found HERE

On the PeeCee, I've tried several freeware GIF animators and found them somewhat lacking and nowhere near as good as WhirlGIF. There are some good cheap ones with 1 month free trials. Tried EasyGIF amongst many others and Microsoft also do a freebee but it's quite basic.

GIF anims can only have 256 colours of course. I really needed 24-bit and PNG format could be a way to go. If you're not using them for web pages, there's an excellent PNG (24-bit) animator, which I've lost details of but a bit of Googling should find it. 24-bit PNG-anims are very nice but not a single mainstream browser supports the format. Stupid I reckon and plenty others think so too. There's even a web petition going on around it.

Cheers,

JaX

[benJamin]

@leirbag28

...load all the [frames] in as brushes, merge all the palettes and then create the anim-brush...

The 'Colour -> Merge...' option will be your best bet.  Select 'Current' and all your brushes by number.  Probably will be useless for more than nine frames, but hey.  Even better, I have a nice Web-safe palette which most images FS Remap to quite nicely (I also force my WB to use it, and has unlocked space for allowing DeliTracker and such to lock its own sub-palette).  You could use that for your animation's base and remap everything to it.  (I was assuming you were talking about PPaint.  I think GIMP has a CLUT mode, but I have only recently started toying with it to seek its depths, so I don't know much).

If it's scripts that you want (for PPaint), they used to be on Aminet in the 'biz/cloanto' directory.  Download them all, they're useful for learning to write your own!


benJamin

"Having Access date-system conversion problems.  Scr*w MicroSoft."

[Karlos]

uncharted wrote:

Personally I don't think PPaint can be beat for AnimGIFs.

On amiga perhaps, but under Windoze at least, Fireworks MX is my personal favourite for working on just about any kind of web graphics, animgifs included.