animated gif

man_o_mule

anyone know a good program to make and modify animated gif files? I've been doing some animating in Flash and it's export to animated gif feature doesn't work properly. it outputs an animated gif but at the wrong fps and there's usually some odd artifacting.

mainly just looking for a program that can take a series of images and put them together and let me specify the fps.

thanks for the help.

Sage

imageready

man_o_mule

imageready does that?

Snowfly

there is no fps in gif format, just a delay you can specify per frame. and yes imageready lets you do that. what are you using to view your gifs? some browsers play them back at different speeds.

also, the artifacts might be coming from how you handle your palettes, or you're turning on some weird dithering method.

leilei

Animation Shop that's bundled with Paint Shop Pro since version 5 is what I use to quickly make GIFs.
I also use The GIMP at times to optimize and crop GIFs. It can take each layer and make it a frame.

man_o_mule

the artifacts i was getting were little white squares. the same squares that the pen tool uses in flash, photoshop and illustrator. it looked like flash was exporting random points for the vector art.

thanks for the advice

edit: what happened to imageready in CS3? i dont see it listed on adobe's site.

LoTekK

They killed imageready in cs3 so they could move some of the functionality into photoshop. SOME. Retardedly, you can apparently create animated gifs in photoshop, but are unable to open/edit them. Adobe, naturally, recommends purchasing fireworks if you want to work with animated gifs.

snemmy

Uhh... I opened and edited and created quite a few gifs in CS3 PS this past spring for my animation class. O.o;

Snowfly

whaddaya know... yeah it's right there in the animation palette, just like imageready's animation timeline.

Lord McMutton

The Beneton Movie GIF program is pretty good. It's free, too.

LoTekK

snemmy wrote: »

Uhh... I opened and edited and created quite a few gifs in CS3 PS this past spring for my animation class. O.o;

How'd you manage that? Every time I try and open an animated gif in cs3 I get the message that animation data isn't loaded and will be lost if I save.

Eric Chadwick

File -> Import -> Video Frames to Layers -> in the Filename: field type *.*and hit Enter -> load your GIF.

LoTekK

Damn, Eric, you're like this ridiculous fountain of random useful knowledge. Thanks!

moose

I'm pretty sure CS3 removed Image Ready completely.

The only other option is to do it in PSCS3's animation stuff like others have mentioned, or use Fireworks (the Macromedia purchased hot-sister to imageready)

man_o_mule

thanks for the help. the Beneton Movie GIF program is cool. used it to compile a bunch of images into an animated gif. i think my next problem is that IE7 doesn't display the gif right. no matter what you set the frame delays to it always plays at one speed.....really slow. oh well. guess animated gif files to show off animations are not the way to go for me.

Test:

Sage

Again Imageready? I lets you spcify how may seconds something will show and a bunch of other crap.

Alex

Eric Chadwick

Animation palette in CS3 (extended?) handles all that now.

man_o_mule

changing the timing on frames in both fireworks (downloaded the demo) and in Beneton Movie GIF makes the gif play faster in those programs, but in IE it always plays at the same speed for some reason.

Since i was doing some 2D animations in flash i wanted to have an easy way to show the animations off. Odd that IE doesn't seem to want to play them right.

Cody

Solution: No one uses IE anymore. Firefox, man, ...Firefox.

Michael Knubben

Ie limits the speed at which animations can play, though. Which explains why (when firefox was first around) animations would play so fast in Firefox.

Geezus

I've always used a mix of Imageready and Microsoft GIF Animator (which is very limited, but super simple).

Sage

If you need a certain speed for something add the extra frames that is one way that the speed should be constant. If something has 15 frames that frames shows 15 times to before moving on. The draw back should be that the gif takes longer to load since the file size should be larger. If you know javascript you might be able to control you sequence with code using an array. I have never tried it though.

Alex

hawken

Animated GIF for website building is dead, thats why adobe trashed image ready.

Brice Vandemoortele

Can you elaborate hawken? it seems like a pretty random statement to me. Animated gif is still the more portable, light and easy way to create small animations on the web imho, what alternative do you have to that?

leilei

they're trying to push flash of course, but good luck getting flash to work in 64-bit linux and other cpu architectures that can't view your site.

hawken

Brice Vandemoortele wrote: »

Can you elaborate hawken? it seems like a pretty random statement to me. Animated gif is still the more portable, light and easy way to create small animations on the web imho, what alternative do you have to that?

Flash is always smaller and ultimately more useful.

The only thing animated gif is used for on the web is funny avatars or clips of videos that are huge. There's nothing random about my statement, animated gif simply isn't used in mainstream web design and hasn't been for years.

Adobe doesn't really need to support people who are just using it for gaffes. In fact the nearest you'd come to using animated gif these days as a web designer is animated ico files, which only run in firefox

Brice Vandemoortele

gif will always inherently be way lighter in size, way more portable on a variety of media, way lighter in cpu process and more backward compatible. Using flash for a blinking arrow doesn't make any sense, except to make content heavier and less accessible. But sure if you assume that users WILL use it in an inappropriate way, then its useless, but so is everything when you use it wrong.

leilei

isn't there a limit on how many .swfs can be displayed at once?
i often disable flash because they have intrusive obnoxious loud 11025hz audio