exporting to animated gif

[mark73]

how do i export toa animated gif ty

[Rasheed]

You can't with Moho, but you can export to separate PNG files and import those into a program like Photoshop or Gimp as layers. The layers can then be exported as frames in an animated GIF file. Another solution might be to use a GIF animation program and import the separate PNG files.

[GregSmith]

Rasheed or anyone:

I've tried using the Gimp for this purpose, but if you use their "Open as Layers" option, when the .gif is exported, the animation is reversed. This isn't a big deal if you are talking about a small number of frames, but anything over 1 second becomes an issue. Try it and you'll see what I mean. I've looked everywhere for a utility that allows you to reverse the order of layers, and found a script, but I've no idea how to open a script in the Gimp. It is called "reverse-layers.scm". Does anybody know how to make this work on Gimp for OSX?

Greg Smith

[Rasheed]

Recipe:
I suppose you have read this article and downloaded this script onto your desktop.

Start the Gimp program and activate Preferences in the File menu. Locate Folders ->Scripts in the left pane. Click on the folder item in the right pane; now in the line above it appears the editable location, something like

Code: Select all

/Applications/Gimp.app/Contents/Resources/share/gimp/2.0/scripts

appears (this is where the scripts are located). Click on it 3 times to select it and then copy it (Cmd-C).

Now activate Terminal (Use Finder's search function if you don't know where that's located). Go to Gimp's script folder by typing:

Code: Select all

cd [Cmd-V]

(where [Cmd-V] means paste what you've copied)
Now something like this will appear:

Code: Select all

cd /Applications/Gimp.app/Contents/Resources/share/gimp/2.0/scripts

and press on the return button to activate the change directory command.
Copy the reverse-layers.scm file by typing:

Code: Select all

cp ~/desktop/reverse-layers.scm reverse-layers.scm

Check if it's there by issuing the ls command (you probably have to scroll up to see it).

Restart Gimp (stop and then start the program) and open the first file of the animation sequence and then open as layer the next files. Now in the Script-Fu menu you'll find a Animators submenu, and inside this submenu the script Reverse. Click on it to activate the script.

I got a bit of messy layer naming, but it should be clear what's what. Leave the Background layer where it is and reverse all remaining layers, by selecting the highest image number as top layer and the second image number (0002) as bottom layer and activate the script.

Good luck!

[Rasheed]

Perhaps you're a bit surprised to see the the Moho application isn't really a file, but a directory (folder), called Moho.app. You can't use Finder to copy the script into its appropriate location, but instead must use low level Unix commands in Terminal. Luckily, you only have to do it once.

[Nichod]

The fastest gif converter I've used is Animation Shop from Jasc (Corel now)

Brian

[GregSmith]

Rasheed:

Whoa! That's really a lot of steps to install a plug-in. I'll need a free afternoon sometime. But, whataya want for free, anyway? Too bad that for many things animated .gif is still the only thing available. I've been looking into a new Mac-based authoring environment for using the output of our incredible tool, Moho. Unfortunately, at present, it only accepts QuickTime movies or animated sequences in the form of animated .gif. Very few applications seem to import .png or .psd sequences for sprite creation, which Moho is simply great for creating.

Thanks for the tutorial on Gimp and plug-ins,

Greg Smith

[myles]

Another alternative is possibly something like Microsoft's GIF animator, which can convert AVI files to animated GIF (tip: use an optimal palette, and don't use any gradients in your Moho animations, because the conversion from 16 million AVI colours to 256 colour GIFs can introduce some distracting dithering patterns).

http://www.jhepple.com/gif_animator.htm
This old one is apparently free, but there are more recent shareware equivalents.

Regards, Myles.

[Rasheed]

Rasheed:

Whoa! That's really a lot of steps to install a plug-in. I'll need a free afternoon sometime.

Not really, I needed less than a minute.

The problem seems to be that Gimp hasn't a good installer for extensions, because it is in essence a Unix/Linux thingie. People who are on those OSes are used to a CLI (command line interface). Most people on MacOSX are used to a GUI (graphics user interface) and are a bit afraid of using the Unix shell, because they (almost) never do.

BTW Installing a script in Moho isn't really much easier or more difficult, but you can do it with Finder, because the appropriate folders are outside of the Moho.app folder.

[Rasheed]

Another alternative is possibly something like Microsoft's GIF animator

X86 code will not run under MacOSX, unless in a emulator. MS GIF animator needs Windows95 or higher, IIRC.

GIFBuilder is a good free alternative for OS X.

However, the disadvantage of both MS GIF animator and GIFBuilder is that you can do no image editing, such as cropping. I often compose an animation from separate PNG files and crop the image (applied to all layers) to reduce the file size somewhat. The majority of file size reduction I do with the free GifWorks webservice, but that has a file size limit, so you can't use it for really large GIF files.