does anyone know of freeware to animate small gif's, on windows xp?

thanks

www.paulspence.com

on the winows this not gifs, all video files. u can uje reshack programm for thange the animations on shell32.dll files.. 
I don't  try to do this, so copy before the original shell32.dll. maybe wiill be some problemms after changes. 

good luck )

don't quite follow ......shell32.dll files?

I was looking for a simple web-animation tool which creates small moving images, such as Miss Nancy's animated forum banner.

:¬)

www.paulspence.com

LOL ) ... sorry i  don't understend you. I thing you tell about the animations of the windows XP. 
For the bannners you can use Corel RAVE 3. this come  with pacet of Corel Drow. 
I know, this not small programm, but I thing this programm better than Adobe ImageReady 7.0 ME. 
What about samll programms, you can use GIF Animator 5.0.

I love Corel Photopaint for this purpose.  Easy to add effects and text to the animation as well.

There are freeware programs out there as well as trial versions of most of the popular (more powerful) software.   Ulead's Gif Animator is an example:

http://www.ulead.com/ga/trial.htm

A bit harder to wrap your brain around is Imagemagick:

http://www.imagemagick.org/

It can do a whole lot more than create animated gifs though and is probably more complicated than what you need.  Works on servers as well as single computers.

A search via Google (or your favorite search engine) should turn up a lot of possibilities:
One I haven't looked at that seems interesting... Movies13.

I see it is available on this page:
http://jansfreeware.com/jfgraphics.htm

AVI2GIF (type it in a search) is a simple one too if you already have a AVI movie generated.

Keep in mind that you generally get what you pay for!
Rodney

thanks alot for your links, I'll check them out and let you know. Apologies for not introducing myself - I'm normally in the Rhino forum, planning to animate some stills from rhino renders. I'm a long time fan of animation having done some old style stop-frame.

I'll be back asking more silly questions no doubt.............

thanks, paul

:¬)

www.paulspence.com

Paul,
Please let everyone know what you discover.  :)

downloaded an ultra simple gif-only animator  -  Microsoft gif animator 

http://www.freewareweb.com/cgi-bin/archive.cgi?ID=288

which works well :¬)  previous gogles only threw up trials for paid software. So many thanks for your guidance.

I'll post in when I've rhino'd something for sure, although have tried already but postings don't seem to accept gif animations? do you need to be a moderator to post them?

www.paulspence.com

Thanks for responding.

Microsoft Gif Animator it is then.
Hope it works well for you!   :)

Found this one recently, not sure if any better than what you found on MS.  http://downloads.zdnet.com/download.aspx?&kw=animator&cat=230&promo=120000&docid=180432
  In case that link is not good,  run a search on zdnet for animator-9.

Here's a sample of gif from poser stills.

Thanks Harrgunn :¬)  will check it out.

How did you manage to post animation? when i try it doesent show up.

www.paulspence.com

Oh,

   I don't use cut and Paste. 
That paste is too thick and gums up the animation till it can't move.

The graphic is not 'posted' if you would, but served off my site. Clicking the 'Insert /Edit Image" near the end of the top line will open another window for a URL link  to image.

You can also link the grapic back to your site this way.

good work, harr. we'll give you a call next time the WC backs up. but when I load an image into a forum thread, I just use "attach a file" and the "browse" button. I admit, though, that sometimes these instructions can be a bit confusing.

.."attach a file" and the "browse".... dont work for me either, Miss Nancy

so its ok to post gif animations by renderosity rules?

still to animate before worrrying about posting anyway ;¬)

Great toilet tools Harrgun, dont quite follow your webcarpentry but appreciate the symbolism. nice to see a variation on your clown too, Miss Nancy

www.paulspence.com

turns out my file size was too big.......

www.paulspence.com

ta da!!

..the robot being transformed into life, in Metropolis.

My first go at gif animation :¬)  Thanks for help. Jumpy style from the primitive movie-still capture tools I have.

is it not possible to do this with jpegs, for web? Gif file sizes are huge in comparison. and loosing details in web-optimisation.........Is it some kind of Gif-only recognition for repeating files or something?

www.paulspence.com

The GIF (version 89) format supports storing multiple images (or fractions of images, even) inside a single file, along with a master frame rate and a separate frame time per frame. JPEG doesn't support that, so JPEG viewers don't have any animation options for it. There is a JPEG based AVI codec that I know of, but forum posts here only support GIF and JPEG files.

good work on the robotrix, bike. that was a fabulous movie. one of the greatest movies ever IMVHO. for those things, flash is probly a better format.

Thanks for details Captain Jack, Gif it is then

Nancy - what advantage would flash bring?I do like the simplicity of this little gif animator, and dont plan to do too many movie captures.........Metropolis is magic - still the best designed Robot I've seen - 'Robotrix' ? girl robot?

what sort of frame rate have you used in your clown-with-instructions? very smooth running

www.paulspence.com

I see you've got the animation posted.  Nice work too. 

bike, the sign frames are 50 msec, and all the other frames are 5 msec, which is about as fast as most client's browsers can run 'em. one can do frames of shorter duration, but the clients will often mention they're still going too slow. flash has the advantage of more colours, but browsers won't usually display 'em directly without specific code, which is not included in this forum thread code, for security reasons. yes, robotrix, executrix, aviatrix; these have feminine suffixes, and are derived from the use of latin in the english legal system.