Animation in LO?

[Chevellegirl]

Still totally new & working blind with software (no books) just learning things by finding tuts...

I just learned how to make an animated tube for PSP using Jasc Animator....really cute...firefly jar. Anyway...just know I'm going to need it in a couple of months to do a LO....don't know if I can somehow put it into LO...would the animation work when I upload? Thought it might be cool for video/cd type thing too (if I can figure out those programs eventually) Anybody know...have any ideas?

[elizabethlmccoy]

this sounds sooo cool!!! Does anyone have any more information on this????

[Haley64]

Sounds like a cool idea...
But my first thought would be No..I could be wrong..I have a feeling that creating a LO that needs to be saved as a .jpg or such where all the layers are merged/flattened...That would make a .gif which is animation loose it ability?? Because it will take on the.jpg file format.
You could probably code it in html and figure out how to absolute position it, then however I don't know if you were to do say a VCD for your TV if the TV understands .gifs.

I haven't seen a LO using this so it would be neat to find out!!

You could design LO's in a html program if you wanted to just use them for the web..then you could use all the .gifs you wanted!! Because the code would be embedded. I played around with that a little bit and tried making a web LO for my ancestry site It's actually pretty cool because you can link to anything!! Even other LO pages!

Tracey

[Emma]

you can upload a gif file, it will be animated. the next wave in non-printed scrapbooks: enjoy yourself, it's fun!

[sskFlyer]

A GIF has a limited (256) color pallette, though, so colors would be lost...
Adobe PDFs now support animation/sound/video though, and using a program like InDesign CS you can pretty easily add that sort of stuff. But are PDF's practical for sharing scrapbook pages?

[Emma]

This is one thing I really dont' understand: I've saved things as GIF that look great. Nice drop shadows, subtle color changes, no dithering. Nothing as large as a layout, but if I choose the right GIF format, things look good...

I've read all the definitions and file specs, etc, and I just don't get it...works for me: why?

[sskFlyer]

I know what you're talking about...
I guess it has to do with whatever color palette is chosen. Mysterious stuff.

On another note, I seem to remember hearing someplace that there is an animated PNG standard (like animated GIFs are actually the GIF-89a standard). Can anybody confirm this?
Samuel
This is one thing I really dont' understand: I've saved things as GIF that look great. Nice drop shadows, subtle color changes, no dithering. Nothing as large as a layout, but if I choose the right GIF format, things look good...

I've read all the definitions and file specs, etc, and I just don't get it...works for me: why?

[Emma]

no, but I've wondered since PNG is supposed to replace GIF, seems only logical there'd be an animated version. Hav eyou ever tried to expport as a PNG in ImageReady animation? Never looked, GIF seems to be the only option though.

Sounds like a Google search is in order. And the GIF format is key, I can't remember the name, but it has to be the one with the most colors, no dither to look right on jpg-suitable images (subtle color changes)

[Lauren]

In gif format you can select a palette to reduce the colour loss but it will be there - 256 is the max number of colours - if you used a palette based on a lot of greys then drop shadows would not look too bad but other colours would show noticeable banding - and at high resolution it would be poor in quality. While being no technical expert here but having done some reading I have found quite detailed history on gif and png - this is a quote from one website "Although GIF allows for animation, it was decided that PNG should be a single-image format. A companion format called MNG has been defined for animation." and then later...."In late 2004, an animation extension (APNG) was proposed which, while retaining the ability to render the first frame as a normal PNG in decoders that do not understand the APNG format, also contains additional chunks which allow it to act as an animated image similar to a GIF file in a decoder which does understand the extension"
For further reading on this - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PNG.
I wondered about the use of flash for animation of layouts - This would not show in the gallery tho and I think would make for huge files - I havent looked into it further myself as I love to print my layouts and therefore animation doesnt apply - but for those who prefer on screen layouts it is definitely something to think about.

[cfordrun]

I've done pages (and similar stuff) like this in Flash. There are no color palette limitations, you can include sounds and music, video clips (from that video feature on your digicam), scripting, recordings of a favorite loved one telling a story, and sooooo much more. The best part is you can save the file out as either an .exe or Mac projector, and then set up an autorun.bat file, so when you burn the "book" to a CD, it will automatically launch when you put the CD into your computer - perfect for my mom - all she has to do is load the CD and it plays. And a swf is far, far smaller than a comparable GIF animation, provided you build your file using vectors wherever possible, and limiting processor intensive effects (like animating full-screen sized bitmaps).

I don't have any online (yet), but you can see some of my commercial flash work (for an idea of what you could incorporate into your pages) on my web site (http://www.cfordrun.com).

[cfordrun]

It's about the same learning curve as Photoshop. You can do simple things very quickly, but the more time you spend in it, the better you get. I've been using it for about 4 years now, and you can really see a difference between the first things I built, and what I can do now, especially on the programming end of things.

If you want to see some really cool Flash stuff (it's what made me think about using Flash for scrapbook pages - you can burn mini-cds to put right on a page, or a full size one fits in a 6x6 album pretty nicely) check out Second Story Interactive (http://www.secondstory.com).

They make me look like a rank amateur ;)