Notes on making animation files: 1 Start off with a series of files with name fileXXX.ext, where XXX is the number of each file in sequence. Creating these files is another matter altogether. 2 File formats: We used tif, jpg, gif, ppm, bmp - anything. 3 Useful programs to convert between image file formats: Windows: Irfinview Mac: Graphicconverter SGI: probably many (Unix) Note: some programs do a better job than others at Gif compression. There is a reason for this. GifMoveiGear, graphic converter, Irfinview do a good job at compression. =================================================== Animation formats: First thing to look for is what player you intend to view the animation. The various players are very quirky - it is obvious the various companies do not get along, and actively do not support each other. Therefore, need to decide what format you want, before anything. Players Windows Windows media player - plays AVI, MPEG (some), animated gif (?) - does not play quicktime Powerpoint: plays AVI, MPEG does not play quicktime or animated gifs - uses external application for these Therefore AVI and Mpeg are most convenient for talks. Quicktime player plays Quicktime (if created on mac, must be "flattened" first), some MPEG does not play AVI Real player Plays AVI, MPEG does not play quicktime Mac Quicktime player plays quicktime Windows media player plays avi Realplayer plays real, others? Web Netscape/IE plays animated gifs internally plays other formats if plug-in present =========================================================== Formats: AVI Windows "natural" format. File size is generally larger than many of the others -at least 2x size of animated gifs. Quicktime: Mac "natural" format. File size is larger than animated gif, smaller than avi. Animated gif: Web "natural" format. Smaller and simpler to create than many others, as it is basically a gif image of all files combined. Limited to 8-bit colour because of gif format specification. MPEG: most varied format. File size ranges from smallest to largest of all, depending on program used to create file and compression scheme used. Must be tested, as some programs create mpegs that other programs do not recognize. Programs used to create animation: GIFMovieGear Windows shareware. Very easy to use to create animated gifs. Just import all files and tell it to make animated gif. Will import gif, jpg, tiff files, probably other formats as well. Limited to 500-frame movies, or at least to importing 500 frames at once. Provides interface for overall frames per second (actually seconds between frames) as well as time between individual frames, which is useful for creating pauses in the movie. Can output AVI as well, but it needs to "remove local palettes" before doing so. Seems to have problems doing this when there is a large number of frames (500). Hands down best for animated gif. GraphicConverter: Mac shareware. Converts between very many file formats, provides editing capabilities as well. Runs in batch mode. Outputs animated GIFS and Quicktime movies. Does not do a good job in creating animated gifs from 24-bit frames - colour reduction is bad. Does do a good job of creating Quicktime movies. In creating quicktime and gif animations, animation speed (frames/second) is input. For quicktime videos, provides option for "key" frames. Movie is interpolated between key frames, making animation smaller (510 frame movie is 22MB at key frame of 10). Does not seem to affect quality at all, but makes manual movement through frames look bad. Note: be sure to check "flattening" option, otherwise animation will not play on Windows. Quicktime Pro: Mac - $30 from apple. Outputs Quicktime and Mpeg. Seems to do a bad job on mpeg- files are HUGE, or at best, same size of Quicktime. Does not write avi. Older versions of Quicktime (2.5) do write avi, but do a bad job of it- bad picture quality. mediaconvert: SGI. Used to make mpeg movies, with or without sound. Can also output AVI and quicktime. AVI does not seem to work on windows files, quicktime not tested. Probably most useful for mpeg. Inputs files as a series of tifs, jpgs. Needs to specify one file as inital input, to determine various paremters. Makes smallest files of all, and these are playable on all Windows players (including powerpint). Hands down best for mpegs. Quirks: 1) frames per second limited to 24 or 30. don't know why, it would _seem_ to be a simple matter. All other programs allow user to specify frame rate. Actually it will let you specify frame rate, then complains that no library is present for that rate. 2) image size: seems to only work on 320x240 or 640x480. Will input other image sizes, but output works best at these sizes. Allows option of other sizes, but in any case both dimensions need to be divisible by 16, so 800x600 must be cropped to 800x592. However, Windows players seem to have problems with these other sizes, or 800x592 at least. 3) image quality: best result is from highest quality. Quality is defined as bits/second, and default is middle (1x CDROM speed). I also increased vector parameter searching in all dimensions to 48 (from default 32), and cut the keyframe rate in half. Surprisingly, higher quality and even higher image size does not significantly increase file size. Take-home message: 1) starting file format doesn't matter too much - gif, tiff, jpg, bmp, ppm 2) Use GifMovieGear (Windows) for animated gifs - web publishing. 3) Use mediaconvert (SGI) for mpeg - powerpoint presentations. 4) Use Graphic Converter (Mac) for Quicktime videos - keep mac people happy. 5) Not much use for avi format...