25 400x300 frames for mine, 1.78Mb (~1822Kb).

*could try reducing the color-depth to reduce size. Even 256 colors with an optimized or web-optimized palette and dithering looks good.

A small bell was suddenly ringing for my ears... :huh:
I seem to recall you once mentioned yourself as a proud dad of a skilled daughter who did your animated signature for you.
So how did she do it? Maybe you can use her pc or get the program from her? (Hint ;) )

Yup, she uses Dreamweaver--says it is the greatest. I just enjoy the challenge of doing something for free. I'll BET I can do it with my Ubuntu installation. If it could play Silent Hunter I'd run Windows about once a week.

The only advantage of animated gifs is that you can show them in posts on forums configured as this one is. You can also insert them into EMails, etc. Any place which handles Images (JPG, GIF, etc) will show your "movie".

Disadvantage is files sizes are large to huge for not much return. I'm surprised that this forum's administrators/mods will allow extensive numbers of Anim gifs to be posted.

As for the process,it is much simpler to use FRAPS (free version is more than adequate for this purpose) to capture a sequence, giving you a *.AVI movie clip file. Just open that AVI file in an animation application such as PaintShopPro's JASC Animation Shop. (Do not open all frames...cull the frames (every 2nd frame, every 4th frame, etc....experiment) (You may want to run the AVI file thru VirtualDub first, reducing the size there down to 400 pixel width, and also culling out every other frame, cropping off the Fraps Logo, then exporting as a new AVI file)

In the Animation Application, reduce size if you've not already done so in VDub. Cull the frames again, significantly...you don't need all the frames you'll first get in the original AVI movie, nor the number in the VDub movie file. For example, in the Animated GIF below, I reduced the frames from 747 in the original FRAPS AVI file to 47 in the GIF. Of course, that amount of reduction also increased the speed of action and reduced theh duration of the 'movie'-clip.

Generally, as you reduce the number of frames, you increase the "Delay time" for each frame remaining...to maintain smooth flow/action.

Then Save your movie as a GIF file. The 127 color option will usually work fine. Less than that and you'll get significant color distortion. (The action below was in Fog)

http://i440.photobucket.com/albums/q...ngUnComp-1.gif

Very cool idea Carotio! The Gimp ( http://www.gimp.org/ ) does animated GIF's and is free.

Art

PS:
http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Using_GAP/
http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Advanced_Animations/

ScreenShot Ani
 

http://i47.photobucket.com/albums/f1...g/SmallAni.gif
New size 400 x 250 pixels Program used Serif Photo+2 only 11 frames.

Hi guys,

if you want to make a thread with big animated files, by all means, go ahead. Please post the "Large files" disclaimer in the title (or something to that effect).

However, for signature images that will appear on every post, please limit the size to ~100KB (see the forum FAQ). We don't want a thread with 30 replies to have 30 x 500KB = 15MB of images to load :huh:

thanks
Neal

I thought, "not modem friendly" was advice/warning enough, but I'm unaware of an official subsim title warning regarding this. I mean something like when releasing a mod, one writes [REL] or REL:

Plus PM

What you wrote was fine Carotio. If you wanted to start a new thread just have the disclaimer in the title. Like 56k beware pic heavy. Something like that.

Aww, don't take this as a "warning". You titled this thead fine, I was speaking in general.

thanks
Neal

:lol:
Word puzzle, I know, but by warning, I didn't mean a warning from you to me about the title, but a warning to those people entering the thread to look/read at the large image files. ;)

Okay, nevermind, back to topic, now that we have Neal's approval, let's see YOUR animated images!!! :up:

I hit shift+F11 by accident and it seemed like the computer locked up, but what actually happened is a window opened on the desktop asking if I wanted to "Capture a sequence" and until you Alt+Tab to the desktop to answer the question, the game stopped.

Peabody

Signal Light
 

http://i47.photobucket.com/albums/f1...hing/Light.gif
Ok ! Don't ask me what it says something about off:rotfl:
Only 2 frames this one off / on Get it

This has given me a great idea. Well, I think it's a great idea anyway.

"I know you understand what you think I said, but I'm not sure what you heard is what I really meant."
-slogan from the -60s

Oh no, you started it. Now I can go crazy and it's ALL YOUR FAULT!
:rotfl:

And I'm not in a position to do animated images, so there!

SH4Ani
 

FRAPS
 

I posted this a while back but thought it worth mentioning here again. My PC isn't the best for "filming" SHIV during a mission, however, I found that using the "replay" function in SHIV and THEN filming that (i.e. using FRAPS) I got a half-decent end product.

To clarify;
Using FRAPS while playing a normal mission caused horrendous framerates but using FRAPS during the game's REPLAY function much, much less framerate hit.

Hope this helps anyone else with a half-decent but not quite top-o-the-line PC!!!
:know:

Very entertaining Carotio.

Nice work Gunfighter as always!

Long time no creativity... :hmm:

Anyway, posting an ani gif (not mine) just to wish y'all a merry Christmas time

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y28...tio/happyH.gif

Forgot about this thread... :oops:
http://i268.photobucket.com/albums/j...me/transit.gif