Animated screenshots - not modem friendly

[Doolittle81]

Originally Posted by AVGWarhawk

Looks good to me. How is this better or more helpful than just a video? Also, Neal has to check on bandwidth I believe.

Cool non-the- less

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)