Animated .gif

[SoCalian]

How would one go about making an animated .gif?

 

[Hurricane]

You need a decent graphics program. I use Photoshop, but I guess Paintshop Pro also has the needed tools.

What you do is that you make several layers of the picture, and then define when the picture should switch from one layer to the next.

 

[funxus]

I'm sure there are free programs that can make animated gifs, as long as you make each frame in another program. Try searching www.download.com for "gif animator" or similar.

I know there was a Gif Animator included in the old Frontpage versions, and you can also make gif animations in Macromedia Flash MX (IIRC).

 

[Hakim]

I once used software to record a movie from a game (CnC Generals) and then used other software to split the movie into individual frames. By only keeping every second or third frame the size can be reduced.

edit: Here it is btw, Colonel Burton in action (it was supposed to be an avatar):

edit II: gah, it doesn't loop!

 

[Plexus]

A good free program that'll do this is GraphicsGale.

http://www.tempest-j.com/gale/e/

I, however, use Adobe's ImageReady.