animated gif

[Mike S]

i am trying to make a animated gif with 2 spotlights shining from the bottom to the top. b4 i save it the spotlights look good, but when i export it as a animated gf the lights now show lines and are no longer light looking (if that makes sense) any ideas? i tried exporting the xar as a ping then importing it back into xara but upon exporting back into a gif it looks like the 2nd pic below. grrrrrrrrrrrrrr

[Mike S]

i am trying to make a animated gif with 2 spotlights shining from the bottom to the top. b4 i save it the spotlights look good, but when i export it as a animated gf the lights now show lines and are no longer light looking (if that makes sense) any ideas? i tried exporting the xar as a ping then importing it back into xara but upon exporting back into a gif it looks like the 2nd pic below. grrrrrrrrrrrrrr

[Mike S]

here is the spots saved as a png with alpha

[Mike S]

and here is the gif. this is how it looks as a animated gif.

[Grafixman]

Remember you're working with a very limited number of colors with gif files, so blends and feathering will get banded and are to be avoided like the plague. http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/biggrin.gif

[Mike S]

so what you are saying it wont work and can not be done?

[amoore]

Can you use flash instead of an animated gif? You'll have a lot more flexibility and probably a smaller file size to boot.

KoolMoves and SWiSH are relatively easy, low cost alternatives. Attached is a swf I roughed together in SWiSHMax

[jclements]

I am guessing what you'lL need to use is ONLY the web safe/256 color palette to begin with and not necessarily use transparencies or other special effects, then if it doesn't look right as you are composing your image you'll know it wont work when exported as a GIF.

[GerryI]

If you export a white to black grad fill as a 256 colour gif (with no dithering) then you will see that only a limited number of colours get used in the palette rather than the full 256 grey levels that you might expect. This is a limitation of the particular algorithm used to do the palette optimisation.

The only current work-around is to set it to use error diffusion (for animations you set this from the Properties button in the GIF animation frame gallery) which will make the image look better but will probably increase its size by a factor of 2...

Gerry

[amoore]

Probably should have mentioned that I created the beam in X1, exported as png with alpha, and imported it into SWiSH.