The joy of animated GIF

[Scott Rossi]

> I have just caught up and discovered how useful animated GIFs can be -- I
> have been making card-based animations since my HC days, and although they
> work in RR, I have encountered some problems controlling the sequence with
> sticky mousedown loops and leaky locking messages. Now the entire animation
> is on one card and I can control the speed, and the sequence, by sending
> messages to the image. Before I get too happy, are there any cross-platform
> issues or other problems associated with animated GIFs? So far, I have only
> tested on Mac OS 9.2.

As you have discovered, animated GIFs are quite powerful in Rev/MC.  You can
do some very complicated/elaborate things in the environment with a good
deal of control.  The following is not a cross-platform issue, but rather a
GIF rendering issue to note: Rev/MC may not display optimized GIFs
consistently or accurately.

In a Web browser environment, the browser has the ability store the contents
of the first frame it encounters in the GIF, and then render each subsequent
frame on top of the first.  The browser can also account for redundant
pixels, meaning that your GIFs can weigh in lighter since you can eliminate
duplicate pixels that occur in subsequent frames.  These rendering features
are not present in Rev/MC's handling of GIFs, and may cause your GIF to
render unexpectedly in Rev/MC.  You can work around this by rendering your
GIFs with complete frames (including any transparency).

Using Adobe's ImageReady for example, I create an animation as needed and
then, using a color not present in the animation, I introduce a solid color
frame between every frame of my original animation.  This forces ImageReady
to generate an animated GIF without any optimization (redundant pixel
removal, etc).  I then open the GIF in a simple GIF editor (GIFMation),
delete all the solid color frames and resave.  The final file contains a
complete image on every frame of the animation and is suitable for display
in Rev/MC.  True, the filesize will weight in heavier than an optimized GIF,
but the resulting display behavior will be predictable.

Regards,

Scott Rossi
Creative Director
Tactile Media, Multimedia & Design
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E: scott at tactilemedia.com
W: http://www.tactilemedia.com