On 10/2/2017 12:17 AM, GimpyGapper wrote:

HI!
i have tried searching all over the web and here and other gimp forums, and youtube for this, but surprisngly i cannot find the info i need.

i enjoy taking various speeds of time-laps photographs, and would love to now elarn how to animate them, and hear that gimp is ideal for this purpose.

i simply wish to arrange the photos in the correct order/series, then make them into little animated gifs and videos, and perhaps loops of the same.

are there any decent tutorials where i won't get bogged down with other stuff i won't need?
i am so frustrated trying to do what i hoped would be a simple thing to learn, but so far gimp is just confusing me. (what is the 2warning.pat"? and what is it warning about?)

replying to my own post here, BUT: here is an EXCELLENT tutorial on exactly what i was after which may help anyone else.
you could use this for anything from rapid screenshot animation, to animating time-lapse, of, say, a plastecine model like Morph (if anyone ever watch UK TV's Take Hart art program in the 70s)

http://gimpedia.tumblr.com/post/24873634363

ImageMagick is much easier:

magick convert -dispose previous -delay 10 +repage FRAMES/*.gif -loop 0 NEW.gif

I've found that converting each frame to a GIF prior to running the above results in a smaller result.

I have also used ffmpeg to make a MP4 movie from individual images:

Create a file "durations.txt". Ex. file frame1.gif
duration 1
file frame2.gif
duration 1
:
file frame(N-1).gif

The last image does not have a "duration 1" line.

Then

# Windows cannot do globbing for input images # -pix_fmt yuv420p required for quicktime & windows media player # -fps=10 required for vlc media player which cannot deal with a # lower fps
ffmpeg -f concat -i durations.txt -framerate 1 -vsync vfr -c:v \ libx264 -preset slow -crf 22 -an -vf fps=10 -pix_fmt yuv420p \ -y MOVIE.mp4

I've done this on windows but these tools are available for unix too. ImageMagick was developed for unix. You can easily find documentation and examples via a quick google.

On 10/02/17 05:56, GimpyGapper wrote:

HI!
i have tried searching all over the web and here and other gimp forums, and youtube for this, but surprisngly i cannot find the info i need.

i enjoy taking various speeds of time-laps photographs, and would love to now elarn how to animate them, and hear that gimp is ideal for this purpose.

Hardly. Gimp is good for extensive processing of one image, but there are better tools to make the same simple processing to many images.

Futhermore, when it comes to animated GIFs, Gimp will only produce GIFs restricted to 256 colors across all frames, while other applications can handle GIFs with 256 colors per frame. This can make a big difference in some animations.

i simply wish to arrange the photos in the correct order/series, then make them into little animated gifs and videos, and perhaps loops of the same.

are there any decent tutorials where i won't get bogged down with other stuff i won't need?
i am so frustrated trying to do what i hoped would be a simple thing to learn, but so far gimp is just confusing me. (what is the 2warning.pat"? and what is it warning about?)

It is just a "pattern" image (an image you can use as a "tile" to fill images). It is called that way likely because it generates something related to visual warnings (the "warning.pat" pattern is black-yellow diagonals).