On 29/01/17 05:56, Paula Koval wrote:

Hello, All,

I don't wish to be a pain-in-the-ass, but I have found a YouTube video that I have been able to follow, however, it does not yield a gif image with a fixed text image on its top layer. The layer that I have added flashes at the playback rate of the gif image.

I have a suspicion that the video misses something about making a mirror image and interleaving the layers. Am I on the right path here, please?

Thank you for your consideration.

Paula

You have to add the text to all the frames, which means make as many copies of your text layer as you have frames, and merge each copy in each frame. Of course there are plugins and scripts for this, you can either use the GAP plugin or use my own "interleave-layers" plugin in "title" mode. See http://gimp-tools.sourceforge.net/animationtools.shtml

On Sun, Jan 29, 2017 at 1:56 PM, Paula Koval wrote:

Hello, All,

I don't wish to be a pain-in-the-ass, but I have found a YouTube video that I have been able to follow, however, it does not yield a gif image with a fixed text image on its top layer.

Maybe this is where we can say it.

GIF images have no top layer.

If you want to talk about the frames in GIF images as "layers", they are, I suppose, but we call them frames for two reasons. One is to avoid the confusion about what a layer means, and the other because the frames in a movie are called frames, and the frames in a GIF image serve the same sort of purpose.

Specifically, when you edit layers in GIMP or Photoshop, etc., the purpose of the layers is to be combined as one still (non-animated) image. Thus there is a top layer and a bottom layer and all the layers in between, and there is no need to define a time delay between layers because they are combined and all shown at once.

The frames in a GIF image are displayed one at a time, in sequence, with the specified time delay, to give the illusion of animation, in the same way that movie film frames are shown very quickly one-at-a-time.

If you want a layer effect where the text is in one layer and the image is in another, you can make an illusion by repeating the text image every other frame. But it won't really be the same, and may flicker a bit.

The layer that I have added flashes at the playback rate of the gif image.

If you don't want the flicker, you have to raise the frame rate. Ad/or, if you have multiple non-text frames, you will need to insert the text frame between each non-text frame. (And if you have a lot of frames, you can animate the text, as well. But most web browsers have buffer size issues that will cause GIFs with a lot of frames to stutter and not look nice, so there are limits to the amount of animation you can achieve.

You may prefer to put the text into each frame, to reduce the flicker. You can keep the layers in the source image format, which should not be GIF, anyway.

I have a suspicion that the video misses something about making a mirror image and interleaving the layers. Am I on the right path here, please?

Not sure what you have in mind about a mirror image, and not sure where you are headed. Can you tell us about what you are trying to achieve?

Thank you for your consideration.

Paula

--

*"It's so nice to know so many nice people."*

*---Eddie Gallaher (1914-2003) Radio Personality, Washington, DC 1947-2000*

Joel Rees

I'm imagining I'm a novelist:
http://reiisi.blogspot.jp/p/novels-i-am-writing.html

...snip...

I don't wish to be a pain-in-the-ass, but I have found a YouTube video that I have been able to follow,
however, it does not yield a gif image with a fixed text image on its top layer. The layer that I have added flashes at the playback rate of the gif image.

I have a suspicion that the video misses something about making a mirror
image and interleaving the layers. Am I on the right path here, please?

Yet another youtube video, this one demonstrates using ofnuts plug-in interleave-layers-0.4.py. The link for that is in an earlier post.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLHaTGh2ztQ

6 minutes duration - it might help

rich: www.gimp-forum.net