Animated gifs?

dansnodgrass

Does Isadora natively support GIF anims or do they need to be converted to a movie file?

Skulpture

I've used GIF's before i'm sure, but you'd probably get a bit more control with a movie; changing speed, movie position, etc.

dbini

i had trouble playing an animated gif recently - Picture Player would only output the first frame.

mark

Dear All,

I'm sorry, but Isadora does not support animated GIFs in their native form. Isadora thinks of any picture as a single frame... I never put any code in their to consider multiple frames in a single picture. (This is the first time in 10 years that anyone ever brought it up!)

If you like, you can add this in the feature request category so people can vote on it.

Best Wishes,
Mark

Skulpture

Just to confirm it wasn't a gif I used I found the file today and it was a tiny .mov file.

loupgarcin

I am oblige to convert every gif in mov, why ? Gif is the only animated loop generated by web culture we need it in isadora sets please code a reader it's nothing.

best

loup

Skulpture

There is an isadora SDK?

mark

Dear Loup,

I'm sorry that you're frustrated by Isadora's lack of GIF support. But I can assure you it's not "nothing" to do such a thing. I will do what I can, but please understand that I have to weigh which features are most important to accomplish. Every feature takes time to implement well. And then you must test it thoroughly. It's not "nothing" I'm afraid.

Best Wishes,

Mark

Fred

Considering how easy it is to animate gifs in Isadora, by loading the images and then choosing what image is displayed when and for how long I think playing animated gifs is a not worth it. There may be some "hassle" involved in converting them to individual stills or movies, but anyone who is serious about multimedia will convert all their sources to meet the exact system they are presenting on (ie 1:1:1 pixels from source, processing and native output resolutions of you display system). As you have said animated gifs are " the only animated loop generated by web culture"- as multimedia artists we also dont expect support for HTML rendering but if we need it we find a way to make it work. Izzy needs FFGL support, native syphon on OSX and other features that drive it into the future- workarounds for these things can take along long time- in comparison the workaround for the lack of animated GIF support take a few seconds. Lets go to the future instead.

mark

Well, I take it all back. Loup's request sent me off on a short hunt and this is what I discovered: if you change the extension of a GIF to .mov and import it, Isadora won't play the animation. But if you import it as a movie with the extension .gif, it does animate it. Very surprising. (And also, QT Player 7 won't play the animation, and QT Player X won't even open a GIF.)

In any case, coming in the next version: an option in the Preferences that says "Import GIFs as Video" - if this is turned on, GIFs go to the movie bin, and thus will play. Only took about 20 minutes in the end.

That being said, all of Fred's comments are totally right. And all of these things are coming.

Best Wishes,

Mark

nic

how's the GIF import option coming along? I've just started a project where having this option would be very helpful. thanks.

mark

I'm gonna post something here tomorrow: http://troikatronix.com/download/isadora-pre-releases/

-- M