AVI -> GIF89a (animated GIF)?

[FredThompson]

I'm looking for a way to make some fairly short, constantly looping animated GIFs from AVI source.

The best option would be to frame serve the sequence to a routine which would work in a couple of passes. The first pass would analyze the colors and generate an optimized palette. The second pass would take the served frames and build the GIF89a file.

Can anyone point me to such a beast for the Windoze platform?

Come to think of it, I guess AviSynth could be used to dump a series of bitmaps to files which are then turned into the animated GIF. Animation Shop (Paint Shop Pro) can turn them into an animated GIF but there's the palette optimization issue.

[FredThompson]

Ignore that post. I've figured this out. AviSynth's ImageWriter should be used to dump a series of bitmap files and the GIF89a builder will handle the rest.

[Sirber]

Cool! good to know :D

[Joe Fenton]

The GIMP has the ability to save GIF89a animations. You might check that out sometime... it's pretty powerful.

http://www.gimp.org/

[FredThompson]

I've got GIMP loaded on all my systems.

I was originally hoping to do something similar to Photoshop's layers where the subject is auto-seleted and the background layer made greyscale then they're combined. That works well for a single image but not thousands of frames. Think of those ads or movies where a subject is in color and the background is greyscale. It's a very effective way to highlight the important subject but keep it in context. Pleasantville did this a lot. This is what I'm hoping to do. It woudln't have to be perfect as long as the generated bitmaps are dumped to individual files. That would allow manual replacement for those frames where the edge detection routines screwed up.

If not, some way to automate application of a mask to greyscale would work. AviSynth could do that using ImageWriter to dump frames which could then be read into Animation Shop, GIMP, or anything else which will do a palette-optimized GIF89a build.

Here are a couple of raw frames showing an example. There is a robot moving in the background and one in the foreground. The best option would be to use the common source but only "color" each portion of the total machine as it is being referenced. That gives consistent context but focus on one element. In this case, I've outlined the robot in front to illustrate the elements to be kept in color.

http://home.mindspring.com/~fredthompson/Image1JPEG.jpg
http://home.mindspring.com/~fredthompson/Image2JPEG.jpg