Animation using GIMP GAP

This method is a little bit more advanced and requires some familiarity with GIMP - however it is more powerful and can be also use to create more sophisticated animations.

GAP allows you to create and edit fairly complicated videos in various formats - but that's for really advanced users. It is a tool for creating much smoother GIF animations with much less effort than would be needed is you were using the GIMP layers method. So if you need to create very complex GIF animation that might have more than ten frames, or even more than a hundred, GAP is a useful tool for you.

• Open your first frame
  Open it as usual from "file" and then "open" - you will have to change its format into XCF and GAP is pretty particular about names too. You can use whatever name you want as long as you add 000001 at the end of the file name. Otherwise GAP wont recognise the format and will display an error. Make some more frames by going to "Image" and then "Video" and "Duplicate Frames". You don't have to repeat the process, just chose the number of duplicates under "N times" in the dialogue box.
• Go to your first image and try and make it move using the "move path" function.
  We will start by zooming out your image so it appears to fly away from the observer and then combine that with opacity increase. For the first animation point try the following parameters: x:157, y:74, width:200, height:200, opacity:20 (those are just example values that might be different for your image). Keep the rest default.
• Now add a new animation point by clicking on the "add point" button. Notice how the status above the button changed to current key: [ 2 of 2 ]. Now change the width, height and opacity back to 100%.
• You can check the result on any animation point by navigating to it (using next and previous or other buttons) and clicking on the "update preview" button. You can also preview the whole animation using the "anim preview". This will create a new layered image and it takes a while.
• Navigating your images
• Go to "video" "VCR navigator" to navigate your images easily, that way you can check how they look. To control display time (duration) of your frames, go to "framerate".
• Save your animation
  To save the animation as GIF, apply the "video" "frames to image" function.