GIF animations in Chimera
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Anyone interested in GIF animation output from Chimera? Their main appeal is that they play directly in most web browsers (like banner ads). It was easy to add to the Chimera movie recorder using ffmpeg which is included in the Chimera distribution. But ffmpeg uses a fixed color palette causing severe color banding and does not offer LZW compression resulting in large file sizes. That option looks unusable. I tried another approach using a separate program called "gifsicle". That gave decent coloring and compression but it would require adding gifsicle to the Chimera distribution. I am reluctant to do that (entails future maintenance) unless there is strong interest in making GIF animations. Tom
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Cathy Lawson also makes animated gif files from Chimera image sequences using standalone programs. --- Hi Tom, Sometimes I do like to make simple gif animations but then generally I have simply imported frames to a separate program to make the animation. Since my recent switch from pc to mac I am not entirely sure what program I would now adopt for this purpose but I am sure there is something suitable. If I were to make a more complex movie that I wanted to post on the web then I don't think I would use gif format. Cathy
participants (2)
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Thomas Goddard
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Tom Goddard