Hello. I've been using wmv files for the animated cut scenes in my visual novels, but want to start using animated GIFs instead. I like using wmv files as the file size is small (compared to avi files). I tried a couple of free animated GIF converters, but they give larger file sizes than the wmv files.
Any suggestions will be appreciated.

Animated GIF doesn't compress as well as wma and mp4. It will always make larger file sizes than them. What is driving you to switch?

Tlaero

Tlaero,
Thanks for the response. I'm not going to switch immediately, but I've been thinking about switching engines for my visual novels from Novelty to one of the programs that uses html.
Very respectfully,
fleet

If you use adventure creator, it has the ability to animate from individual jpegs. You can also do loops and pingpongs forward and back, as well as have the animations be controlled by how the user moves the mouse. In our original games we used animated gifs, but I find the html animation to be much better to work with. Let us know if you need any help figuring it out.

Tlaero

Thank you.

Tlaero,

Just wondering, how much work do you think it would it take to implement html5 video elements into AC? I'm talking just about the visualization, not animating or converting files. It's something worth considering, given the huge difference in filesize between them.

It's certainly possible. Would the idea be that the page just plays the video? No hit targets on it? What about the tells at the bottom? Trouble is, videos aren't very interactive. Do they really have a place in a game?

Tlaero

As I said, it was mostly a curiosity.
I guess with the current state of things the complication's still in rendering, so enabling higher FPS with lower size would mean rendering a ton more and not really doable anyway.

I draw from my experience going from "video" (animated gif) to individual files I can animate. As a storyteller, I have a lot more options with the individual files. That said, a long cutscene would do better as video. When I play games like that, though, the long cutscenes seem out of place. I don't know. The other challenge is that, while AC is putting out HTML5, it works on older browsers. The video tag wouldn't degrade as gracefully. I guess the number of people on older browsers is going down, though. I wonder what percentage of browsers hitting the lagoon and playforceone aren't HTML5 capable these days.

Tlaero

I don't know much about it and i'm certainly not a programmer like tlaero, but i recently read about .Gfy files and it seems like they might also be a good fit for you. significantly smaller than .GIF, and if i understand correctly options to include sound. so you might check it out.

Here are two articles discussing it.

http://gfycat.com/about

http://www.dailydot.com/technology/what ... if-gfycat/

Hope this is helpful, cheers!

Just gave the gfycat.com link a momentary checkout using Firefox and the example gave me nothing visible apart from the controls. I might recheck with Chromium some time later.

Some time later... works fine with Chromium -- okay Firefox, get your sasserfrassing act together! There are good reasons why I use you as a default, but this is not good enough -- I need full functionality from a browser!

Unfortunately Chrome and Chromium fail in different ways -- GRRR!

Addendum: I normally have Flashblock enabled to give me control over evil flash using sites, but it seems .gfy and Flashblock are lousy bed fellows! Disabling Flashblock and restarting Firefox allows full .gfy functionality. If only Flashblock could be toggled without a Firefox reboot!

How long are your movie clips?

For shorter animated clips you could investigate using spritesheets. It is actually possible to render spritesheets as animations with CSS3 alone, but the approach for full-frame video would only work well for a few seconds of animation in my experience.

Old topic, I know.

There's a little video utility program called "Virtual Dub". It's a decent converting utility, for creating animated .gifs from most video formats. You can tweak the frame rate, and the dimensions of the exported .gif file.

Gimp can also output gif animations

I don't know if the GAP (Gimp animation project) is still active... it was kind of an animation specific offshoot of gimp