Presenting Mathematical Concepts on the World Wide Web
Animations

Animations: Image Formats

When you make the frames for your animation, they may not be in the format that you need to make the movie (usually .gif). You may need to use a conversion program to transform the images into .gif files.

Under Unix, there are lots of tools available for this. ImageMagick, already discussed under Still Images, is one very nice package for doing this. GIF Converter is a good one for the Macintosh. There are comparable packages for Windows.

In general, all your images will need to be the same size. If you need to resize images, it is best to make the images too large and then reduce the size (enlarging images can cause serious pixelation effects, while reducing can allow for anti-aliasing and color-map corrections).

If you generate PostScript files for your frames, these usually can be scaled without distorting the image prior to converting the image to a bitmapped .gif file.

Here is a summary of the tools commonly recommended for visitors to the Geometry Center:


Next: Screen Captures
Back: Getting Frames from Maple or Mathematica
Up: Animations


Presenting Mathematical Concepts on the World Wide Web. Copyright © 1997 by Carol Scheftic. All rights reserved. (This section was originally copyrighted in 1996 by The Geometry Center and is re-used here with permission.) Please send comments on this page, or requests for permission to re-use material from this page, to: scheftic@geom.umn.edu
Page established 1-Jun-97; last updated Thursday, 24-Jul-1997 00:42:39 CDT.