Quick links to procedures on this page:

Exporting animated GIFs

Corel Painter lets you export a frame stack as an animated GIF file. The animated GIF format is ideal for displaying simple animations on the web.

You can use a GIF as a link anchor or as an image map. However, you cannot use it as a background.

There are many options available when you save images to a GIF file.

You can apply transparency to the animation and choose a background option. However, you must set up a selection for each frame. For more information, see Getting started with selections.

The Disposal Method options let you specify what happens to an image after it has been displayed (and its frame delay has passed), and before the next image is displayed. The disposal method is significant only when you use transparency that differs between frames.

The Loop option lets you play the animation repeatedly in the client browser. The animation appears in the browser one frame at a time, at the speed at which it is downloaded. In most cases, this is significantly slower than the intended display rate. With the Loop option enabled, the browser will loop the animation after all frames have been downloaded, with the specified delay between frames. Because the animation plays from the browser’s cache, it’s much faster.

If your movie is intended for the web, you should consider reducing its file size so the movie is small enough to download within in a reasonable amount of time. You can minimize file size by doing any of the following:

To export a frame stack as an animated GIF Back to Top

 

In the Misc Options area, enable the Interlaced option.
In the Map Options area, enable the NCSA Map File or CERN Map File option.
In the Map Options area, enable the Client Side Map File option.
In the Transparency area, enable the Output Transparency option, and then enable a background option. Move the Threshold slider to specify the selection mask value at which the image becomes transparent.
Enable the Loop check box, and type the number of times to repeat the animation. If you want it to repeat indefinitely, type 0.

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If you do not set a frame delay, the frames appear as quickly as the system can load and display them. The display of each image (especially with larger frames) varies between computer systems, so the actual animation display rate may be lower. You can use frame delay to approximate a particular frame rate. For example, you capture some one-quarter size video at 8 frames per second (fps). You want 8 frames to appear in one second, so you divide one second (100 hundredths of a second) by 8. The result is 100/8 = 12.5. Discard the decimal portion and enter 12 as the frame delay. Discarding the decimal is the only allowance for the time required to display each image. For a large frame size, you might want to allow more time for display.

If the animation in the browser window stops playing, it’s probably finished the set number of loops. In some browsers, you can get it started again by resizing the window. In all browsers, you can get it started again by reloading the page.


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