Movement from two drawings

[peterws]

I have Videopad and am interested in making a continuous movement from few drawings, Say, the tide coning in and going out. Two or three reference points, the editor does the rest; Now I`m new to this and not sophisticated so I don`t know of modern developments. Does this sound workable? The name`s Peter by way of introduction!

[Cornucopia]

2 or 3? That's not much to go by - it'll look very choppy/stilted movement unless you want just simple linear or binary toggle change. What about the tweening? Editors don't create that, animators/artists do (unless you're using a specialized cell-animation type app to help generate the tween frames, then IT does). 2 is the bare minimum for any type of movement (start position, end position), with 3 being just slightly better: start/action highpoint/end.
A tide (or more likely SURF) coming in & going out would look clearly very fake if left with only 2 keypoints. For something more natural-looking, I'd do 3 in+out cycles minimum, with intermediate keyframes to add curvature or psuedo-randomness to the look of the movement. That's like (was ~15) ~30 keyframes minimum, cycling at ~0.3 - 0.5 Hz, with at least 10FPS tween frames inserted to fillin.

If this is all new to you, look at web info about cell animation & flip-books, maybe even stop-motion animation. It'll at least give you a better understanding of what's required. Something like Synfig or Pencil is Free/opensource, so a good place to get your feet wet.

Scott
<edit>miscounted # of keyframes.

[peterws]

Yeah; I`m brand spanking new to this. Just wondered how to get started . . .thanks man. Appreciate.

[budwzr]

So you want to like start with a sunrise, then add a sunset, and have some software fill in the rest? Maybe that's good for making a movie too. Sure would save a lot of time, money, and energy.