any programs that can do primitive animation??

[guitardan]

I wanted to do some primitive animation on my pc and also add effects to live action camcorder footage. i've got all the individual
frames but i need a program where i can compile them at 25 fps. something like a slideshow where i can display 1 picture per frame would do, and then maybe dub sound to it. I don't want anything too complicated if possibble. any freeware that could do this would be great.

[lordsmurf]

Flash? And convert it to video afterwards?

[guitardan]

not sure what you mean, i'm not very clued up on this stuff i just tend to improvise. can create pictures which would be the individual frames, so i need to load it into a program which will run it as video at 25 fps (since i'm doing it in pal) (i put it in a slideshow at 1 picture per second and played it at fast foward just to see what it looks like) i'll try any method, whether i have to convert to video afterwards and see how it goes, i just don't know how to do it. i have got a way but it involves videoing my pc screen and takes ages but i've got some test footage of me with a lightsabe and it looks not too bad! so i really want to try some sfx.....

[lordsmurf]

The software FLASH can make animations. But you usually use those for web pages. However, they can be done in high enough resolution (pixels) that they'd look good as videos. And you can convert them from FLASH to AVI or MPEG with certain programs.

[psx_pirate]

You could use slide show movie maker ... this makes avi movies from .bmp and .jpg files ... you can also add sound ... you can then convert the avi into dvd compliant mpegs with TMPGenc or similar prog .... the only drawback is that slide show movie maker is somewhat slow at converting and may take quite a while if your converting a lot of bmp's/jpg's but it does do a reasonable job so it might be worth having a look ... get it here http://www.joern-thiemann.de/subpage/index.htm?/tools/ssmm/

[gadgetguy]

If you have all of the pictures set up as 1 frame per picture and all of the pictures are the same dimensions, then rename them in numerical order (Pic1.bmp, pic2.bmp, etc.) and load the first picture into Virtualdub. It will load the rest of them as individual frames, then you can specify the framerate and an audio file and save as avi, or frameserve to your favorite encoder.

[dphirschler]

AviSynth. Load image sequence. Shit, I think even Virtual Dub can load an image sequence.


Darryl

[spectroelectro]

The two best pieces of freeware for doing simple animations are MonkeyJam, which unfortuantely requires wmv, and Movies13.

www.giantscreamingrobotmonkeys.com/monkeyjam/
It's designed for pencil test animations but has features that let it do stop-motion animation, claymation, etc., and you can work with graphics bitmaps and get it to do simpler things relatively easily.

You might find Movies13 more along the lines of what you're looking for. It's a GIF animation with a variety of wizards and some fun features:
jansfreeware.com/jfgraphics.htm

For payware, you might try a used version of Macromedia Director from ebay. You can pick up an old Director 5 or Director 6 CD for ony $20 or $30 on ebay, and it has a vast array of features that would probably do exactly what you're looking for.

Movies13 and Director can output to avi (typically Type 2 DV, or Huffyuv), while MonkeyJam has to output to the DRM geyser wmv.

The nice thing is that both MonkeyJam and Movies13 are freeware, as in beer. Cost nothing. If you don't like 'em, deep six 'em, and no loss.

[guitardan]

ok thanks everyone, lotta stuff there to try, so hopefully i should be able to work something out

[ozymango]

It's not freeware but you can also check out Digicel Flipbook; it'll do all sorts of animation and it's pretty easy to use (relatively speaking; I can't draw worth beans so coming up with images is painful, but the software is easy!).

The "lite" version is about a hundred bucks, but there's a limited use trial download version (free!) that might be worth a look; I don't own a copy, but a friend does (he's a great artist and loves to do animation), he's got the pro version which is kinda pricey ($300? $400?) but apparently it'll do for even professional animation.

Anyway, this is probably overkill for your needs but I wanted to mention this in case somebody else looking for animation tools/software finds this thread, I didn't see Flipbook in the tools section so I just thought I'd drop a note.