Animated Gallery 1.2 review

Animated Gallery is a GIMP plugin that creates an animated gallery by overlaying multiple animations frame-by-frame onto the current

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Martin Crossley

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Animated Gallery is a GIMP plugin that creates an animated gallery by overlaying multiple animations frame-by-frame onto the current image background and saving the resulting combined images.

Written using python-fu and gimp 2.2.3

The purpose of the plug-in is to create an animated gallery (e.g for a DVD menu) by overlaying up to 5 animations frame-by-frame onto the current image background and then flattening and saving the combined frames.

The script takes parameters giving the filenames of the first frame of each source animation (or "OFF" to disable a feed). The frames themselves should be sequentially numbered (e.g. frame_000123.jpg). It should work with all image types the gimp can load (tested with .jpg and .ppm). Note that if a frame is missing in an animation, the previous one is repeated.

I have included an option for rounding the corners of the source frames (using the script-fu rounded rectangle function). If you want other similar functionality (e.g. fade to black at sequence end) I would recommend you to have a look at the source code - python is very easy to learn, and the script is fairly well documented.

Usage:
In order to make a DVD menu with animated chapter images, you would normally merge a number of short animated frame sequences(one per chapter), shrunk down to say 80 pixels high, onto a 720x576 background image (for 4:3 PAL). Obviously you should create all the static parts of the menu (text, drop shadows, button outlines etc) on the background image prior to calling the script. A suitable example background template is provided on the gimp plug-ins registry page for the project.

In order to create an actual DVD menu, you will of course need to use an authoring tool such as the excellent and highly flexible dvdauthor package (make sure you use at least version 0.6.11 however, as previous ones have a problem with spumux not correctly recognising transparent bitmaps). There is a very good HowTo at http://mightylegends.zapto.org/dvd/dvdauthor_howto.php

Installation:
Download the script to the .gimp-2.2/plug-ins/ directory (or equivalent) under your home directory; make it executable (chmod +x animated_gallery.py) and restart the gimp. It should appear as an option under the 'python-fu -> alchemy' menu.