On Tue, Nov 01, 2005 at 09:51:14AM +0100, Preben Randhol wrote:

I'm looking for a tool to make some animations. I'm editing some home videos and I want to add a title screen animation and a scrolling text at the end. But let's concentrate on the first.

I have been looking at gap and as far as I see from the tutorials it seems to be a lot of work to make some simple animation. Say I want a black background and to fade a white text and then after a bit pause fade it out again. I see how I can do this manually from the tutorials, but if I want to do this many times with different texts then I imagine that this should be something a script/macro in gimp could do? However, I haven't found any and I don't know how to make scripts/macros. So I was wondering if anybody has something like this laying around? Would be nice to be able to specify the lenght of the fading in/out time and pause and the text/image to fade.

for gap to do this is not so difficult as you seem to think. you do not need to remake the text layer each time for either effect mentioned here. make one text layer and add that as a layer to your image stack with Video-->Move Path. tell the dialog which image in the stack to start adding the fade-in text layer to, and which position in each images layers. there is an opacity slider so for the first frame in a fade in effect, move the slider to 0. determine the frame in which you would like the fade-in text to be completely faded in (only you know the frames per second of your animation and how long you want the effect to take), select Add Point, tell it the frame to finish the fade in with and make certain that the opacity slider shows 100. you can actually continue all in one step (if you want the text layer to display for a while and then fade out) by continuing to add points for each transition in your effect.

it is much worse to write or read about it than it is to actually do this.

If nobody have something like this it would be great with some hints as to how I can make a script like this. Is Pyhton the most suitable language to learn to make scripts?

i use python, but that is a personal preference. it has documentation and i have friends that are willing to help me with it.

perl has just as much documentation and i had friends around to help with that when i was working on updating the scripts for gimp-2.2 -- there is a pre-release of gimp-perl in ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub somewhere. and then gimps own script-fu. that works on windows and if you have SIOD friends to help with that, there is nothing wrong with this method to handle your gimp automation needs. it is a matter of opinion and resources as to which is the better language to use and underneath it all it is just gimp anyways.

i have made some python scripts to make up for a few cases where i could not use gap to do what i wanted. my scripts are really minimal, gap does most things already better than can be scripted, in my experiences. for example, to script gimp to do what you want with gap, you would still probably have to have places in your dialog where you tell your script all of the same information you will need to tell gap. the one advantage that your script would have is that the dialog would appear more simple (less options for other things).

gap has a little bit of a learning curve, but once you achieve this it is more a matter of ignoring all of the parts of the dialog that you don't need for the task at hand rather than learning a bunch of new things.

carol