Add Gifs possibilities!

[stoyaniliyn]

Hopefully u guys can add possibility of making animated gifs! I’ve been doing this in photoshop and now since I switch to affinity I need to go always to other apps to do that coz is not supported in ur applications! 🙌🏻🙌🏻🙌🏻🙌🏻🙌🏻😇😇😇😇😇😇😇😇😇😇😇😇😇😇😇

[Alfred]

Serif staff have previously indicated that they have no plans to add animation features to the Affinity suite, but if they change their minds I would expect animated GIF creation/editing to be added to Photo rather than Designer.

[pruus]

I Photo would be hè best, and all slices in different layers. It is possible. PLEASE MAKE IT POSSIBLE AFFINITY, PLEASE....

[JET_Affinity]

On 8/4/2020 at 5:49 AM, Alfred said:

I would expect animated GIF creation/editing to be added to Photo rather than Designer.

That would seem obvious. But laboriously painting raster frames for an animated GIF is, well, laborious.

But in a vector-based program with a blend capability, creating a sequence of frames is a simple matter of rasterizing the blend's steps. That can be done by simply taking a screenshot of a 'stretched out' blend and then cropping it into individual frames. But a command that simply  rasterizes individual blend steps and exports them as a set of GIF frames eliminates that tedium.

The advantage of starting with a vector blend is that it automates the tweening. So scaling, skewing, rotating (or any combinations of those) is much less laborious. And  each frame is effectively individually rasterized from a pristine original, not a transformed raster.

So just as one expects a vector-based drawing program to be able to export the whole file's content to raster formats, there's no reason not to enable it to export an object blend as a series of raster frames.

A vector drawing program with a blend feature can 'break apart' or 'expand' or 'flatten' (or whatever the publisher decides to call it) a live blend to deconstruct it into the stack of individual objects that it really is. When Flash was in its hey day (before Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia), Illustrator was provided the ability to export the stack of 'expanded' blend steps as Flash frames. But frame-by-frame Flash animations—even when containing vector-based artwork—are really rather lame. They limit the whole resolution independence advantage of vector-based artwork to mere scalability of the whole movie. The real power of Flash is not frame-by-frame animation, but in programmatic—and therefore interactive—transformation at the individual object level.

But animated GIF is nothing but a series of raster frames anyway. So I consider the ability to export steps of an expanded blend in a vector-based drawing program as GIF frames perfectly appropriate—once Affinity gains a (hopefully full-featured and innovative) object blend command.

JET

[Alfred]

3 minutes ago, JET_Affinity said:

laboriously painting raster frames for an animated GIF is, well, laborious

That’s true, but since we can create vector shapes in Affinity Photo we aren’t quite so restricted. And if Serif were to add tweening capabilities (as in Serf PhotoPlus) we might end up with a fairly versatile aniGIF editor.