For those who care. One of my watches (at this time) has a sequence.
I generated a black dragon’s head in NightCafe (which was free). Took about 8 tries to get one I wanted
I then picked an image, and used NightCafe “Animate Image” (which cost a few credits). This took about 5 tries to get what I wanted.
This generated a file about 3MB, so I used the resizer feature to shrink dimensions a bit, then the optimizer function to compress it (lossy) about 50%
This resulted in about a 1.4MB GIf with a 2 second animation, which I downloaded, and input into Creator.
It wouldn’t render at 2 seconds, so I shortened it to 1.2 seconds in Creator and it worked fine.
Check out night mode on this one!
(No, I’m not promoting the MP4 to GIF site or NightCafe… they are just the tools I have)
Firstly, thanks for including all of your steps. This is the sort of information we like to see
Looks good but resource hog? some dirty maths may halve or more the animations. Or pre generate a backing animation or image and a hollow face template. @russellcresser paste your hollow colour wheel.
Thanks for the props. As you might be able to guess, I’m a rank newbie, so the kind of info YOU provided in response (along with @russellcresser) is equally (if not more) valuable to me.
One of my goals is to do my own FFMPEG conversions from MP4 to GIF, which will help me fine-tune, but that’s not as replicatable for others, so I figured this set if free and nearly-free (in the case of animating through NightCafe) was a good enough compromise for others to learn.
I posted this because when I googled info about sequences, information was lacking and all I could really find was a 2+ year old post stating it had to be under, like 200k or something like that. My first animation I tried to keep under that, then I was like “let’s push it” and found a current upper limit (for my watch, at least) of close to 2 MB (resource hogging notwithstanding)
Yeah @CryptoKnight you will just find that the Power Drain is higher and if you had some seconds hands or smooth scrolling running it might get a bit jumpy . At the end of the day we have a small screen to work on . Even looking at size of the New Watch Displays .
You have obviously encountered the 25 frame limit . But it seems to me that you are quite capable of running several animations in a sequence . In my experiance 3 is a sensible number in that case .
Excellent. Actually, having seen the previous thread, my 2 second animation was 24 frames, so I’m thinking it’s possible the 1.6 second requirement was due to something else. memory? I dunno, but I intend to continue to experiment, read and learn
