Gif frustratie

2007-07-31

Ok, because I'm not very satisfied with the current lay-out of this website (partially because that was the common comment from people) I'm now trying to get subtle moving clouds in my background. Or so I was hoping.

I want to get the effect by looping an animated gif (a certain filetype) and putting it in the background tiled.

The concept works fine (example) but is too generic and not very fluid. What I'm trying now is to create a bigger animated gif with multiple clouds in several layers where each layer has it's own moving speed to create the illusion of depth. None of the applications I've tested so far seem to be able to do this properly.

The only program I found so far that allows to merge multiple animated gifs is Adobe After Affects. This application however seems to not give a damn about transparency settings, no matter what I try. Besides that the output looks like shit, but could be blamed to the blending options I had to use (only one that blends is 'darken', but that doesn't do what I want, the result just looks like it in my tests). Finally the filesize is huge. My gif would have two colors, white and transparent. The optization and compressionpossibilities gif offers are huge here. Yet the result is 3mb. Yeah, thanks.

I'm now thinking about creating my own application in Java to merge the animated gifs the way I want. But I'm afraid it's a rather huge project for such small results.

It's really rediculous that I can't find anything on the subject (and I've tried...).