How can I create a gif of individual exposures?

[swag72]

I saw the other night that I have an asteroid in a few of my exposures and I'd like to make them into a gif. I used to use Maxim for this, it was really easy, but it is no longer on my new computer. I am looking at Pixinsight as the blink function looks perfect for the animated gif I want to do and there's a video function on the tabs.

Guess what ............ In typical PI style it is unfathomable and there's no information I can find online that tells me actually what to press. to get it going. Silly me would have thought that 'run' was the correct button but it would seem not!!

Can anyone help or suggest something easy to use?

[Oddsocks]

Do you have Photoshop Sara?

It’s fairly simple to create .gifs in PS and I have made a few NEO and Lunar gifs over the years in PS 5 & 6.

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/how-to-create-animated-gif-quick-tip-ht

Never tried in PixInsight and there doesn’t seem to be a tutorial on their resources pages but I’ll have a look later this morning when we get back home after swimming....

William.

[PhotoGav]

Sara, here’s Adobe’s own Photoshop animated gif tutorial:

https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/photoshop/how-to/make-animated-gif.html

Works a treat!

[Star101]

Hi Sara,

I have used this easy online site to create GIFs

https://www.onlineconverter.com/mov-to-gif

 

[alexbb]

If everything above fails, PIPP will easily do

[fireballxl5]

+1 for PIPP👍

 

However, I've also used the Blink function in PI which allows you to crop around the target - see this animation of tiny Asteroid Edna 445 that I imaged on Christmas Eve.

 

CS, Andy

 

Asteroid 445 Edna - 2018-12-14.avi

Edited June 2, 2019 by fireballxl5
added PI video

[david_taurus83]

I'm sure Blink has the ability to export as a gif but I think it needs some sort of add on to work.

[swag72]

2 minutes ago, david_taurus83 said:

I'm sure Blink has the ability to export as a gif but I think it needs some sort of add on to work.

There is a video tab, but I can't get it to work........ what a surprise!!!

[swag72]

2 hours ago, Oddsocks said:

Do you have Photoshop Sara?

It’s fairly simple to create .gifs in PS and I have made a few NEO and Lunar gifs over the years in PS 5 & 6.

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/how-to-create-animated-gif-quick-tip-ht

Never tried in PixInsight and there doesn’t seem to be a tutorial on their resources pages but I’ll have a look later this morning when we get back home after swimming....

William.

Thanks William.

2 hours ago, PhotoGav said:

Sara, here’s Adobe’s own Photoshop animated gif tutorial:

https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/photoshop/how-to/make-animated-gif.html

Works a treat!

Cheers Gav.

1 hour ago, Star101 said:

Hi Sara,

I have used this easy online site to create GIFs

https://www.onlineconverter.com/mov-to-gif

 

I'll take a look - Thanks.

41 minutes ago, alexbb said:

If everything above fails, PIPP will easily do

I've never used PIPP - Will it auto stretch the fits files too?

38 minutes ago, fireballxl5 said:

+1 for PIPP👍

Thanks!

[fireballxl5]

PI's blink function does work, I've updated my previous post with a video that I created using it🙂

[swag72]

10 minutes ago, fireballxl5 said:

PI's blink function does work, I've updated my previous post with a video that I created using it🙂

But how did you actually create the video? ..... I can't do that bit! I've got the files in 'blink' then the video tab doesn't do anything but produce an error message when I try to run.

I've got both Terakado (mag 17.8) and Conrada (mag 15.7) in the same image.

Edited June 2, 2019 by swag72

[Stub Mandrel]

I use an ancient version of Photopaint. It works really well, you can even have different length farmes.

[fireballxl5]

6 minutes ago, swag72 said:

I've never used PIPP - Will it auto stretch the fits files too?

I'm a bit of a newbie at this animation lark and I've only tried this once with my 445 Edna sequence, imaged in poor conditions with some cloud, but my work flow was:

Using MaxImDL

1. identify the good frames
2. perform auto gradient removal
3. Stretch
4. DDP
5. save as JPEG (auto stretch)
6. load frames into PIPP to animate

I had 45 reasonable frames and so manually processed each as above before moving onto PIPP

 

I also used Blink in PI, selecting the 45 JPGs and running the animate script (in the Blink dialog) with default settings (with output folder defined). I've just re-done this and it worked with no problems. 

What is the error message that you've getting?

HTH

Andy

 

[swag72]

With PI the error message is as follows

 

[fireballxl5]

these are my settings...

not sure now where I found these parameters for the arguments, I probably found them on the PI forum - I'm not sure about these values without doing some more digging.

[swag72]

Ahh, it looks like I don't have the relevant program or something..... your top line is populated very differently to mine...... I checked the arguments on the PI forum and it should give me a 0.5s clip..... but I guess it won't work with whatever that top line means

 

[PhotoGav]

My guess is that the 'Program:' dialog is not pointing to 'ffmpeg.exe' correctly? So it 'Failed to start external process'. Check the path to 'ffmpeg.exe' and put that in the Program: setting. Hopefully it will then work.

[fireballxl5]

I notice that I'm creating an AVI rather than MP4. Maybe there is an issue with the libx264 codec on your PC?

[swag72]

Just now, PhotoGav said:

My guess is that the 'Program:' dialog is not pointing to 'ffmpeg.exe' correctly? So it 'Failed to start external process'. Check the path to 'ffmpeg.exe' and put that in the Program: setting. Hopefully it will then work.

And in normal speak that means? LOL!!!!!

[swag72]

1 minute ago, fireballxl5 said:

I notice that I'm creating an AVI rather than MP4. Maybe there is an issue with the libx264 codec on your PC?

Nope - Avi is the same error message

[david_taurus83]

I've downloaded that FFMpeg but it's a .tar folder or something. I've unzipped it but cant find the .exe file? Where is it and where do you put it! I'd like to know too!

[fireballxl5]

as Gav suggests, maybe you just need to find the folder where ffmpeg.exe lives and include the full path to this folder, something like "C:\win64\usefulprogs\ffmpeg.exe"

 

It looks like I had to download from the web, there's a link here https://ffmpeg.org/download.html

 

[Davey-T]

As mentioned P'Shop or PIPP work well, PI = brain ache 

Dave

[swag72]

5 minutes ago, fireballxl5 said:

as Gav suggests, maybe you just need to find the folder where ffmpeg.exe lives and include the full path to this folder, something like "C:\win64\usefulprogs\ffmpeg.exe"

 

It looks like I had to download from the web, there's a link here https://ffmpeg.org/download.html

 

Downloaded that and put it somewhere - Pointed PI to it and the same error message......... 

[JamesF]

6 minutes ago, david_taurus83 said:

I've downloaded that FFMpeg but it's a .tar folder or something. I've unzipped it but cant find the .exe file? Where is it and where do you put it! I'd like to know too!

That's probably the source code that you've downloaded.  I'd guess you probably want the version available from here:

https://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/

James