Animation software advice needed

[George]

Do you have any recommendations on animation software that is easy to learn and reasonably priced? This would be used for the BAUT astronomy class.

[Jeff Root]

George,

What I have is really old (1997) ULEAD GIF Animator Lite Edition.
It has worked fine for me. Never had a crash or program error
with it. It has one little problem with typing nuimbers into the
input boxes, and is slow when the image size is large, but those
are not serious for me. The files it creates have some junk in
them which I remove with another program.

I can't recommend that other program because it modifies any
and every file that it opens, without further user input. I will
tell you the name of that program, though: GIFClean 32 6.2d.

The pallet-size reduction in GIF Animator Lite is good though,
and better than the one in the paint program I use every day,
so I now use it instead of the one in my paint program even
if what I'm making is an image that will be used in PNG format.

I'm sure the current version is very different from what I have.
The current version trial is limited to 15 days, but the price to
buy is only $13.

http://www.ulead.com/ga/trial.htm

Examples of animations I've made:

http://www.freemars.org/jeff/answers/float4.gif
http://www.freemars.org/jeff/speed/circ6h.gif

I believe that all versions of Paint Shop Pro for the last several
years have an integrated animation program. I use an ancient
version of PSP to create BMP images which I then load into
GIF Animator.

I've also recently used a Flash-making program. It produced
SWF files almost identical in size to the cleaned GIF Animator
output. I find that the Flash player plays SWF animations more
smoothly than IE 5.0 plays GIF animations. However, the
program crashed several times while using it, and it is quite
limited in its capabilities. It is not an all-purpose Flash maker
as I had naively hoped when I downloaded it, but is instead
meant for making demos of software use. Moving the cursor
around the screen, clicking on buttons, etc. I uninstalled
the program before the trial period ended, and I'd have to
install it again to get the URL. I think it was made in Czech
Republic, or someplace like that.

If you find a good Flash maker (especially if it is free and runs
well on a 166 MHz computer under Windows 98SE!),
please lemme know.

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

[George]

Thanks Jeff, I like your animations, too.

I don't mind paying several hundred bucks as I can get company assistance since we are starting to do more PowerPoint presentations. However, I prefer something simple to learn and your suggestion might be just the thing. My experience is only Corel Draw and a little Photo Shop, but no animation experience.

[mickal555]

I use fireworks for simple animations...