Tuesday, November 4, 2014

Google doodle

The "vote" Google doodle today is excellent. I  honestly couldn't do better myself.

Oh wait. Maybe I can. It lacks something. It's not just voting and spinning around, no, it's voting for the expressed purpose of tossing people out of their jobs, firing them, and tossing with extreme prejudice.



I notice Google animators are doing something I see often that does not make sense. If you download their gif and open it in Photoshop you will see they have strings of identical frames at the beginning and at the end. There is no good reason to duplicate frames, far less a string of 10 or so identical frames. If the last frame is the same as the first then eliminate the last and give more time to the first. Eliminating identical frames reduces the file size considerably. That would make uploading to millions upon millions of computers much faster.

They do this for timing.

In GIMP all frames have the same speed. The animator assigns the speed for the frames at saving.

In Photoshop the animator assigns a speed for each individual frame. That was always my least favorite task because it means several taps for each tiny frame, then run the animation to check the speed to see how it looks and make adjustments accordingly. For years this has been a total drag when the  number of frames exceeds, say, twenty-five or so.

Photoshop is so vast one can spend their whole life learning its nuances. I just recently learned how to change the speed of frames in groups, change the speed of all the frames at once if I like. Here's how:

In the timeline window, once layers are transformed to frames, click on the first frame in the string, hold shift key, tap the last frame in the string and all frames in between are selected at once. Change the time of one frame and all selected frames change identically. This relives the tedium of changing times of frames individually, a remarkable savings in tedium. It makes adjusting the speed not bad at all.

8 comments:

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

I saw Chuck Todd pointing to the screen, doing a John Madden thing, and say... to tell you the truth.

What a crock.

ricpic said...

I'm always put off by attempts to encourage people to vote. Best is when those who feel the need to vote vote and those who don't don't.

Unknown said...

Visualize freedom from tyranny.

Unknown said...

The progressive income tax explained.

Eric the Fruit Bat said...

There's a suggestion box joke somewhere in the GIF.

Eric the Fruit Bat said...

GIF. Was that even close? I should have played it safe and just said "animation."

Eric the Fruit Bat said...

Or maybe peanut butter.

Some Seppo said...

You can set the time for the frames in GIMP:

http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Simple_Animations/