15-Minute Reviews :: Zoner GIF Animator v5.0b2

Hello all and welcome to another issue of 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is Zoner GIF Animator version 5.0 build 2 by ZONER Inc. – A GIF animation application to aid you in building ads, fun graphics and more.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Zoner GIF Animator 5 is the best tool for creating images in the animated GIF format. It is very easy to use and offers : you can create hundreds of impressive bitmap textures (like bricks, clouds, and bubbles), restore animations’ original states, import both bitmap and vector images to use as frames, import high-quality bitmap images with over 256 colors, use alpha transparency of 0-99% and much more.”

Quick Pros

• Ability to build fairly complex GIF animations is powerful
• Ability to use bitmap files as well as vector files
• Also capable of importing frames from avi files as well
• Dialog box functionality built-in
• Texture generator can create some really cool textures
• Effects are pretty cool for giving special effects to specific frames

Quick Cons

• Interface a bit overwhelming at first
• Applying colors to ranges in texture generator awkward
• Explanation of “Redraw Method” and its usage could be improved
• Frames don’t seem to ‘stack’ to reduce scrolling
• Can’t paint directly in frames

Sample

Expansion

While it has been years since I’ve dabbled in GIF animation, there is still a place for it on the internet. Lightweight animated advertisements, avatars, AOL IM logos and many more uses where using a Flash file would be difficult, too large, or just not able to be used.

When I first dove into the application, I found myself very overwhelmed at first; There is a lot of options and settings scattered about through the menus, the top toolbars and 4 tabbed windows. I found I had to dive for the helpfile quickly at the start just to familiarize myself with a lot of the options that were posed to me; They made sense for the most part when I quickly flipped through and mixed with a quick menu reading; It is just the interface is a bit cludgy and spent some of my time looking for some option or button rather than working on creating. That said, these options all have a purpose; The capability to create some fairly powerful animations. This animation above, when I got rolling, took me very little time to make.

There are a lot of features here. Not only can you use bitmap files (Which include gifs, jpegs, bmps and much more), you can use vector files as well (wmf and emf) which can be handy for quickly building different size advertisements without losing great quality. Moreover, you can also import frames from avi (and other formats) video files into your workspace as well. (Those looking for this; It is in the ‘Bitmap frame’ option.) This in itself could pose to be be very powerful; You could create swoosh video animations or otherwise to overlay on the background of your animation. I can think of so many other options for use of the avi import, including short video clips of your product or a game (For those who build forum signatures) and much more. While I didn’t have a chance to test it, it shows promise.

There are a lot of other handy functions as well for building your animation; Premade Windows dialog boxes (And a lot of other options as well with this) are handy for making those (potentially annoying) ads that act like there is something wrong on your computer. These tend to catch more attention than others I’ve found, especially with those who may not be as computer savvy.

There is also the texture maker, which in itself is extremely powerful and offers a lot of presets and the ability to change them. There are bricks, hardwood, abstract globs of goo, clouds and much, much more. I would love to have this as a standalone application in itself for building quick dynamic textures for other applications.

All is not glitter though with this application. First off, it took me quite a while to figure out how the redraw method worked (Apply it to the frame you want to ‘undo’ after the frame is done it’s duration, not on the following frame.) The method to which it works does provide a lot more power, but the helpfile could be more descriptive on how to use it, and maybe even a demonstration.

Another issue I had was working with the frame browser window; Even if you resize the window, the thumbnails to not rearrange to fill the entire area; Instead, on a long animation, be prepared for a lot of scrolling, especially if you increase the thumbnail size. I did hope that this could have been managed differently but unfortunately it is difficult and can end up being a time sap, especially in a complex animation. Even with my short animation above, it was 4 pages of scrolling.

My biggest hope when I saw this application was at least limited drawing functionality; Granted you can click on the ‘paint’ button to paint on bitmap frames, in reality, it would be nice to have that built directly in, with other functions such as adding drop shadows, glows and so forth on the fly rather than having to build all the frames beforehand. For some, this application may only be useful as an animation assembler only.

Final Verdict

Even with the awkward interface, lack of painting functionalities and so forth, this application offers a lot of functionality and usability. While I wish I had more time to play with the video functionality, I have a feeling that it would be extremely powerful being able to add videos to your gif animation. For free, I would definitely recommending it if you think you want anything to use this application for. As for paying $49.46, this price may be steep for those just looking to make an AIM icon, avatar or forum signature, but its power may be worth it to those in the market of making web advertisements. For those who may miss this freebie, it seems that Zoner is offering a deal called ‘Summer of Love’ which starts at 90% discounts this week and go down 20% each week. That would make this application only $4.95 this week – A steal for what it does (Check out their other software too.)

Posted by BladedThoth on Friday, July 20, 2007