Photoshop® CS3 Extended Video and 3D Bible

Chapter 10. Animating Using Frame Animation

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Working in the Animation (Frames) palette

• Creating tweened frame animations

• Creating frame-by-frame animation

Now that you have looked at how the Animation (Timeline) palette works, I'm going to introduce you to the frame-based Animation palette, which is called the Animation (Frames) palette. Of course, as far as animation goes, the frame-based animation palette is not new at all. In fact, if you've ever used Adobe ImageReady, the frame-based animation palette will be very familiar to you.

ImageReady has been completely assimilated by Photoshop CS3, and its features can be found in the frame-based animation palette. Its original purpose was to create animated GIFs for the Internet.

An animated GIF is a small animated image or icon that you see almost anywhere on the Web. They are usually simple, such as the animated smiley faces, and operate at an extremely slow frame rate, giving their motion a jerky appearance.

Although frame animation has most of the capability of Timeline animation, you'll find that its strength lies in creating short, crude animations, such as animated GIFs. Being able to see each frame without having to drag the current-time indicator around is very handy. Frame animation can become very unwieldy in a very few frames, however, as you'll see when you begin to create animations in this chapter.

Some of the other advantages of frame animation are being able to reverse frames and set the frame rate of each frame ...