(262/300)

While looking back at the blog post on how to create a via (<bf5.eu/post/how-to-make-a-gif->) in regards to make animations for , I noticed that there are a couple of things that irk me that I have ignored previously.

These things include animation quality and process time.

Follow

(263/300)

The guide still has its place when dealing with images that are minorly misaligned. This is because on will need to adjust the images in such a manner that they overlap on top of each other.

This practice can be extended to the point that once a set of standardized images exist, then the ones that are misaligned can be filled and cropped to align with the standard.

(264/300)

If one continues to use for sorting the images for the animation, then the [export-layers-plus tool](gimp-forum.net/attachment.php?) can ease the process of exporting all layers at once.

The user script can be saved in the _script-fu_ directory. The directory can be found by visiting `Edit > Preferences > Folders > Scripts`.

It is recommended to pad the layer number with zeroes. The suggested one is `%6i`, which will pad the number with zeroes until the number has a length of 6.

Script from the [Gimp forum](gimp-forum.net/Thread-exportin)

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Now with the layers as frames one can use to merge them together to create a desired animation file.

```
ffmpeg -r 1 -i %06d.png -c:v libx264 out.mp4
```

This will create a MP4 with 1 frame per second. It is important the import naming `-i %06d.png` aligns with the export of layers modal.

To have a smooth looping experience, make sure to set the starting and ending frame be the same image. Just copy and past the start image and rename it so that it becomes the ending image.

(266/300)

The guide suggests to export the animation as a with a 1 frames per second.

This approach is fine if one is dealing with images that use less than 256 colors. Otherwise one will notice some compression artefacts.

(267/300)

also permits to export the animation as a . This will nullify the artefacts issue introduced by .

The only issue is if one wants to upload the result to the the animation won't be registered.

(268/300)

Not only do have the animation halt in the though so do .

To overcome this issue, one can convert the specific file extension to a MP4.

For GIF one can run via this

```
ffmpeg -i input.gif output.mp4
```

Sadly, currently the same cannot be done with WEBP, since [decoding animated WEBP](trac.ffmpeg.org/ticket/4907) has not yet been implemented.

(269/300)

One option to handle the case is to follow this [guide](superuser.com/a/1688890). There are some modification that should be taken.

First extract the frames using

```
magick input.webp frames.png
```

Then use to build a MP4 video from the extracted frames

```
ffmpeg -r 1 -i frames-%0d.png -c:v libx264 output.mp4
```

(270/300)

The issue with this approach is that when extracting the frames via one will only get the changes and the rest will be the alpha channel.

Thus when building the MP4 with won't look as expected.

One could go back in and merge each frame to the base layer (the first frame). Or just use the reference images.

(271/300)

One would have hoped that one came full circle, though one came fully around with less data than before.

Let's start again from the beginning and use the method described in [265](qoto.org/@barefootstache/11231) without using . The only thing that is required is that the file names are in consecutive order. This can be done via

```
ls -1prt | grep -v "/$" | cat -n | while read n f; do mv -n "${f}" "$(printf "%06d" $n).${f#*.}"; done
```

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One nice thing that provides is the option to crop all layers at once. This can also be done with to crop the _output.mp4_.

Just follow this guide: [How can I crop a video with ffmpeg](video.stackexchange.com/a/4571)

Gimp or any other image editor app can be used to get a reference area for the crop area.

Hypothetically one combine step [265](qoto.org/@barefootstache/11231) and this one in one command.

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