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Software Reviews - GIF Movie Gear from Gamani

GIF Movie Gear from Gamani

This review covers GIF Movie Gear from Gamani.

Gamani makes one product and one product only. The cool thing, though, is that it's the best in its class... by far! In fact, GIF Movie Gear is the GIF animation tool that I recommend to all of my "real-life classroom" Web Technologies students. Why? Because one assignment I give to every Web Graphics class is to create an animated GIF ad banner with very strict restrictions on how big the file can be, and GIF Movie Gear has the best optimization of animated GIF files that I've seen in over a decade of working with web graphics.

I also recommend GIF Movie Gear to my already overworked and stressed-out students because of its ease-of-use. I'm sure you've heard the cliche about how intuitive a product can be. I believe this to be true... after you've used a given product for any length of time, that is. However, GIF Movie Gear's learning curve is extremely small. If you've tried other products, even some of the ones from the really large software companies, you'll truly appreciate how easy GIF Movie Gear is to use. With many of its competitors if you haven't used the software in over a month you usually find yourself struggling to remember how to do certain effects, etc. Not so with GIF Movie Gear. Because of its ease-of-use you'll find the "intuitive" description of this software actually rings true.

Don't let the ease-of-use fool you into thinking that GIF Movie Gear has no power, though. Aside from being the best animated GIF optimizer, GIF Movie Gear handles 24-bit files, opens Photoshop files using the layers as frames for the animation, offers live editing with the editor of your choice (Adobe Photoshop, for example), does palette reduction (lowering the number of colors used in your animation - resulting in an even smaller filesize) with realtime before and after views, continuously updates the filesize information (especially helpful to those Web-tech students of mine with that "restricted filesize" project :) ), and much much more...

Figure 7.1 is a screenshot showing the frames sequence and the Preview Animation window.

Figure 7.1

If you need:

Highly optimized animated GIFs
Ease-of-use like easy visual cropping
Flexibility in how you work such as undo/redo with infinite levels
A really powerful, professional-level tool that will let
you, for example, resize your animation or individual
frames, with or without re-sampling, or
enable you to edit individual palette colors

...then you should take a look at Gamani's GIF Movie Gear.

You don't need to take my word, though... visit Gamani.com for more details, a couple of excellent tutorials, or to download the free demo.

Discount Coupon Code

Although this professional tool is already competitively priced, enter the Discount Coupon Code "grafx_300" and save even more as a GrafX-Design.com reader.

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