Manual start of GIF animation

[buehrenm]

Hi!

I want to put a GIF animation into my PowerPoint presentation. This animation is actually a video of about 15 seconds in length. I want to start the animation manually by clicking on it, but there is the problem: The animation seems to start whenever it wants and runs unseen in the background before the GIF-animation itself appears. When it appears, the video is already somewhere in the middle.

Converting the GIF into a video file like AVI or MPG is not an option. Is there any other possibility to tell PowerPoint when exactly the animation shall start?

Regards,
Markus

[Doctor]

I've not come across this problem before.

How large is the gif file? Is there any chance that you can email it in to us and we could take a look at it?

Follow the main contact details on the main web site.

[buehrenm]

Hi Doctor!

I have just sent an example movie to helper1@... It is one of the shorter movies (but exceeds the upload limit about a bit), I also tried to use ones that are even longer than this.

The good things at GIF animations are a) that there are no compression artifacts visible, which are quite severe in this line drawing kind of video when using a lossy codec, and b) that I can flexibly change the pauses between frames, for example to play the interesting part a bit slower and then accelerate again.

As I already wrote, one problem is that Powerpoint starts the video when it likes to. Also, Powerpoint seems to need huge processing power to play videos like this. Every other image viewer seems to play the animation without needing any resources.

Hope you can help me in this issue.

Regards
Markus

[Doctor]

I have just tried out the animated gif.

I inserted the image and then used custom animation to display it. I set it to appear and on mouse click.

This works fine, but the image does not show up.

What I would suggest is that you take a flat copy of the first part of the animation and overlay this on top of the animated gif. The easiest way to do this is to take a screen shot (press print screen). You can then use the crop feature to crop down the image. This will appear in a flat gif or jpeg format.

Then send the image to the back so that it is underneath the animated gif. Only the flat image will show until the mouse is clicked and then the animated gif will appear.

[buehrenm]

Hi!

Thanks for your suggestions, but this is exactly what I did before. Try to put one or more slides with some effect before the slide with the Gif. Then start the presentation and wait some seconds before you click through the animations until the animated Gif shall appear and start playing. Then you will notice that the video has already started.

I also tried to use a trigger, thus starting the animation after clicking on the first frame image. It does not change anything, even when I use a delay of two seconds after the image is clicked on.

Unfortunately I guess that the use of animated Gifs was designed only for some annoying little animations which are of one second length and repeat infinitely.

Or do you have any other suggestion?? Is there a way to put a bug report for this on the Microsoft website?

Regards and thanks for your help
Markus