After receiving many CoffeeCup emails I finally decided to give Animation Studio a go. And I have to say that for the most part I am impressed.

In just a few minutes I was able to take a portion of a video (avi), crop it to 225 x 225 and turn it into a 16-frame animated gif. I just need to do one more thing for the animated gif to look like all the other products on our online store. I need to put a border on those 16 frames.

I edited the first frame (frame-0) and added a layer with a 4pt border that was 3399CC (blue) using the Draw Rectangle tool. That didn't go quite as planned as it seems the Draw Rectangle tool does not want to stay with the 225 x 225 dimensions; it seems to indicate that it does by stopping at the edge but then it's not exactly where it should be either - quite odd. That's okay though as some manual adjustments made it appear as it should. The problem though is that this border needs to be exactly the same on all 16 frames or it will appear to move around.

Unfortunately, copy/paste does not paste the border in the proper place. There appears to be no alignment tools included. And it doesn't seem that there is a copy/paste option for the layer. So I'm at a loss at this time as to how this can be achieved.

See Attached: Animation_Border.jpg

I attached an image showing the Draw Width: 4 px border that I am attempting to add to multiple frames. As I noted in my original post, I can add this to a single frame but having the border (Draw Rectangle) appear in exactly the same place on multiple frames has thus far proven impossible. It just seems that there must be a way to do this but I'm just not having any luck with this at all.

Thoughts and/or suggestions as to how this might be accomplished?

Hi TC, Try this. The easiest way I found was to make the border in Frame 0 then use the select tool to select the border element and hit ctrl + c. Now go back to the frames tab and select the next frame. Now go back to the edit tab and hit ctrl + v. Repeat for as many frames as you have. I know it takes a little while but it will be in the same position on every frame.

Eric,



See Attached: Animation_Border_Copy_Paste.jpg

It would be awesome if the copy/paste worked this way. No problem adding the border to each frame. However, The if I draw the border as it should be for for frame-0 (Animation_Border.jpg attached to previous post) and then copy/paste the border to another frame (ex. frame-1) instead of pasting it in the exact same location it pastes it a few pixels off - shifted slightly to the right and down. In effect, it is no longer a border at all but two lines on the picture.

Now, if I copy/paste to the same frame (frame-0 to frame 0) then the copy/paste does work as described. The border appears in the same location. Different frames? Different results. Quite odd.

I would make this a suggestion. As it would be nice if you could apply changes to all frames.

The Animation Studio is a nice little program for the cost.

Having said that, it does feel like it is a work in process - beta release vs. 2.3. There are all sorts of little odd things I think from the interface - ex. Edit defaults to Tool: Draw/Pencil where I would expect it to default to Select/Move Object or possibly last used. To a few issues - ex. if you click on a rectangle created with Draw Rectangle it sometimes changes it from say 4 px to 1 px. It seems strange that if you click on the Preview icon it opens the animation in a browser rather than doing an in-program preview which is instead accessed by selecting View | Play from the menu. And then there is the previously noted copy/paste that only in certain situations does the copy/paste from/to the same location. Yes, it would be great if you could apply something to some or all frames and/or alignment options (align to frame - center/top/left, etc. and align objects - center/top/left, etc.).

There just seems to be quite a few strange user interface choices combined with a few issues and missing features that make the program somewhat less useful than it would otherwise be. Depending upon your needs it could be an excellent choice. But given the lack of a viable way to have a static border alone will cause this to remain in my "possible future use" category.