MASON actually originally had animated GIF output before we went with
Quicktime, but the code is long gone.  However here are some hints:

        - The Quicktime files generated by MASON are huge because they're just
streams of uncompressed images.  You can dramatically improve the size
of the files by converting them with Quicktime Pro ($25).  I suggest
writing out with the "Animation" codec.

        - Consider strongly if you really want to do animated gifs: GIF images
are restricted to 256 colors.  Heatbugs, for example, looks terrible.

        - The movie encoding hooks in MASON aren't hard at all.  Basically
MASON generates BufferedImages and then hands them to the encoder to
stick in a file.  Likewise the following software:
        http://jmge.net/java/gifenc/
        ... takes Images and stuffs them to a GIF file.  That'd be pretty
simple to rig up.

Sean

On Apr 1, 2005, at 1:33 PM, Florin A. wrote:

> Hello,
> Does any current version of Mason provide a way to make animated GIFs?
>  I would think that for outputs with few frames an animated GIF is a
> better alternative than a Quick-Time movie in terms of size and ease
> of distribution.
>
> Thanks,
> Florin