[Chimera-users] GIF animations in Chimera

[Tom Goddard]

Anyone interested in GIF animation output from Chimera?  Their main 
appeal is that they play directly in most web browsers (like banner ads).

It was easy to add to the Chimera movie recorder using ffmpeg which is 
included in the Chimera distribution.  But ffmpeg uses a fixed color 
palette causing severe color banding and does not offer LZW compression 
resulting in large file sizes.  That option looks unusable.  I tried 
another approach using a separate program called "gifsicle".  That gave 
decent coloring and compression but it would require adding gifsicle to 
the Chimera distribution.  I am reluctant to do that (entails future 
maintenance) unless there is strong interest in making GIF animations.

    Tom