Odd animated GIF behavior

[nutz4lights]

Hey all,

So I was cramming to try and get some effects put on my window matrix units for Halloween the other night (at 2:30 in the morning before Halloween of course!) and I had something odd going on with an animated GIF.  I wanted some blinking evil eyes in the window units.  There are four window two units, top left, top right, bottom left and bottom right, so I thought it would be cool to have a left eye in one window with a right eye in another window.  Of course, all the animated GIF evil eyes I found were a pair of eyes.  I downloaded the pair and then went to ezgif.com to crop out the left eye and then the right eye, saving them as separate new animated GIF's.  The two new GIF files seemed to operate just fine if I double click them in the folder they were saved to... however when I went to insert them into the window matrix, all I get is a whole pile of nothing.  I have attached the three files here, I was hoping someone else could try to see what they do in a picture effect for you...  I should add that the master, double eye file works just fine, so I ended up putting that in all the windows with a different frame rate to stagger the blinking eyes... I was just hoping to have one eye per window to make them larger.  The -04 file below is the original image, the -04L and -04R are the left and right eyes.

Thanks,

[Gilrock]

I'm not able to view the GIF files right now but a temporary solution could have been using an oversize buffer.  I would just need to check how big we allow you to make it.  If you right-click the buffer area you can type in buffer sizes.  You could have make it 200% wide favoring one side or the other if we allow a number that big.

[JonB256]

I am also getting "nothing" with those GIFs.

Oddly, when opened in IrfanView, the appear normal but they cannot be Saved. There is some sort of protection on them.

I do notice, when opened in Notepad++, at the very bottom, they were created with a Trial Version of some ULead software. They may be protected when saved by that Trial version.

Someone with better GIF tools may be able to "fix" them. I have failed so far.

[JonB256]

Ok, sort of success -

If you upload them into  http://gifmaker.org/

don't change the size or speed

Then "create animation"

Then Download GIF to a new name, they will work in xLights.

[nutz4lights]

That gifmaker.org site worked, thanks Jon!

Thanks for the suggestion too, Gil.  I will have to look into those buffer settings as I have never seen those options (my picture usage is pretty basic).

[keithsw1111]

The library we use to load GIFs reports them as having an invalid format ... and thus 0 frames.