gimp - animation formats besides gif

Question

Using Gimp 2.8.4

I am developing an animation for a game in gimp. The game does not require a gif animation - I load individual images as frames, usually pngs, and animate them in the game engine. The animation frames depend highly on transparency, and when I preview the animation using Filters -> Animation -> Playback, everything looks completely wrong. I would be fine with simply exporting the animation to preview it, but I don't see any options. I tried installing the apng plugin, but that did work (get an error saving the images.) I tried exporting as an mng, but I am not able to find software to view it.

Does anyone know of a way to preview animations in gimp that allows transparency, and doesn't compress the frames? Or maybe a better animation format that Gimp can export to?

Answer 1

By default, GIMP can export to the .MNG file format - which is a somewhat complicated format designed to replace animated GIFs in the past, but never caught on due too being too complex. (GIMP itself implements a rather restricted subset of it).

Since you asked "what animation formats GIMP support", it can also export to ".flic" - "Autodesk FLIC Animation" - but that is a fixed size, limited colors, animation format used in the late 80's - certainly mostly useless by now.

I think what would be best for your workflow instead would be to install the GIMP Animation Package (GIMP-GAP) - which provides a lot of other capabilities to editing animations in GIMP (like, allowing each frame to be a full GIMP image with multiple layers) - and can export to either a sequence of images, or various video formats making use of other installed system libraries

(The code on GIMP-GAP works with GIMP 2.8, but the Windows installer listed there seem to be outdated - please check this link on how to install GIMP Animation Package for GIMP-2.8 on Windows)