Fun With FantaMorph

Hello.

I'm trying to generate a multi-sequence animated GIF with a transparent region surrounding the morphing images. The input is a pair of PNGs with alpha channels as appropriate. It seems to be right in the preview window, with the gray-hatched background in the transparent areas, but when it is rendered, that area is black. (It shows as black in the preview window during rendering, but not during editing/previewing).

The "Export transparent gif" box is checked. The threshold slider does not affect the result.

Background colors and images work properly; they occupy the area I am trying to make transparent. If nothing is set for a background, however, it defaults to black.

Sequence and Movie effects both have alpha set to zero. "Highlight overlapping areas" is checked for all sequences.

Any ideas?

(FM version: 4.2.6 Deluxe)

(Also a suggestion: In a future release, please consider removing black dots from the color-cycle option. They tend to get lost in images very easily.)

Please send us the source project by choosing the File/Share Project menu and then fill in our support email address support@fantamorph.com, we'll find out.

Your suggestion about removing black dots from the color-cycle option is really helpful. It would be adopted within the next update. Thank you!

Sorry, false alarm.

It had slipped my mind that GIF transparency is binary, not an alpha channel with varying degrees of transparency. I had said that the threshold slider didn't work; that was a quirk of the particular sequence I had been looking at. Others made sense according to that setting.

The list of new features for V.5 looks terrific. Of particular interest: I know I'll get good use out of the ability to set effects by sequence, and the layer morph feature looks very intriguing.

The one that I particularly like, though, is the new abilities to manipulate groups of dots in various ways; from my experience with FM I know that will be extremely useful.

One question about that feature that I can't tell from the demo video: although I can see that the set of dots to be manipulated en masse can be selected by rectangular area, is it also possible to select them by line, the way all the dots on a line can be selected and moved together without affecting others?

is it also possible to select them by line, the way all the dots on a line can be selected and moved together without affecting others?

Yes, you actually can achieve this since version 4. Just click on a line to have all the dots on it selected.