Morpheus Software Support Forums

by **Jack** » Thu Feb 05, 2004 3:17 pm

I am inserting morphed photos into slides on a Power Point presentation and even though I have tried adding time or frames to the "stay on ends" option before rendering, it fails to hold the initial image for more than a second. I am saving them as an animated GIF file. This is for a school presentation (age progression of students) and it is important that we can view the initial photo for 3-4 seconds. Please advise!

Also, any problems burning morphed images onto a disc? I haven't tried that yet...

by **Ark** » Thu Feb 05, 2004 6:37 pm

Play the GIF in any web browser such as Internet Explorer and if it plays fine, the problem is obviously with PowerPoint. Some people have reported similar experiences and unfortunately there is absolutely nothing anybody except for Microsoft can do to fix such an issue. If there are no options in PowerPoint that you can find to make an animation play the way you want, you need to contact Microsoft support for a fix. There is nothing special about the animated GIFs produced by Morpheus that make them any different from any other animated GIF.

by **CyberVenom** » Thu Feb 05, 2004 7:35 pm

As a work-around, why not try saving the original photo, the morph, and the ending photo separately? Then make 3 slides. (use no transition effects between them in PowerPoint) Let PwerPoint use its built-in timed slide feature to show the first slide for 3-4 seconds, then display the morph slide for whatever the duration of your morph is, and then the final slide.
Or if you like, make only the morph slide timed so you can sit at the first slide as long as you want, admiring the pretty picture before clicking to advance to the morph.
As long as this is done without any slide transitions, and on a reasonable fast computer, there should be no flickering between slides, and the result should look like what you described.
-CyberVenom

by **Jack** » Fri Feb 06, 2004 10:29 am

Thanks for the suggestions; as for the workaround suggestion from Cybervenom, I tried that but it is tedious as I must make sure the still photo is in absolutely the same position and is the same size as the morphed picture to follow or there is an obvious jump noted. Also, the picture quality is different so it is not a seamless transition. Frustrating!

by **CyberVenom** » Fri Feb 06, 2004 12:53 pm

Well, then like Ark said you might try using HTML to do it (depending on how "tedious" you condinsider HTML by comparison... :wink: )

I would set up a page with the morph on it, and with either a link to the next morph page or a meta refresh tag to automatically advance to the next page after a set time. (or both...)

In case you are not familiar with HTML, you could use this:

<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5;URL=mynextpage.html">
<title>My Title Goes Here</title>
</head>
<body text=#000000 bgcolor=#FFFFFF>
<img src="mymorph.gif"><br>
<a href="mynextpage.html">Next</a>
</body>
</html>

(the "5" is the time before the next page loads, in seconds.)

If you want to do more complex pages without learning much HTML, you could use FrontPage (I'm assuming you have that since you have PowerPoint...)

-CyberVenom

by **Ark** » Fri Feb 06, 2004 1:46 pm

I was suggesting just loading the GIF into your web browser such as Mozilla, or if you have to, I.E. and seeing if it plays properly in that. I have seen occasional complaints about powerpoint enough to figure out that the program does not obey all of the GIF loop and delay commands, and that is simply a flaw in powerpoint from what I can tell. We don't use powerpoint or any MS Office programs here, so I can not verify for sure, but a few reports all point in the same direction so far. Using 3 slides, with the still pictures for 2 and the animation between would seem a good workaround though. I don't believe it should be hard to line the pictures up, just don't use the mouse. I hope that is possible, to edit the image properties in powerpoint and align them by typing in coordinates and sizes as numbers directly.

by **CyberVenom** » Fri Feb 06, 2004 2:23 pm

LOL! :roll: No, I don't think you can enter coordinates in PowerPoint. There is a snap grid that helps though.
I actually find it a bit surprising (although not unlikely) that PowerPoint would use a different library to display GIFs than would Explorer. In my experience, Microsoft likes to embed Explorer components into everything, so I would have guessed that they would have just used an embedded Explorer object to display GIFs.

-CyberVenom

by **Ark** » Fri Feb 06, 2004 3:06 pm

Well perhaps the snap grid units can be adjusted to a large number. I would have suspected IE to be embeded in everything as well, but I have quite a few confirmations via private emails from the last year or more that the same GIF that plays fine in IE does not loop properly in powerpoint.

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