Ulead GIF Animator 5 - Old-School Looks Don't Detract from This Animator's Strengths

At around 10MB, you can't call Ulead GIF Animator 5 a hefty download, and it installs pretty quickly, too.

Setup was simple, just enter the product key if you have one, or hit "Try" for a 15-day free trial. GIF Animator 5 quickly loads a couple of components and you're ready to go.

Ulead GIG Animator 5 performance is flawless. It takes almost no time at all to do anything, and although there are sometimes a couple of odd crashes it is a remarkably sound application.

Memory usage after GIF Animator 5 is saved to Program Files is less than 16MB (which doesn't exactly strain your hard drive), although this number grows slightly as you start finding the Ulead folders dotted around your document folders.

Since Ulead GIG Animator 5 was released in 2001, it will most likely run on any PC manufactured since then with an operating system of Windows 98 or later. The machine I use daily runs Windows Vista so I was interested to see how it performed because I'd read reports from others experiencing problems running GIF Animator under Vista. Having tried it myself I haven't seen any problems with Vista or with XP (there were also problems reported with XP). Those with problems may have had more specific issues caused by other applications but GIF Animator 5 worked fine on Vista for me.

Email support is effective, though the techies do try to push you towards the community forums. Search those first before you send email and then mention that you have when you first contact support to save an extra email and the additional wait while someone replies.

Something that has popped up running the program in Vista is a problem with product help. Unfortunately, GIF Animator 5's help files are not compatible with Vista so you've got to get at them another way. There's no update for this either, though Windows help provides a link to a download of the old version of Windows Help to get you around this. There's also a crash error every time I close help in Vista. It provides a helpful dialog box letting me know GIF Animator 5 has stopped responding, but this isn't a big deal as it's simply the result of application changes made in Vista.

GIF Animator 5 is a little expensive at first peek ($49.95, or $29.95 to upgrade), but it offers some great features that do set it apart from similar freeware, for example. And the price certainly isn't outrageous for an application this good.

Ulead also offers a plugin for GIF Animator 5 on its website which is another $19.95 (at the time of this writing) and adds 90 transition effects and 40 animated image filters. I think this plugin should be part of the application, however.

Let's break down Ulead GIF Animator 5's primary features:

Editing
GIF Animator 5 makes it fairly easy to edit your animations. There is a learning curve as some things are in odd places, but once you've played with it a bit you will quickly start enjoying it. You can also take a test drive with the Trial version first.

There are a lot of settings to work with, and this is made easier by a series of Wizards that guide you through most tasks.

Exporting
There is a good range of export formats included in version 5, including GIF, SWF, and PSD, as well as various video (AVI, MPEG, etc.) and miscellaneous (UFO, etc.)
formats.

The program's compatibility with multiple formats is a big advantage over most competitors, including Adobe Flash (which only allows you to export in GIF, Flash format, or MOV).

GIF Animator 5 also has scope for changing the export settings, resolutions, quality, frame rate, and so on, to meet your needs.

Optimization
You can optimize GIFs using the program, too; GIF Animator's value increases when used in conjunction with other animation programs that produce excessively large GIF files. Adobe Flash, for example, can export projects as GIF files and these are often packed with detail that really push file sizes up, which can render them useless with most applications.

GIF Animator 5 allows you to import these files and optimize them before saving them again. You can remove or reduce a number of aspects, including:

• Picture quality (by cutting down the number of colors in each image).
• Dither value (higher Dither values mean better quality pictures but were unnecessary for my stick men animations).
• Redundant pixels between frames (cutting out unnecessary data in the image).
• Comment blocks (not something many programs offer).

The optimization wizard (which guides you through the above steps) helped me optimize my test animation by 68 percent, cutting it down by hundreds of Kilobytes. Even if you haven't animated with this program, you can optimize with it, which is a really useful feature.

Importing
This feature certainly isn't  GIF Animator 5's strong point and you have to take some care to ensure that you aren't chopping up your media when it's imported. It seems to drop a couple of frames here and there if you've set the frame rate wrong for a video (although this is rare and you need to have gone really wrong for this to happen) and media can have a habit of being cropped.

Resizing is a little difficult too and this function could certainly be improved. You can free transform which allows you to either distort your image or resize it by typing in an exact pixel size (this scales it exactly) but you have to guess the right size and then use the transform tool from here.

It's easy to drag things around and you can import a wide range of files. I would try and stay away from WMV and files with DRM and codecs as it isn't too keen on those - but still offers great functuality. Does a better job of importing than Adobe Flash CS3 and you CAN add sound to your clips, contrary to some comments made by users.

Overall, Ulead developers have created a number of very nice touches to the features in GIF Animator 5.