I know what curiosity did to the cat, But can I ask a question?

Is there a limit to the number of colours that a Pencil2D pallette can contain?

Practically speaking no. I would guess you would probably run into problems with 100M+ palette items. But with ~16M you’d already have one of every color Pencil2D can represent.

File formats allowed to be saved using Pencil2D Discord.

Why doesn’t the Pencil2D Team allow users to upload .MP4 files. Is is a matter of file size, or the fact that most players will pay the sounds attached.

I wanted to examine the work of a Member of Pencil2D, as artistic inspiration.

Because it was stored as a .GIF file, I could not pause it to examine individual frames or how these frames worked together to produce the overall effect. When the animation was stopped, it always stops showing the first frame, frame 0.

This is because when the .GIF format was devised, in the early days of the Internet, they were used almost exclusively as animated logos.

This is because you can grab attention, by adding movement to an image, and even then ‘eyeballs’ was the name of the game.

After some experimentation I found that you can import the images, held within a .GIF file, into a bitmapped layer.

FileName

ScPosition

You’ll have to experiment, to set the Camera size correct.

At this point, however you are not home & dry, because some video players allow the user to pause at any point, they insist on looping the viewing experience.

Again by experiments, I found that the player, in Firefox allows non looping mode to be selected. Thus I was able to fully examine the video of interest.

This has been an interesting challenge and a dive onto Internet history.

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Incidentally the project used as a demonstration in the last posting. I was awarded a distinction grade.

https://discuss.pencil2d.org/t/is-there-a-way-of-applying-a-camera-zoom-differently-to-groups-of-layers/8356/9

Thing’s are obvious, when they’re pointed out to you! The menu option might be worded in the way, that it is because the option allows other animation file formats to be loaded into Pencil2D using it?

Why doesn’t the Pencil2D Team allow users to upload .MP4 files. Is is a matter of file size, or the fact that most players will pay the sounds attached.

I’m assuming you’re asking about posting MP4s here as you can already post MP4s on the Discord server (and that’s all decided by Discord, not us). I will bring up the with the main website administrator, but can’t promise anything.

As you mentioned, there is a file size concern. Bandwidth is also a concern with users trying to play large videos. Though the max upload file size can be limited, and similar arguments could be made for GIFs and pclx files, which we already allow. The big thing that separates MP4s though is that streaming videos is actually quite complicated to do well. Uploading your video to YouTube or another video sharing site and linking to it or embedding it here would generally be preferable. That way the burden of serving the video is on YouTube’s servers and not ours, and visitors can take advantage of the many features such websites have that we would not be able to offer. For example, you seem like you would be interested in navigating frame-by-frame through a video, which is something anyone can do on YouTube with the comma and period keys, but which likely is not a feature of your web browser’s built-in video player.

That option used to be called “Animated GIF” import, however we changed it because it now supports importing animated WEBP files as well. The distinction we make between animated image formats and videos is that only the latter supports audio tracks. There are also technical differences behind-the-scenes on how animated images are imported vs videos.

You can usually find out what formats can be opened/imported by trying it out. The file selector dialog that comes up should list somewhere which file extensions are supported. I don’t know exactly where this is on Windows, but on Linux it usually looks something like this:

File browser dialog screenshot

Thank you scribblemaniac for your answers, you’ve given me much to think about!

Now I know about webp formats, both single image and animated versions, I can now search for and find extensive information.

This includes how to generate, convert and use these images.

I have used Pencil2D extensively, but I didn’t realise that you could load and save files in .WEBP format.

The above was, I think, because I was focused on using .PNG and not the .JPG format.

I had done work using .HEIF and other associated formats, but not the .WEBP which is implemented in Pencil2D.

I know what curiosity did to the cat, But my understanding from my research is that a .WEBP file is a single image and a .WEBM file is a video file, which can contain animation.

The file below is a .WEBP format file.

I can load this file using Import Image option on the topline menu.

The Import Animated Image seems to only allow .GIF and .WEBP formats.

Am I misunderstanding something?

The file below is the .GIF file.

Mr_Giuliani-3

The WEBP is an image format that supports animation similar to GIFs. It’s superior to GIFs in every way except for adoption. It is still not widely used. Pencil2D supports exporting to WEBP, but only as a static image, not with animation. Importing supports both static and animated WEBP images.

Here’s an example of an animated WEBP image (source): sample

So, what we are left with is a format which only plays on limited number of browsers and video players and although you can upload it to the Pencil2D Discord group doesn’t play.

The Webp format is only useful on a storage system, which I control, if I understand the limitations! For example my PC! Or I stick to using it only for single images.

The file shown above is an animation, but so far I haven’t found a suitable player?

To produce this file, I exported it from Pencil2d as a .MP4 format file. And then convert it using Handbrake! You should reuce the file size by between 30 and 50 percent.

Examine the previous posting, to see what you should be seeing!

If you export the animation as a .WEBM format it plays on Player player.

My conclusion is that the best option is to use .MP4 files because these are generally smaller, in my experience than the same animation as a .GIF file.

They work with the vast majority of browsers and video players and can uploaded to the Discord server.

This is an unfortunate situation, what we have us 2 systems which offer smaller file size, but are totally incompatible with each other. An require the use of different browsers to access Discord and up or down load files.

The .WEBP format for single images and sequence of images does work.

The website that describes the different formats, I presume wraps the images in an .XML file which contains HTML code. Ther is some possibility of using this, but this may require significant work to acheive.

This has been an interesting exercise. Discord can handle .WEBM file format, but currently the only way to generate these, is to export from Pencil2d and then convert, say using Handbrake.

Still for now, I required to complete my animation project and hand it in to my tutor.

Pencil2D can export WEBM files using the Export > Movie option. You just have to select the WEBM format rather than MP4 when choosing where to save the file to.

Thank you Scribblemaniac, there too much grass, so I cannot see the trees!

But I don’t know how to import the .WEBM files into the Pencil2D Discord? Because this would save disk space within the Pencil2D Discord allocation.

The more I look at what both .WEBP and WEBM can do, and what software they can be played on, this situation reminds me of the VHS mess of the late 1980’s.

There were 2 companies that devised solutions, which technically were wiz, but nobody adopted their technology. We continued with VHS technology.

Currently I think the best solution is .MP4 files because they are playable on the vast majority of players and browsers!