Topic: What do you use to produce radar animations

[Steven]

Hello Michael

Yes I read you answer, and hey I was just asking that's all. Now with radar loops, I can't believe you actually make each loop frame by frame, it must take you hours and hours on end to make one, I always thought you have special membership to a radar website or something and there's a program or utility that makes radar loops.

I checked out this program, my graphics tool makes GIF animations as well but I don't know how to use it, it will be handy for me to make radar loops so that I can put put them on my website blog. Anyway keep those pics on coming.  As for storm chasing, I mainly like night time lightning shows, as long as it's not too close, it's my hobby.

Sorry for posting off topic posts but I don't know where else to put it.

[Steven]

Well, I used a Gif animator which wasn't too hard, however i keep having a black border around my images, why? and is there a way to fix that.

[Jimmy Deguara]

Michael suggested:

I use Gif Animator:
http://www.ulead.com/ga/runme.htm
but there are some others you could search for at download.com or other sites.

Michael Bath

[Steven]

AdGIF Advanced animator I used Which I found at download.com, but I tried several other ones and they did the same thing. I wonder why it happens. Besides I only want a free one for now.

[Steven]

Imade this image up, can you see the black border, it mainly happens with transparent GIF images and it is not supposed to happen.
Radar loop taken between 4:30 pm and 8:30 PM Today

[Steven]

Well I downloaded that program that Michael uses and I must say it does a better job in making radar loops than the other software I've used. The reason for the black border was because I had no option to make the gif image fully transparent with this software I can.


Heres a loop I whipped up

[Michael Bath]

Steven - the loops I make take about 2 mins to produce using Gif animator - the only time consuming part is picking the frames you want to display, and choosing a loop speed.    I find it is useful to put an extra delay on the last frame before it flicks back to the start again.

MB

[Steven]

Yes I noticed that, there is some delay in the last frame before it starts off again, I used 36 frames in this radar loop and used .25 second delay although I used .5 and .75 delay although these speed delays are too slow.

Although I think $50 for a program like is way to expensive.

[Michael Bath]

Yeah - .25 is good most of the time. I think Jimmy prefers the loops a little slower like .4 - which is what I used to do all of them in the past.  I put 2 seconds for the final frame before it loops back to the start.

MB

[Michael Bath]

I spent a few hours yesterday developing a new tool for radar animations on Australian Severe Weather. You can see the results in the first use of this new program here:

http://australiasevereweather.com/storm_news/2007/radar/20070102/warrego512.htm

The Visual Basic program takes radar images from the Strike One archive and merges them with the BoM Radar animator javascript and outputs to a webpage in the standard Storm News format.

It's now quicker for me to produce radar animations, and the animations allow full analysis of the radar by everyone as you have the full controls over how the loops display.

This was an idea I first played around with in February 2001 but it was too tedious and time consuming getting radar archives back then. 6 years later and another recent comment from Jimmy about radar loops being too fast , and ta da - done !