GIF animation: how to set a delay for a particular frame?

[minglw]

I have an animation file named test.gif.

I know that I can set the delay for all frames to 30/100 second using:
convert test.gif -set delay 30 output.gif

The question I have is: how do you set a delay for a particular frame ?

I want to delay 1 second after the first frame displayed and delay 3 seconds after the last frame displayed
and for the rest of the frames to delay 30/100 of a second, how do you do it?

Thanks!

[fmw42]

An example where the first and last images are set to 100 and the rest to 10 is given in my examples page for my pagepeel script at http://www.fmwconcepts.com/imagemagick/ ... /index.php

[minglw]

Thanks Fred for the reply!

pagepeel seems to be adding the delay as it reads-in the images to build the animated GIF.

I was looking for a method that could apply in a generic way to any animated GIF file, where
I want to change the delay after the first frame and delay after the last frame.
(without even knowing the total number of frames in the GIF file, it could have 4 frames or 400 frames.)

Since we already have options to set a delay ( -delay and -set delay ), I was thinking perhaps there's an easier way to change the delays.

Do I have to extract all the frames from the animated GIF file and then add them back frame-by-frame and set the delay that way?

[fmw42]

If you already have an animation and just want to change to delay of one frame, then lets say you want to change the second frame i.e. frame [1], then you can do that with -set delay. You have to clone the given frame and then swap the new one for the old one and then delete the old one.


convert anim.gif \( -clone 1 -set delay 50 \) -swap 1,-1 +delete anim.gif

This clones frame [1], changes the delay, then swaps frame [1] with the last frame [-] and then deletes the original frame which is now the last one (using +delete).

see
http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/basics/#parenthesis

There may be other ways, but I am not an animation expert. You can read about animations at
http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/anim_basics/
http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/anim_opt/
http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/anim_mods/

[anthony]

This is also covered byFrame-by-Frame Modifications
http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/anim_mods/#frame_mod

However an alturnative to set the delay of all the frames, with different values for the first and last, is given in
Color Morphing Animations
http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/anim_mods/#morph

[minglw]

After some experiments, this seems to work. BTW, I am using Win 7.

convert test.gif ( -clone 0 -set delay 100 ) -swap 0 +delete \
( +clone -set delay 300 ) +swap +delete test2.gif

Thank you Fred and Anthony for the help!