Beneton Movie GIF 1.1.2

Beneton Movie GIF is a free application for creating simple animations. The user interface features a simple timeline panel, which can be used to navigate through the frames in your movie. You can use drag-and-drop to move frames inside the timeline. If you select a frame from the timeline, it is visible in the preview panel.

The program is also able to show you the entire animation even before saving. You can zoom in and out of your animation anytime. It's also possible to loop the animation preview.

Adding animation effects is very simple. On the right, you have 11 normal effects, which you can apply to any frame. You also have 9 animation effects which you can use, for example, to move, resize, or fade any of the frames in your timeline. If you did a mistake, you can easily undo it, because Beneton Movie GIF supports multiple level undo.

Each frame of your animation can be imported from file. Supported formats include JPG, BMP, WMF, PNG, and others. You can also import a set of files automatically if your files are named in a sequence like "file001.bmp", "file002.bmp", "file003.bmp", and so on. Exporting the animation is very simple. The default is to save your animation using the GIF format, but it's also possible to save it as AVI, and MNG, or as a sequence of static images.

Pluses: Beneton Movie GIF features a built in editor. It contains simple tools for editing the frames in your animation.

Drawbacks / flaws: Although I usually use toolbars, sometimes I felt that a simple menu would have been nice to have. Resizing the user interface of the program is impossible. There is no way to move its components, or to adjust their size. This makes it impossible to customize the looks of the program. Another drawback that I found is, that the processor occupancy rises a lot every time I start the program.

In conclusion: This is a good utility to edit or create animations. If you need a simple way of creating an animation, you might want to try this free program.

version reviewed: 1.1