How to add same piece of text to all layers in an animated gif

...using either Animation Shop 3 or ImageReady 2.0?

[Robert Charlton]

I've inherited a logo that's an animated gif... 5 layers... and I need to add "TM" to all the frames in the same place.

I have Animation Shop 3 (with PaintShopPro 7), and ImageReady 2.0 (with PhotoShop 5.5). I'm not super proficient in either, but I can sort of fake it. I've only worked with animated gifs once every 500 years, though, and the documentation doesn't really tell you how to clone a piece of text in the same spot on all frames.

Can anyone who really knows talk me through it quickly. It would save me hours, if not days. I'm more inclined to go with Animation Shop, if anyone knows that, because it seems simpler for what I have to do, but I could be wrong. Thanks....

[Edouard_H]

You can open an animated .gif in Photoshop and each frame will be displayed as a layer. What I would do then is save it as a .psd for editing and export it as an animated .gif when finished.

You may end up working with each layer as a separate file to add a text layer with the TM then save it as a .psd without layers intact and patch the whole thing back together before exporting.

added: You will probably have to tweak the frame rate when exporting!

[Robert Charlton]

I think ImageReady is a little better for this than Photoshop. There's probably a way to create the "TM" text in a separate layer which I'd then copy to each frame... and then save the whole thing as an animated gif.

>>{i]You will probably have to tweak the frame rate when exporting![/i]<<

This is the kind of complication I'm trying to avoid. I think the site owner thinks this is a 5-minute job. ;)

With Animation Shop, it's really easy to drop the text into place on the first frame... but I don't see any way of matching position or copying the text into the same spot on all the frames. There's got to be an easy trick to do this. Animation Shop has registration marks, but I haven't quite figured out how to coordinate them with the text paste.

[Edouard_H]

Not familiar with Animation Shop, but it sounds like a better bet. Someone may come along with a better solution in PhotoShop too. I used to use M$ Gif Animator, which was a real pain. Probably the easiest program to do this with is Flash.

[Robert Charlton]

To answer my own question, it was super easy in ImageReady... When you create a text layer in one frame, it duplicates automatically in all the other frames, and you then click on the eye-icon for that layer (in each frame) to make it visible.

I still haven't figured out how to do it in Animation Shop... there must be a way.