Note: The software referenced in this article is no longer available.
Great freeware image animation apps are hard to come by. Most of the free stuff is either entirely confusing to use or so completely lacking in features as to make it useless. Beneton Movie GIF fits right in the sweet spot of image animating apps, providing both a simple interface for creating animations with enough features to create something you won’t be ashamed of when you finish. While the title implies being a GIF only app, Beneton Movie GIF supports JPG, GIF and BMP files for input. Output is either animated GIF files or AVI video you can then use in other apps. Import frames, drag them to the location you want, then set various properties for each of the frames. A handful of image effects allow you to tweak things like motion blurring, image rotation, and color blending, in addition to also being able to animate transitions between frames. Some basic image editing is also built-in, making tweaking your images a breeze without needing to launch an external editor too. [Windows 2k/XP/Vista $0.00]
