GIF Movie Gear has everything you could possibly need to create and optimise GIF animations to a professional standard. With an uncluttered and streamlined interface, which is designed to make the whole process as easy as possible, this is one animation package that no serious web artist should be without.

There is huge support for different file types, including Photoshop PSD, JPEG, AVI, BMP and many more - simply open them directly in the program ready to be converted into GIF format. You can even export the finished Gif in a variety of formats, including AVI, ICO (Windows Icons) and ANI.

Everything you could possibly wish to do with your animated GIFs is here: resize images, 'blend' two animations, select multiple frames, export frames as individual GIFs, scale one frame at a time and full frame delay options, to name just a few. I doubt whether you'll find anything you need which is not included in this package, and if by some fluke you do, it's sure to be in the next update.

Each frame is displayed on-screen in a filmstrip style, with the layout being fully customisable to something you're happy with. Drag and drop functionality has been fully incorporated which, again, helps to make this one of the easiest GIF animation packages on the market.

A great deal of attention has been paid to the optimisation methods available to you, which include palette reduction and inter-frame optimisation. These allow you to get your GIF files down to a fraction of their original size, with as little quality loss as possible; when you're working on the web this is the most important aspect of all.

There is even a nifty little tool that will generate the HTML code required to display the animated GIF in a web page. Just copy the code into your HTML page and there you have it - the whole process of making and displaying animated Gifs dealt with one program.