Exploring Sanyo Digicam Multi Shot ‘movie clips’

Using PaintShop Pro to animate Sanyo Multi Shot images

I unearthed my early Sanyo VPC-G210 photos and discovered a few ‘multi shot’ photos taken at the time (1997-98), so I decided to see what I could make of them today.  Each Sanyo multi shot image contains 16 sequential pictures, tiled 4x4 into a single 640 x 480 pixel JPEG.  So each ‘frame’ is a mere 160 x 120 pixels and movie clips last 1.6 or 3.2 seconds. You can't play the ‘animation’ on the camera screen. I'm not sure if Sanyo’s bundled MGI Photosuite SE software enables them to be viewed on a PC either (I'll try to find out).

[click for full size]

^ Sanyo 'Multi Shot' pictures - 16 frames in a 640 x 480 px image

I thought about making an animated .gif out of them. Remembering the source image is a JPEG, using Paintshop Pro I created a series of macros (see later) that selects each 160 x 120 frame from a row of four images and saves them out individually. So I could save all 16 images manually to disk as .gifs.  (Portrait mode images need rotating and re-ordering. The brilliant File Menu Tools by Lopesoft is great for re-ordering or renaming files, using its Advanced Renamer tool.)

Then by uploading them to my favourite animated .GIF maker (https://gifmaker.me/) an animated .gif could be made, setting the frame rate to the original Sanyo value of 100 milliseconds (or sometimes 200).

^ Animated .gifs made from the Sanyo Multi Shot pictures

The results are small digital animations taken in 1997 at a time when this was a great novelty. I’ve immortalised them above, and here's a never-before-seen breadboard LED experiment for Teach-In 98:

Below, for anyone interested, I’m offering my PSPscripts that slice four images from each row, ready for you to Save As a .gif and upload them to the GIF Maker.

Paintshop Pro Scripts to slice Sanyo Multi Shot images - ie 4 rows into 4 images. The fifth macro I've included, runs the other four - ie slicing and creating all 16 images. Then create a new folder on hard disk, and in PaintShop Pro hit F12 to Save....  each one as a .gif in the correct order. You can then make an animated .gif from them.

Sometimes I found the camera produced an artefact with errant pixels down one edge of each frame, as though the frames had overlapped with the next one. Strange, I guess it's a hardware fault.

See also http://alanwinstanley.squarespace.com/alan-winstanleys-journal/2024/4/18/sanyo-vpc-g210-digicam-the-start-of-something-big.html