How do you make a mini-movie icon

[Bijou]

I have a Mac now so PSP is out of the question. I know PS is superior than PSP but damn, I find animation much more tedious.........is it just me or can you do things in PSP that you can't in PS? Like image transitions. It is so easy to make a mini-movie icon with PSP. I'm lost with PS and IR. In PSP you could select all and each frame of the animation would fall into place after the base was duplicated. I downloaded a splitter and then converted a wmv (crappy I know but it's what gets sent to me) to an avi and imported it into Animation Shop. But, with PS and IR there's the issue of .movs and it's frustrating.

I know some people use PS to make mini-movie icons, animated siggies but the tutes I've found weren't all that helpful to a newbie such as myself.

So, can anyone offer suggestions or links that are helpful and not too basic?

Also, I've heard interesting things about GIMP. Is is good? I know it's free but can it do animation like PSP and PS? What are its limitations?

Thanks.

[MetalSkin]

I have heard a lot of good stuff about gimp, but the biggest (in my mind) draw back is it's window system. To get an idea of what I mean, have a gander at Mac Screen Shot - Gimp.

As you can see, its a mess, which personaly I hate, but you may like it. It is free, so it costs you nothing to get your hands on it (cept any download related costs).

As for a comprison of features, well thats a tough one. Best to find a review, I googled for gimp review and gimp vs photoshop, tones of hits.

Gimp can be found at www.gimp.org.

As for transformations, with PS you tend to buy specialist plug ins (or get free ones) to do activities that you wish to do which are not 'core'. I'm not aware of a image transformation like your describing, but there maybe a standard feature in CS that I'm not aware.

btw CS is short hand for Photoshop CS. or CS2 for Photoshop CS2.

/MetalSkin.

[Bijou]

Thanks so much for the links. I hadn't thought of plug-ins, silly me!