[Gimp-user] GIF animation automation and revert diff

[Bgs <bgs bgs hu>]

 Hi,

I've been playing a bit with GIF animations and there are two things I'd 
like to do but haven't found any trivial solution for.

1) I have a background type of layer and several smaller ones. I want to 
make an animation where these additional layers appear and disappear. 
The hard way to animate this is to duplicate the background and merge in 
all variations I want and create an animation from that. This has three 
drawbacks: a) It's a rather long handiwork to do it b) by default it 
produces a full-frame animation that needs to be optimized c) the 
default differential optimization might not produce the best result in 
terms of size.

My question for the more experienced ones is: Is it possible to script 
creation of such images without creating a full fledged plugin? Example: 
I have background and layer1 through layer8 as small overlaying layers. 
I want to create a blinking/glowing effect by turning on and off 
layer1-8 in a random(like) way. Let's say I create a dozen of such layer 
on/offs and cycle the result as a GIF animation.

2) Once I created an optimized GIF animation (differential) is there an 
easy way to convert it back to a full-frame layer structure? (This has 
practical sense for example with a couple of frames taken from a video).

Thanks
Bgs