I'm trying to combine about 45 png files to make a gif, or to make a video, or some type of movie or animated image.
Please provide ideas for how I can do this? Is there free software I can download? Is there Java code I can write to do this? etc.
Thanks
You can use ImageMagick. There's plenty of documentation on creating GIF animations.
It may be as simple as:
convert -delay 20 -loop 0 *.png myanimation.gif