# Animating that gif.



## Trip (Mar 16, 2006)

I've been using ImageReady to animate my gifs recently, but have come to find that it's creating files a bit larger than I want (by a few 100k). I was wondering what methods or programs other use to create simple animated gifs but still keep the size low? Share your thoughts!


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## Lt Major Burns (Mar 16, 2006)

gifs are quite primitive, and employ virtually no intelligent rendering (like if part of the image is the same across 40 frames, it'll still use 40 seperate instances of that image).

basically, there's no real way around it.  stick to as few colours as you can, and keep the canvas size small.


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## texanpenguin (Mar 16, 2006)

Actually, Lt Major Burns, unless I'm mistaken, Animated GIFs aren't just a sequence of images, from a compression point of view.

From my understanding, an Animated GIF is really one wide GIF image with all the frames side-by-side and the "viewport" of the GIF changes step by step to each. Since GIF compression works horizontally (collecting all like-coloured pixels in a row as one piece of data), an animated GIF should be slightly smaller (very slightly ) than the sum of its parts.



To answer the original question, if your GIFs are coming out at multiple hundreds of KB for apparently "simple" animations, your optimisation settings aren't very effective. I'd follow Lt Major Burns' suggestion to use a very limited palette, including turning off transparency if you can.

ImageReady is still your tool, though.


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## adambyte (Mar 16, 2006)

Umm.... Lt_Major_Burns, I THINK you may be wrong about the "part of the image is the same" thing.... I remember taking apart images using "GIFbuilder" (Which is the program I'd recommend, by the way, to make animated gifs), and I remember seeing that some frames only contained what changed from one frame to the next.... like a banner, where most of it was static, and then a small animation existed....

But, yeah... GIFbuilder is what you're looking for. It's a little long in the tooth now, and slightly clumsy, but does a great job, anyway.


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## Lt Major Burns (Mar 16, 2006)

in theory, i over-simplified my description, yes, but in practice, that's basically whats happening.  

take a 640 by 480 jpeg.  animate the bottom 10 rows of pixels over 20 frames.  i reckon the gif will be huge compared to the jpeg, if the same compression rates are used, even though only a small part of the image is actually being animated. but i'm too tired tired now to check sorry ...


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## Trip (Mar 16, 2006)

Thanks everyone for your input so far!


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## Natobasso (Mar 17, 2006)

Use Flash. I just created an ad for NBC that had to be between 30 and 36K and it used photos on half of the frames! Set flash for 32 colors and save your gifs out from ImageReady, and create any text in flash. That saves a bunch on memory.

The thing too with animated gifs is that the more repetition you have of graphic data the better: Memory is saved because those pixels only have to be used once through several (or all!) of your frames.

Go here to see the Jillian Michaels ad I helped create:
http://www.nbc.com/The_Biggest_Loser/


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## Natobasso (Mar 17, 2006)

Speaking of long in the tooth: I still use GifBuilder in Classic mode&#8230;


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## Natobasso (Mar 17, 2006)

And I used Flash 4&#8230;LITT.


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## RacerX (Mar 17, 2006)

Trip said:
			
		

> I've been using ImageReady to animate my gifs recently, but have come to find that it's creating files a bit larger than I want (by a few 100k). I was wondering what methods or programs other use to create simple animated gifs but still keep the size low? Share your thoughts!


If you are using ImageReady CS or later then you can output your animation as a Flash (swf) file. It'll be much better quality than a GIF and much smaller too. Adobe added this ability to ImageReady after they stopped making LiveMotion.


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## adambyte (Mar 17, 2006)

Natobasso said:
			
		

> Speaking of long in the tooth: I still use GifBuilder in Classic mode



Actually, there IS an OS X version, now... no need for classic. Go look for it on MacUpdate.


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## Natobasso (Mar 17, 2006)

I didn't say there wasn't an OS X version; just that I'm still stuck on the Classic version.


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