GIF Animations

optimizing animations

[satlas]

I am trying to have animated advertisements on my home page (fade in...pause...fade out, next banner..) to make it more dynamic, but the animation program I am using--BannerShop GIF Animator 5--exports them at sizes ~100-200K. "Optimizing" them within the program means reducing the # of colors, and that completely ruins the image. I've tried a couple other programs and this is the best. The only program I havn't used is Ulead Gif Animator because it crashes on load for some reason (tried fixing).

I'd really appreciate any input on how to establish this effect without the large file size. Manual modifications, different programs, different formats, anything that works!

Thanks!

[The_Hat]

Doing this kind of thing with a animated gif and making it load quick is a really difficult thing to do.. If you don't know how a gif works it is really a slide show of images so when your doing a fade you either have to chose between reducing the number of colors down and having a grainy looking image or making the number of frames lower which would result in a choppy animation.. neither solution is that great.. a better solution for something like this would be to do it in flash.. flash does the animation of fading in a process way instead of a series of different images.. short of buying a program you might also try a google search for "flash image fader" you might find something pretty good for free that would do the job..

[rocknbil]

"Optimizing" them within the program means reducing the # of colors

This is what optimizing is. The problem you ae probably experiencing is that you have no control over the degree of optimization. You might possibly look around in any options settings that might give you control, or look closely at any in-between dialogues that specify color depth/colors in palette.

IMO animation is a bad idea from the outset, for all the reasons you will find on Google and this site. But if you think this is the way to go, your best option is to use Flash. You will have adequate control over your animation image quality and additionally it will stream, loading content as it's required. Granted, this is a big leap from animated .gifs and presents it's own set of difficulties, but if I had to do animated banners I'd do it with Flash.

[tbear]

Hi satlas, welcome to the forum :)

I seem to recall that you can save a background for the animation, if appropriate, and then reduce the frame images by removing the background. Might save a bit there.
I haven't tried this for a few years so I'm afraid I can't remember how it is done or if it will save much, but a good editor should have a destruction, I mean instruction manual.
I used JASC Animation Shop I think.
Good luck...

[Candid India]

I haven't understood why you are facing problem in your graphic animator but still there are some other graphic animators and image editors available that can help so you can try any of those. With this your problem will be surely resolved.