Animated gifs

Reducing files size with animation shop

[claimsweb]

Hello all

I have recently upgraded my skyscraper banner and added simple animation to make a sentence or two change and a button flash once or twice. Nothing extravagant.

Ive done the changes in paintshop / Animation shop which is really easy to use and the end result looks ok.

The big problem is file size. Ive got 14k to play with and cannot really get below 19k without severe corruption in the quality. Ive tried the wizards in psp / animation shop and fireworks - to no avail. To be honest the animation shop wizard is very basic and simply doesnt help with this kind of problem.

The dimensions for the sky banner are 120x600 - dpi on all frames 72 and no more than 8 frames in the sequence. Ive now exhausted my rather pathetic graphics resources and seek help from those in the know.

I wouldnt have got the sky banner of the ground in the first place without help from this forum (same problem re: size would you believe!) so again - any help greatly appreciated.

Thanks
C

[Sinner_G]

Never used animation shop (using ImageReady), but I guess the possibilities are the same with every program. I suppose you have already taken away as many frames as you could?

The other thing you might try is reducing the amount of colours. This normally takes a lot of size.

[tedster]

There is one feature that some very basic animation programs don't offer - the ability to eliminate redundant pixels (pixels that don't change from frame to frame). And this step can significantly reduce the total file size - like by 80% or more in some cases.

Often there's a file size optimization wizard of some kind that needs to be run to do this elimination as a final step after you're sure the animation is set the way you want.

Making sure that all your frames use the same palette (a global palette instead of a local palette for each frame) is another step to watch for.