Originally posted by Stryke 9:
I was about to say the same...
Oh, and the Photoshop animated-GIF totally-wrong person, I think it's time to be condescending: To animate a GIF, you compile multiple GIF files. Hence, if you cange ALL the separate frames and recompile (a good 10 minutes work for 30 frames at most), the whole thing is smaller. Speak only of what you have experiernc in, and I won't haul out the Dead Frozen Goat of Justice. Do I need to explain that statement too?
I love being mean.
Dude...*sigh* I'm not going to turn this into a flame war or anything, so don't bother trying to get my goat.
Now, everything I say/said about Photoshop is concerning version 6.0, with ImageReady 3.0 alongside it.
You are correct in a manner of speaking about what animated GIF's are made of, but there is more: they can also be onion-skinned. That means that the next frame in sequence will not be a complete picture, but only show what changed between the frames. This can shrink the filesize by a huge amount in certain files.
Note: I think that onion-skinning is the right term for this - it's also the whole keyframe thing in digital video files.
Now, about ImageReady's handling of animated GIF's. When you open an animated GIF in ImageReady, it shows all the frames as different layers, as well as some sort of list down bottom. Fine, whatever. I admit freely that the time I've spent in ImageReady is about 20 minutes total, but I couldn't figure out how to optimize the animation
as a whole. It could have been made much easier. And yes, there is a nice menu item called "Optimize Animation" in the menu of that animation preview window/toolbar, but it didn't do much for me.
PSP7's Animation Shop, on the other hand, makes the whole process very simple. It can process a whole animation just like PSP itself can process a single image. Optimization, filters, everything. And, I must admit again - I've only spent 20 minutes or so in Animation Shop, too. All it needed was a click on File --> Animation Wizard.
So to sum up:
- There definetly is power in changing an animation's frames seperately, but for what was being talked about here a general change to the animation as a whole is best.
- Don't accuse someone of talking about something that person has no experience in. When you do that not only do you come across as some sort of elite know-it-all, but by your accusations you make yourself guilty of the very thing that you accused me of.
Now, there is absolutely nothing to loose by replacing that 300Kb animation with an optimized version. So do it, please.
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