what aren't i doing right on this conversion?

[snafubaby]

I downloaded a time-lapse video. I wanna make it into an animated gif. I use virtualdub, and load the compressed .avi into virtualdub. I use the export>animated gif function to save a portion of it to animated gif. Then, when i play it back, i end up with LOTS of artifacts in the gif. It looks horrrrrrible. Anyone got any ideas?

[Baldrick]

Try reduce the framerate under video->framerate to something like 1-5fps and maybe resize it to a lower frame size/resolution.

[snafubaby]

Hi. Thanks Baldrick, but it still looks horrible when resizing it. I ddn't try lowering the fps because i wanna keep the spped of it intact. It's a mystery why it looks so bad. I usually have good results when using virtualdub to make animated gifs.

[Baldrick]

I see. Maybe try ffmpeg (or a gui for it like video to video converter)...but it's usually even worse.

[jagabo]

Gif uses a 256 color palette. It's not going to look good unless you have few colors and an optimized palette. VirtualDub uses a generalized palette of 256 colors spread across the full 16 million color RGB cube. That means the steps from one shade to the next are very large.

full color original:


256 color GIF:

[sanlyn]

There are other ways of converting to GIF.

16million-color PNG graphic posted by jagabo above:

[Attachment 14707 - Click to enlarge]

GIF created from the above PNG using HVS ColorGIF 2.0 photoshop plugin. Not perfect -- after all, you're still working with 256 colors, not 16 million. The actual range used for dithering below is RGB 8-250.

[Attachment 14708 - Click to enlarge]

I recall seeing internet guides that showed how to make animated pseduo-GIFs that actually used jpg and png graphics that were simply renamed "GIF" by the animating software. Of course, now I can't find any of those posts . . .!