animated gif

[snafubaby]

I have been using SUPER to make animated gifs. Today, i saw a BEAUTIFUL animated gif that was not grainy, like the ones i've been getting when using SUPER. Does anyone out there know of an animated gif maker that will produce a clear, non-grainy animated gif?

thanks

[JohnnyMalaria]

Sounds like the ones you are using are dithered. Is there an option in SUPER to adjust dithering?

[Midzuki]

Microsoft GIF Animator

[thecoalman]

Ulead Gif Animator, probably the best gif animation tool bar none. For that matter the gif capabilities in Cool 3-d and their image editing apps is superb too. They must of had a gif guru on the development team. Here's sample of full Frame DV-AVI file converted. Note I didn't deintelace so you'll see some interlacing lines in the lights. It's 300 frames 10secs, highest quilty for .gif so its over 23mb, make sure to download whole thing as it will probably be jerky until the second loop.

www.nepadigital.com/temp/biggif.gif

[Midzuki]

It's 300 frames 10secs, highest quilty for .gif so its over 23mb,

[thecoalman]

Do the math, that's 70KB per frame 720x480 frame,... nothing out of the ordinary really. .gif is not a very good format for detailed images to begin with, they are generally much larger than a .jpg at a lower quality. Add in the dithering and the file size balloons. The DV-AVI is 30MB+

It could be cut down quite a bit by reducing the color pallette and not using dithering but you're alos going to reduce how good it looks. I'd imagine if you let most people view that clip they wold never guess it was .gif. It looks that good.

[snafubaby]

thanks all for the suggestions. i guess i will just buy Ulead Gif Animator. The animated gif Coalman uploaded looks incredible!! THAT's what i'm looking for. I doubt the freeware stuff can produce that much clarity.

[JohnnyMalaria]

FWIW, I thought I'd see what Animation Shop could do (companion product for Paint Shop Pro) with an file exported from Vegas. I was able to achieve comparable results.

[DarrellS]

I took that gif into Virtualdub 1.7.X_test 10 and deinterlaced and exported as a gif and the file was 22MB. Took that gif into Gif Movie Gear and saved as a 17MB gif. Then I took the original gif and used ATI AVIVO Encoder to save as 5.24MB H264 file and a 2.59MB WMV9 file.

If I was going to create a gif like that, I would cut it down to about 35 frames and alter the speed to play correctly. 22MB is way too big for a gif file. When making a gif, the object is to use very few frames and ping pong and loop the file so it looks like a long continuous clip when reality, it's only a 3 second, 100KB file.

[thecoalman]

You may want to look at Photoimpact as the Gif animator is included with it and it's not going to cost you much more. The Gif animator software is actually quite old, I think at least 5 or 6 years old. I'd also check around to see if you can find version 8 or better on closeout somewhere. If you do I wouldn't pay more than $30 for it.

[thecoalman]

DarrellS, well if I was going to use that on website I'd just use WMV or flash to begin with... It's 256 colors at 100% dithering so as I said it can be reduced, actually quite a bit and that's even if you leave all the frames. It's 10 second clip so 35 frames isn't going to do it justice but 100 woould. I do the same thing with WMV... 10fps, 70kbps, 320x180 , 7min and 22 secs, just under 4MB, negligible macroblocking :

http://www.40lbhead.com/headfiles/albums/video/rockfest2005_empire_wandt_du.wmv

Almost stream on 56k . :P

[p_l]

Ulead Gif Animator, probably the best gif animation tool bar none. For that matter the gif capabilities in Cool 3-d and their image editing apps is superb too. They must of had a gif guru on the development team. Here's sample of full Frame DV-AVI file converted. Note I didn't deintelace so you'll see some interlacing lines in the lights. It's 300 frames 10secs, highest quilty for .gif so its over 23mb, make sure to download whole thing as it will probably be jerky until the second loop.

www.nepadigital.com/temp/biggif.gif

I second what thecoalman says. Take a look at this.

[Midzuki]

Do the math, that's 70KB per frame 720x480 frame,... nothing out of the ordinary really.

IMHO, 720x480 is too much for an animated gif.
Regarding the "freeware", M$ Gif Animator was/is just an
assembling application; ages ago, when I had a true website,
I created the gif frames with PSPro v. 4.x and used
Gif Animator only for "authoring" the animations.

If I was going to create a gif like that, I would cut it down to about 35 frames and alter the speed to play correctly. 22MB is way too big for a gif file. When making a gif, the object is to use very few frames and ping pong and loop the file so it looks like a long continuous clip when reality, it's only a 3 second, 100KB file.

I second that.

[racer-x]

Saying that you can't create good animated gif's with freeware is just bullcrap.............

I did this in Paint.Net and animated it with Unfreeze. I could do a much better job, but I wanted to keep the file size low:




creating an animated gif from video frames is very easy........now 3D images are a little harder.

[thecoalman]

IMHO, 720x480 is too much for an animated gif.

Ummmm, the point of that .gif wasn't to display my gif optimization prowess, I wouldn't use a file even 100kb on web page under any circumstances unless it was flash or video and it was needed. Certainly not for main parts of page. The OP wanted high quality gif converted from video (at least that's what I'm assuming since he's using super). That's what I provided.

If you want to debate optimization I'll post some gif's that I'll guarantee will be very hard for anyone to match.