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Animated .gif compressor?

Beerina

Sarcastic Conqueror of Notions
Beerina
Joined
Mar 3, 2004
Messages
34,334
Anyone aware of a freeware or shareware animated .gif compressor?

I have an animated .gif that's 100x100 for this forum, but it's way too big. Even converting it to grayscale is way too big.

I can lop out frames until it fits in the small 48k limit here, but if there's something that will lossy compress the image quality until it fits, then I could find a better balance instead of just having like 5 frames.
 
GIF doesn't support lossy compression, so you're out of luck there. All you can try to do is: reduce the number of colours or the number of frames.
 
Is it an avatar? If so a few of the av makers here like Akhenaten would probably have a look at it for you?
 
There are some compressors that make use of the fact that each 'frame' of the gif doesn't have to redraw the whole image - so if there are large areas of background that don't change too often, the gif can be much smaller.

Failing that you just have to reduce the number of frames (possibly a slower frame rate) and the number of colours.
 
Gawdzilla said:
Kludge suggestion. Take each frame, convert it to jpg (chose your compression %) then back to gif.

If you just want to resize it, I use Easy Gif Animator.
Click to expand...
I don't think the jpg approach will help.

The LZW compression used in gifs is lossless - it compresses very well when working with blocks of the same color, sharp edges - the sort of things that computer generated graphics often contain.

By running the frames through a jpg compression, it will introduce all the usual jpg artifacts - slightly different colors for adjacent pixels and so on - when those frames are made into a gif, it will likely be bigger than before.
 
Well, that'll have to do, thanks for the help!


I appreciate the help, especially by females, unknowingly enlisted for the purpose of creating this subtly offensive .gif.


Used the online thing to reduce the number of colors over and over until it got to about 70k. Then saved it locally and used a different editor to remove most frames from the beginning, which is a distance shot and is rather fast FPS anyway. Then added the two label frames, which cost the removal of several more frames as a trade-off. Repeated the entire process starting with color reduction including the two label frames. Then did Normalize using the online thing, which lightened it up quite a bit.


It's still 8 bits per pixel. Is there a way to go to, say, 6 bits per pixel? 4 would be too small, as 16 colors, even optimized, was way too grainy on the online color reduction. Well, I suppose it wouldn't matter as the colors stored would be indexes into the color table, which is presumably the 8 bits, not the actual bits stored per pixel, n/m.
 
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It occurs to me an optimized color reducer that focused on the importance of flesh tones, weighting them to take up more slots of the reduced color lookup table, could produce better results for the face, at the expense of the background.
 
Can you not host your avatar externally?
That way, you don't have to stick to a 48k limit.
 
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