GIF animations from movie clips HELP!

[amscray]

Hey first off I want to say I know there is a tut for this but i'm trying to do it a different way.

Ok so heres what i'm doing. I have an mpg file that I am opening in imageready. Image ready converts the file to frames so I can save it as a gif. The problem is that when I save the gif file it plays at about half speed in most programs, including IE. The only program i've found that actually plays it full speed is firefox. I think this may have something to do with the frams per second imageready uses and the fps of my mpg file. Is there a way to change the fps in imageready? If not, what can I do to make it work in all programs? By the way I had this same problem when i used the tutorial's way of doing things. The speed at which imageready plays the frames and the speed at which quicktime plays them is different so the gif comes out slower than it should. If it helps I am using PS 6 which I think comes with ImageReady 3.0.

[Tamlin]

I'm very far from being an expert in ImageReady, but as far as I know the only way to change the "fps" of a GIF animation is to change the frame delay time for each frame. For example, if each frame has a frame delay time of 0.5 seconds, changing that to 0.25 seconds on every frame would double the speed of the animation.

(I'm not even going to comment on the fact that your animation runs correctly in Firefox but not in IE. )

[amscray]

I set the frame delay on each frame to 0 sec and it still runs half speed lol

[notjustgraphics]

Render times for GIF Animations can be affected by many things including your video card...

I don't think you'll ever achieve fluid video motion from an animated gif... especially if the gif is larger than a couple hundred pixels square...

You might try reducing the number of frames.... Image ready will convert MPG's frame by frame.... if the MPG is running at a standard 24fps or faster, you can probably trim it down to about 8 fps with satisfactory results in your gif...

its not a perfect science... so you might have to play with it a little.

AgentXI might have more precise tips for you!

Mike.

[Tamlin]

Here's the thing: I have a suspicion it might be something to do with the conversion from MPEG to GIF. Earlier today I did a bit of experimenting. I opened a small section of a MPEG in ImageReady - about 30 frames in all. The default frame delay time was 0.03 seconds. I optimized and saved as a GIF. Ran it in Firefox - no problem. Ran it in IE7 - GIF ran at approximately half speed.

Back in ImageReady, I changed the frame delay time for all 30 frames to 0.01 seconds. Optimized and saved again. Ran it in Firefox - it ran much faster. Ran it in IE7 - it ran slightly faster, but still well below the desired speed.
(Aside: changing the frame delay time to 0 seems to have no effect for some strange reason)

Back in ImageReady again, I tried fiddling about with all the optimization settings like number of colours and colour palette and suchlike. I succeeded in drastically reducing the filesize (and the image quality!) but no matter what I tried, I couldn't get the damn thing to play at the right speed in IE.

As a control, I opened a similar-sized GIF I had previously created from scratch in ImageReady. This ran at exactly the same speed in both Firefox and IE. Changing the frame delay time changed the speed equally in both browsers.

So there you have it. I tried searching Google Groups to see if anyone else has encountered the same problem, but couldn't find anything. If it is a bug in ImageReady, it's not a well documented one.

[amscray]

Well at least I know its not just my computer. I asked some of my friends to test it out on their computers too and they have the same problem. Fast in firefox, slow in IE (It also plays slow in the windows picture viewer thing if that matters at all). Since it doesn't seem to have an easy fix, is there another program you guys recommend for this kind of thing?

[Tamlin]

There's a link in this post: http://forums.biorust.com/biorust-sp...html#post41529 (Avatars?)
that might be what you're looking for. I haven't tried it myself.

[Tony_photoplus]

Well never having done any of this I have to get the tutorial and have a go myself

What do you think of my new signature?

[agentxi]

Browser Issues
No software is perfect, and Web browsers are no exception to this rule. Over the past few years as the Web has developed, popular Web browsers have been inadvertently released with some, um, limitations, in the way they handle GIF animations. The result is that a Web designer, working with pages that will be viewed using a variety of browsers, needs to be aware of things that might not work properly on some viewing setups.
Below is a list of some of the bigger issues. "Netscape Navigator" is referred to as "NS" and "Microsoft Internet Explorer" is referred to as "IE".
NS3, NS4, and NS4.5 do not properly handle the "Restore to Previous" removal method. It is a good idea to refrain from using this setting. All animations can be successfully defined using either "Leave As Is" or "Restore to Background".
Both NS and IE browsers sometimes have difficulty dealing with interlacing in any frame of the animation. Side-effects often manifest as intermittent black horizontal lines on some frames.
Both NS and IE browsers do not do an especially good job of scaling GIF animations on the fly. This happens when the height and width components of the <IMG> tag do not match the height and width of the actual animation. The results are especially bad with a heavily optimized animation.
Both NS and IE browsers are not entirely accurate with their timing, especially with very short delays between frames. GIF Movie Gear's playback will often be faster than that of a browser if the delays are shorter than 15/100th of a second. Time for download slows playback even more.
IE4 may experience drastic slowdown in the playback of long animations containing lots of transparency. Only some animations are affected, but the exact cause is still unknown.

this is an excerpt i found on another site, the link is here

basically they're saying that ie and ns can't handle alot of things when it comes to gif animations.

amscray, thanks for posting this, I've used gif's before and I was totally unaware of this issue. I will have to be more cautious when I create animated GIF's in the future.

[Tamlin]

Both NS and IE browsers are not entirely accurate with their timing, especially with very short delays between frames.

That would certainly explain this problem - that was a good find, agentxi. Oddly enough, I have seen animated avatars on other sites that have obviously been created from movie clips and they seem to work fine. I wonder how they were made?

[Bobbles]

Just wondering how these movie anis run on everyones browsers?





Top one is 80.3kb and second one is 1020.8kb and both were created in the same way, from QT movies.

(Trim wanted clip, open in Image Ready, make frames from layers, optimise gif, adjust delay, or not, as required, crop/resize if required and save optimised.)

[Tamlin]

Top one runs the same in FF and IE. Bottom one runs OK in FF but about half-speed in IE.

[notjustgraphics]

Why is EVERYTHING a challenge in Internet Explorer!

God save the planet from Microsoft!

lol... I concur with Tamlins assessment... FF and IE6.

Mike.

[agentxi]

The Truth

So that's the theory. After a number of people had mentioned problems with their animations being slower than they had build them, I decided to investigate and put together a test page containing the GIF progress bars described above. I then loaded this test page into a number of browser/OS combinations to see what happened. What I found was a remarkable example of piss poor programming.


* Mozilla's rendering engine seems to have taken the line that, as screens cannot refresh faster than 90Hz, no one will ever use a delay of 1/100. So a 1/100 delay is changed to 10/100. Not what you asked for. Mozilla's answer to the 0 delay is to ignore the specification and use a delay of 10/100.

* Internet Explorer is even worse. Any delay less than 6/100 is changed to 10/100. This is probably based upon the assumption that if 15fps is good enough for cartoons then it's good enough for animated GIFs.

* Opera is the worst of all. Every delay below 10/100 is displayed at 10/100.

* Safari is the best as far as delay cropping is concerned. It does crop below 3/100, but it crops to 3/100, not back to 10/100.


The figures below show screenshots of the test page displayed by various browsers on different platforms (this test page is available here - you may find this test works best if you download it and run it locally).

here's the site i got this from...

interesting how each browser is different, etc... and that out of all of them, Safari was the truest to rendering o.O

too bad it sucks on everything else lmao

-agentxi-

[Bobbles]

Something to do with the combination of kb, frames and delay then do you think?

Beside the difference in file size, top ani delay is 0.3 all the way through and has only 10 frames, whereas the bottom one has a whopping 93 frames, a delay of 0.01 on the 1st and last frames, 0.04 on the others.