animated gif

[Mike S]

thanks everyone for the quick responses. sigh... guess i need to learn swish or flash now. http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/frown.gif

[a4hire]

Hello Mike
I tried your animated gif in Xara X1. The results are not too bad and might be acceptable for you. Under the frame gallery go to the properties tab and choose animation colors. I used under Palette colors , optimized palette per frame. Then under dithering, I seleceted error diffusion. Also thought I should mention that I did use a linear fill on the lights as well as some linear transparency and a slight feathering.

[Mike S]

hey thanks all again.

The Cigar goes to Bruce! thanks i did what you said and it came out GREAT! thanks again. sorry about the size 75kb. any ideas how to make it less with out shrinking it more?

[Grafixman]

Great tip, Bruce. dithering would minimize the banding. But gif animations like these are limited to small sizes. Any bigger and it would look terrible.
Mike, you could try reducing the number of colors further. I was able to reduce it to 60K.
Cropping the excess areas around, it is possible to reduce it to 55K.

[Mark (theKeeper)]

Mike... if this will be used on a Website, do as Gm suggested and crop all excess black areas. Then just drop the image into a table with a black background and scale the table to create the black excess space around the animation again.

[a4hire]

Glad that I could help a little. As Grafixman said you could probably reduce the colors and just do the black transparent background as mentioned by Mark. The only other option to reduce the file size would be to have less frames in the animation, but that might ruin the smoothness of the animation.