Animated GIF speed

[tinimark]

Hi

I'm quite new to xara3d and quite frankly don't know a lot about animation. When I do a logo in x3ds and set the frame cycle to 10 and the fps to 30, the preview is fast and smooth (ripple effect) When I export it to an animated GIF it runs slow and jerky, even if i preview it in IE6 Is there something i'm missing?
Thanks for your help.

BTW running winxp sp2 on p4 laptop.

[tinimark]

Hi

I'm quite new to xara3d and quite frankly don't know a lot about animation. When I do a logo in x3ds and set the frame cycle to 10 and the fps to 30, the preview is fast and smooth (ripple effect) When I export it to an animated GIF it runs slow and jerky, even if i preview it in IE6 Is there something i'm missing?
Thanks for your help.

BTW running winxp sp2 on p4 laptop.

[Egg Bramhill]

Welcome Tinimark
Can't think of any reason for this, 30fps is fast for an animation, so why yours is running slow is a bit of a mystery. What size is the animation (w x h) ?
Is it possible to post the Xara3D file here so we can try it out ourselves.
Egg

[tinimark]

Hi

It seems to happen no matter what size i make the animation. I'll try and post the xara file aswell as the gif.
Thanks

[tinimark]

here is a link to a page with the gif on. It's not just slow online. it's slow in any viewer...including my phone!!

http://www.dogcam.biz/test.htm

[John Rayner]

hello tinimark,

the created gif is huge... about 125k, To make it move smoothly change the frame per cycle to 8and frames per second to 10.

[tinimark]

Thanks

I think i'm getting the hang of it a bit more now.

[John Rayner]

Glad to here it. Good luck!

[tinimark]

Thanks, But why don't the animated gifs run at the same speed as the preview in the program? Is there a way of previewing what the finished gif will look like before rendering it?
Again, Thanks

[Egg Bramhill]

Mark
I make your file (on the net) as 405Kb! I work on an average dowload over a dial up connection (56k modem) as about 4 to 5 Kb per second. That gives your file a load time of 1 min 40 seconds! That's without anything else on the page. Most visitors would be long gone before your page finished downloading.

Animated gifs are fine but you must remember what you're actually doing is loading (in your case) 20 images, each one overlayed on the one before. So the larger the Gif, the larger each individual image file will be & therefore the longer the download time.

You must first ask yourself do you need an animated gif? They can be very distracting to the reader trying to view the page content. Why not just use one frame of the animation, as a still image. The impact is almost as good and not as distracting to the visitor. The file size would only be 20Kb, 4 to 5 secs download time.

If you wish to use an animated gif I would recommend something much smaller (w x h wise)

As for the slow response in a browser, I couldn't notice any difference display wise. What's the speed of your processor?

As well as the above, I'd take Johns advice re the number of frames. The frames per second shouldn't make any difference file size.

You say the animated gif looks bad on your phone. I take it from this you mean your mobile phone? If this is the case, it will, if you're exporting it at the size you have on the net. Mobiles use a very limited display size (and colour range). Try to find out the display size of your mobiles screen, and export the animation at that size.

Egg