Gif animations

Nimrod · **on:** August 15, 2010, 11:19:09 AM

I have a problem. I would like to make a Gif animation out of a small video clip to use it as my avatar in msn. Thing is, it¥s very big. Is there any program to downsize the size of my gif? Right now it is 5 mb. I would like to have it like 1 mb or something around this size. Maybe it helps if I say that I want to use it as an MSN avatar.

Thanks in advance.

landbeforetimelover · **Reply #1 on:** August 15, 2010, 11:30:35 AM

ImageReady CS2 is what I use to compress GIF images. It's the only thing I know of that can do it properly.

Nimrod · **Reply #2 on:** August 15, 2010, 11:40:21 AM

could you maybe give me a side where I can download the program? Didn¥t find one now.

Nimrod · **Reply #3 on:** August 17, 2010, 04:50:32 AM

Is there really no one who could help me out with this? :blink:

landbeforetimelover · **Reply #4 on:** August 17, 2010, 05:13:09 AM

ImageReady CS2 is made by Adobe and it's not free. It comes with Photoshop CS2, which is a program that costs hundreds of dollars. ImageReady is not included in later versions of Photoshop.

Petrie. · **Reply #5 on:** August 17, 2010, 07:57:37 AM

What I've done in the past to make my gif images acceptable for web use (smaller than 300kb) is cut out the number of frames to make fluid motion and shrunk the size to about 80 x 80. Sometimes I'll even cut back in the number of colors used in the animation. May not look great, but I'm not going to ask people to load a 1mb image multiple times in one forum post.

I haven't tried to make any gifs in a while so I'm not sure what programs are out there. I've used Easy Gif animator (trial gave about 30 uses) in the past and that was fine for me.

landbeforetimelover · **Reply #6 on:** August 17, 2010, 11:40:03 AM

Yeah. You can always use a program to reduce the physical dimensions of the GIF image. But in ImageReady, you can easily compress the image without reducing it's physical size. You can adjust the dithering options and even reduce the colors one by one. For example, if I need to reduce the number of colors to 57 or 58, I can do that exactly. I've been able to cut down 5mb+ images to only ~100kb....and that was before when the maximum avatar size on this board was 170px by 170px! I just wish the program was free. You can't even download a trial of it, as it's older Adobe software that isn't sold anymore. As I understand it though, ImageReady was replaced by Fireworks. Still....Fireworks is a few hundred dollars. Not as much as Photoshop thank God, but it's still expensive.

oogaboo · **Reply #7 on:** August 20, 2010, 08:39:13 PM

Any program that can use gif images can suppress your image. I use Illustrator, Photoshop, Adobe Flash, and Indesign. Fireworks in my opinion, is more for website designs while Photoshop is more for rendering images which is used very often among multimedia and artists. So I would use Photoshop for a little animation and for decreasing MBs. Microsoft paint can help you too! You just have to play with it, though.