h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Any suggestions??? I'm open to almost everything... the problem here is that I've reduced the quality and size so much that I don't know what else to do... I'm not willing to compromise the amount of frames that I have, but I am willing to do other things- like delaying the time until it shows up, to have a popup... you name it...
Once again, suggestions??

The loading time for the whole page with the GIF for me (on the far side of the world) seems to average about 1min 35secs - with the GIF cached the page loads in 25-30 secs. The data is arriving here in a nice steady stream averaging about 20-25K/sec at the modem. At 210K you're right the GIF file size needs to come down.

At the moment I haven't any concrete suggestions that you haven't already mentioned as being unacceptable - but I'll load the gif up into some graphics progs & see what other alternatives you might have & let you know

;^)#

Hmm... I was afraid of that... I just simply must try to make simpler gifs... but it is hard for me to compromise ... I've actually thought about making MPEGs, and then having a link that can open them

130 something frames are quite a lot - as a 1st guess I'd try cutting out every second frame & speeding it up so that the frame delay is 0.05 secs instead of 0.1 secs - I don't think you'd see a lot of difference in quality & it would roughly halve the file size - sacriledge I know

;^)#

sigh........ possibly... we shall have to see

I'll load it up later & have a play & see if there are any alternatives that become apparent

;^)#

Hmm... I posted it up... still seems to take just as long

I timed it at about 40secs uncached - thats a fair bit quicker here & it didn't seem to suffer much quality wise.

;^)#

Hmm... I invited other people... I wonder when they shall arrive... This was a test GIF- I couldn't care less about it really... however, I'm looking for tips on making them, in the future (not just from you Bruce)... Such as ways to get rotation in, drifing patches of light, etc...
Maybe I shall have some people come in tommorrow morning... well, I have school in 3 hours, so tootles !! And Thanks

Hi Marv

I've got to go out just now, but when I get back I'll post a list of guide lines that I try to stick to when doing animations. Unless someone else does it in the meantime.
Pastey

I've got a mega-fast machine (TM) here at work, so it loaded in under 10 seconds. However, with my Mac at home on my god-awful ISP....

Will try to run it over the weekend from home, but no promises. This weekend is going to be crazy with all sorts of family functions.

Hi, I'm afraid that this can only be a quickie.

It took about 20-30 secs to load onto my machine, and my machine is old.

Things to remember about doing gifs,
1) Gifs only have 264(ish) colours, so try not to use loads of fancy shading. Unless of course you have 200 odd shades of the one colour.
2) Gifs come in different formats. Strange as it seems, but newer gifs have a better compression rate.
3) Software package. You don't need to use a top of the range software package, but you do need a reasonably new one. This is because of the compression of the gifs. The package I use is Paint Shop Pro 5. It costs a bit of money, but you can get PSP4 on trial ware of the front of a lot of magazines and it's almost as good.
4) Loops are great. Loops obviously use the same frames over and over, cutting down on the amount to be downloaded.
5) Tweenies. Not some sad programme for kids but frames that you don't need. Unless you are going for film quality frame rates, you don't need half the frames that any software package will put in. As Bruce said, take out every second frame.
6) Remember who the picture is there for.
If it's there for anyone passing by then try and compromise between quality and speed, a mid point often suits all.
If it's there for your benefit, then it'll be cached on your hard drive anyway, so sod it and put in the full image.
7) Link to it. Often a good thing that I've seen is links to higher quality images. Put the low quality one one the site but make it a link to the full blown version.
There is a similar thing that you can do for static images with a html tag called lowsrc. It downloads a second picture first. The idea being that the second picture is a very simple and small file. I'm not sure if this works within h2g2 but may be worth checking out. If it does then you can download a very basic static version of the first frame and then the animated version would download afterwards. Might be worth looking at.
Pastey

It loaded in about 30 secs here Sporky!I am not at all technically minded...so can't give you any help...but...I LOVE gifs (as is aparent from my own page) so I always am willing to wait for a good one to load
shazzpR

hello there sporky
just wanted to let you know that it loaded in about 8 seconds over here which i thought was pretty good
as far as advice goes for them i have none to offer as i am a bit technologically challanged
monsy

I'm not really the person to ask, as I've got a cable modem, which, for those of you not familiar with it, goes obscenely fast. The GIF popped so fast I didn't even notice load time.
But as far as compression goes, an animated GIF can only hold 256 separate colors (that's for all the frames together, not per frame). And yours could probably be reduced to about 24 colors with no ill effects. I advise Photoshop 5.5, but it's a mite expensive if you don't already have it. I'd be more than happy to fiddle about with it if you wish.

I was actually using Photoshop 5.5, and, believe it or not, I ran the program in 256, and those are the colors I got... the choppyness/grainy parts are from me sacrificing quality

Imageready, right?

No worries - looks like you've got some more input

;^)#

Also an excellent program. I was thinking more along the lines of using the "adaptive" option at 5-bit color, then going back in and fixing the graininess manually with the pencil tool using the resultant indexed color palatte as a color menu to make sure no more information is introduced. But that's just me, and it's a lot of work.