Tips for creating animated GIFs

Palsa's Tips for creating animated GIFs.

Original post, here.

Since a lot of people aren't familiar with how GIF animations function, I'll give a couple of tips.

1. Windows Vista.

For those of you with a Vista operating system, always make sure to add your graphics programs to DEP (Data Execution Prevention).

DEP is a feature in Windows Vista that shuts down any program that uses, in its opinion, a high memory rate.

Audio/Video/Graphics programs, often use quite a bit of memory, so I highly advise adding your graphics and animation programs to the DEP 'ignore list'.

How to add the program is simple.

1st, go to: Start Menu> Control Panel> System> Advanced System Settings> Advanced Tab> Settings (under 'Performance')> Data Execution Prevention.

Once your there, make sure that your set to "Turn on DEP for all programs and services except those I select", you can then add your program.

2. A couple things to know about GIF animations.

GIF animations are in many cases like a simple video.

It has a start, and a finish, you can choose to have your animation go through an endless loop, or end the first time its played.

One of the things about GIF files is that you can specify the display time of each frame.

Here's a good example:

See how the eye's will blink after a certain while?

That is because of the GIF's display time feature.

The above sprite has a total of 6 frames:

F: (Frame), D: (Duration).

GIF animations can also support 1 transparent color.

The drawback to the GIF animation is that it has to be saved in 256 colors.

There are ways of protecting the images quality, though you will have to expect loss either way.

I'll show you how to preserve quality using JASC Animation Shop 3.

Note: This can either be done before or after you choose to save, I'm going to explain how to do this manually before saving.

Use the yellow method to preserve as much of the images quality as possible.

Note: If your creating an image that already has less then 256 colors, like a sprite for example, then switch to 'Nearest Color'.

Use the blue method if you already have a palette file made for your animation.