a-m-v.org animated banners

StarMasayume · Post by **StarMasayume** » Wed Mar 24, 2004 2:12 pm

I really didn't know where to put this since it's not an amv or anything, just about the banners. I was wondering how people get their animated amv banners reduced to the size of 20 kb????

I've been trying for the past hour two get one banner I'm working on down to 20kb and it's only 2 frames! It's around 26kb. I've been trying all the optimzation and compression things I can think of, but either it's still too high or I'm not satisfied with the quality. It's really frustrating.

Is there any tricks to reduce the size and not the quality of an animated banner? I know some of the banners here have around 5 or 6 frames and I'm trying to think how they managed it...

Zarxrax · Post by **Zarxrax** » Wed Mar 24, 2004 2:52 pm

The tricks to keeping the filesize down are:
1. As few colors as possible. If you are using images of anime characters, you'd be surprised how few colors it actually needs if you repaint the frames to eliminate the noise.
2. Change as little during the animation as possible. If the entire banner changes, then thats not gunna work out so well.

<-- I think my avatar was like 60kb before I worked on it to get rid of the noise. Now its 6kb.

StarMasayume · Post by **StarMasayume** » Wed Mar 24, 2004 5:20 pm

Thanks Zarxrax, that's probably what I need to do then.

Do you think you could explain that just a bit better though?

I'm compressing it for 63 colors, Optimized Median Cut (I believe that's lower than the Octre), I'm not sure whether to tell it to reduce colors by Error Diffusion or Nearest Color, and that gets me to 27kb. 31 colors gets me to 22kb.. I can't even recall how I once got it to 20.. >,< I was trying so many things.

These are the two I'm trying to animate together... Except for the logo, they are basically different.

Zarxrax · Post by **Zarxrax** » Wed Mar 24, 2004 5:45 pm

Er, yea, those would be hard to compress, seeing as it has gradients of color and the images are nearly totally different

Anyways I just messed around with it and came up with this:

It's not perfect and the logo flickers, but its pretty respectable I think. I loaded the images into virtualdub and cleaned them up with some filters, then loaded them into imageready and saved as gif with 24 colors and 79% diffusion dither.

StarMasayume · Post by **StarMasayume** » Wed Mar 24, 2004 6:12 pm

Oh Thankyou!

It's better than than anything I got for the size limit.

*hugs and more thanks*

I guess I'll need to do more simple animations for banners or stick with still banners.