Continuing our experiments with GIF animations, I’m surprised by how crap the gif support is in Photoshop. And on Mac, there aren’t any alternatives for files larger than 100×100 px or so. Also, export for web seems to gunk up the cache; Files no larger than five megabytes crash the app, and each rendering takes a minute or two. Are there any good alternatives? Something as flexible as PS but faster (or, y’know, actually working) and maybe with a few more dithering options would be awesome. GIF is the most ubiquitous format for Internet animations, and it’s just too darn fun to play with not to use.
I don’t have a software suggestion for you but I am loving your gif animation work. For some reason
they give me a tactile impression, as if they were “drier” than your typical .flv inline moving image. So youtube is “wet” and gif animation is “dry”? Maybe its the dithering that reminds me of dotmatrix printers and jpeg compression reminds me of silver prints (sopping wet with fixer?) ?!?
Keep up the good work.
Yeah I agree. There’s a pixel exactness in the gif that isn’t there in the average jpeg compression. I guess if you’d compress the shit out of a jpeg a couple of times you might get a “real” artifact in the image/video and not something that seems as “wet” as you describe it.
Very good McLuhanian phrase, that, although I might reverse your examples; The gif as a negative (thus with “grain”) and the jpeg as trying to print an advanced image on a dot matrix printer where the ink (or is that the heated head?) isn’t as precise — as descrete — from copy to copy and blurs.
Also, there are no messed up keyframes, and the lower framerate makes you more aware of the images themselves rather than the animation they’re trying to create.